The Asian Power Hour

Korean developer Nexon is bringing their flagship MMORPG Maple Story to the portable scene on the Nintendo DS. Due out later in the year, screenshots of the game so far look pretty much like the PC version, but not much news besides the fact that it will have some sort of Wi-Fi capability has been released. Personally, because of the simplistic visual style of Maple Story, and the way that each server uses multiple channels to keep bandwidth to a very low medium, I hope that the DS version will be able to connect to the PC version and allow players on the go to play Maple Story with their PC peers.

Michael Fahey down at Kotaku has speculated on a money transfer system similar to Ragnarok Mobile Mage, however, because of the way that Nexon and it's affiliates use a microtransation transfer system and that the game itself is free to download and play already, I'm thinking this is highly unlikely. Other possibilities could include an instanced world for each DS where you can adventure over Wi-Fi (in different channels) or locally with your friends.

Maple Story has one of the distinct honors of being one of the few MMORPGs that have become professionally developed console games on their own accord (that I know of). Other examples include French Bread's Fight! Ragnarok! PC side scroller and Champions of Norrath, although I think they were just milking the IP to use with the Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance Engine at this point in time.

Lately, Nexon has really been pushing Maple Story in the US. The past few months, there have been an insane amount of ads pushing Maple Story, especially the free part, on social networking sites like Facebook. Being an avid player of Maple Story in Taiwan, I picked up the English version and was a little put off by what seemed to be a gamer population composed entirely of angry little 12 year old boys. I'm not sure that I've heard the phrase "KS!" more times in one night of global Maples Story than in my entire time in WoW.

However way they spin it though, I really hope that this Maple Story Game really is just a portable version of the full game, although making sure that there's enough re-writable memory on the DS cart to download updates may be a problem, so the instanced console based MMO may be very viable. Either way though, I'm looking forward to it! If you haven't played Maple Story, you owe it to yourself to hop on and give it a try, it's a pretty unique MMO experience, if not entirely grindy and full of kids expressing their pre-teen angst.

Maple Story Official Website