The Nintendo Wifi service launched two weeks ago with the release of Mario Kart DS and Tony Hawk's American Sk8Land. Getting online with the handheld console was incredibly easy and other than a few hiccoughs as soon as the games were live, it's been performing exactly as expected. Nintendo also launched a wifi website and gaming hub where you can go to check out leaders from each game and your own stats. Unfortunately, it seems more than a little broken at the moment which would be fine if it was still under the radar but I got an email announcing the site last week.

Nintendo is obviously aiming this site at slightly more devoted gamers, allowing you to link your MyNintendo login to your DS at no extra cost other than a very confusing 20 minutes. Firstly, you have to find a unique ID (the WFC ID) assigned to your DS which is a four step process, requiring a game with wifi capabilities. As soon as you input your WFC ID you're given a temporary username which you have to configure your DS to use, connect to the Nintendo wifi service within an hour and, after receiving an email confirming your account/WFC pairing, change your username back to whatever it was before.

All this work gets you the same stuff you're able to see while not logged in (like top players for each game and global game traffic) plus the name and time of the last game you played. Lame! Placeholders for "Your Sessions" and "How you stack up?" (suspiciously engrishized) graphs exist on the logged in page but the XML file linked for the sessions data doesn't appear to have real data associated with it, just numbered slots and "0" for the player field (the xml file is here - only works if you're logged in). The "How you stack up?" <object> doesn't even bother showing up on the page, probably due to the blank FlashVars <param> tag for the object where all other graphs on the page specify an xml location.

Eventually I'm sure we'll be able to do nifty things with the XML that Nintendo uses on that gaming hub page but the data right now is all very general. In the interest of sharing though...

Things that work:
Top Five MKDS Players XML
MKDS: Current Activity vs Highest Today XML
MKDS: Day/Night Activity XML
User Activity Over 2 Weeks

All XML scripts have a gameCode associated with them to specify which game you're trying to get data from. All the links here have AMC, the Mario Kart DS gameCode. For the American Sk8Land game, you can presumably replace AMC with AH9 to get global Sk8Land data. The Animal Crossing gameCode is ADM.

Update 12/21/05: The User Activity XML seems to be working as of a couple days ago. I haven't yet gone online with Animal Crossing but I'll update if I find anything interesting of note.