Wii to feature a single friend code?

The DS has suffered much criticism for the antiquity of its "Friend Code" system, whereby players may only become online "friends" through the manual sharing and entering of a random, twelve-digit code. Even worse is the fact that each DS game and system combination generates a different friend code, so one needs to reshare and reenter a new code for every Wi-Fi enabled game. Archaic? Yes. Overly protective of small children? You betcha.

Well, word on the street (and an unconfirmed word!) is that Wii will also be utilizing a Friend Code system. While this is not surprising, it seems as though Nintendo took a bit of a hint and reduced the Friend Code to being system dependent only. It's unclear whether a different code might be generated for different user profiles on an individual Wii, but at least we can memorize the digits as we would a personal phone-number.

"Check it, man, I got her digits."

"Sweet, you can play her tomorrow on Brawl."

[via Joystiq]