Disney have announced their foray into the DS online network with the news that upcoming movie tie in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, will signal the launch of Disney's DGamer service. What exactly does that mean?? Read on...this will sync up with DGamer.com on your pc and is designed to be a way for players of the game to have a forum whereby they'll be able to interact with each other as well carry their identity over from game to game. The way this will be achieved is through the use of an avatar which will be completely customisable along the lines of Disney characters and other assorted varieties. This will also enable gamers to use the Honour system of points which is essentially a portable version of Microsoft's Achievement Points. The points will then be used to unlock more content from the game. Chat will also be introduced in three different levels, the first being the speed chat where you choose from a pre-aranged list of phrases as illustrated in Mario Kart Wii. There'll then be speed chat Plus which becomes active after you've exchanged Friend Codes, more of the same but you'll be able to type your own messages with censoring in real time. And finally the last chat service is the Open Chat which is completely unrestricted although you'll still need to swap Friend Codes to use this one.
Granted this is only for Disney's own games but as you can see, the opportunity for other developers to jump on board and incorporate this into all future games is exciting indeed and would open up the DS market for Nintendo even more so as communication is what's sorely lacking from the DS's online experience.