Nintendo's online service scores an own goal straight from kick off...

Are you one of the many people who rushed from work or school desperate to get some online play in? Well your going to be left a little disappointed...

Whilst things have been running smoothly for those lucky enough to play during the day, once 4pm/5pm hit and people started to arrive home from work and school messages such as "ERROR GETTING STATS" and the displaying of error codes 98020 and 86070 have become common place.

What has caused this problem is unknown at this moment in time and with NoE closed for the weekend we might not hear anything. There are of course many possibilities, the worst case scenario is that the servers have collapsed under the weight of extreme traffic, which could mean they down all weekend. Perhaps more likely however is that they simply didn't anticipate the huge demand for online matches and the servers are just having a bit of trouble keeping up.

Whatever the case it is a little disappointing that Nintendo's first online title for the Wii has failed to completely deliver a great online experience from day one, but there are plenty of examples of this happening in the past with online titles World of Warcraft suffered server problems at launch and perhaps a better example is Pro Evolution Soccer 6 which at launch on PC and PS2 suffered connection problems. Keep trying, and hopefully you will manage to get some games in this weekend.

Update: It would appear that it was simply the sheer number of people connecting to the service as it is up and running again!

Update 2: It seems that some matches that happened have been erased from Nintendo's servers as a result of a crash - So you may have less points today than you had yesterday.