Nothing can replace playing against someone on the same couch, but Xbox Live comes close. Log onto a Halo 3 match, and the TrueSkill ranking system will select opponents that are deemed to be your equals. Annoyed by another gamer who keeps shouting obscenities over the voice chat? The mute button lets you silence him. Find yourself trading South Park jokes with the gunner who’s watching your back? Send a friend request, and you can keep in touch later.

The Wii, by comparison, doesn’t have a consistent online network, forcing each developer to devise its own solutions. A game created by a third-party company like Electronic Arts, for example, might use an entirely different login system than the one designed by Nintendo for online play. What the Wii’s online games all have in common is that they’re shamefully primitive. While Xbox Live makes it easy to set up a match with a friend, most of the games on the Wii (including every title made by Nintendo rather than a third party) require you to trade 12-digit Friend Codes before launching a multiplayer game. Even worse, you have to swap codes again if you want to play the same friend in a different game. Since the Wii doesn’t have a microphone peripheral, you can only talk to your friends by text message, if at all.

Quote from an article written by Slate writer Jack Patrick Rodgers

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He continues to go on to state more reasons the Wii has a poor online system compared to XBox Live.

I really can’t help but agree. Nintendo really needs to prepare for better online for their next generation of systems or their customers will continue to complain and lose interest in their systems as a whole.