This is definitely a bid to keep the Wii family friendly. Most games carry a disclaimer that they cannot be held responsible for on-line content; but that won't mollify mom after she walks in on a four-letter rant from one of Timmy's on-line friends. In Nintendo's view, better to keep the environment safe but bland than wild and lawless.

we might all be willing to suck it up and deal with it if that were the end of the story. But if mario kart becomes a part of Nintendo's pay and play setup than it will be downright unacceptable.

As much as I hate this move, I totally understand why they did it- bdwilcox is 100% correct. I guess I'll have to get into a Halo 3 lobby on my 360 so my friends and I can have voice chat while we play Mario Kart.

You don't even have to be in a lobby, you can voice chat right from the dashboard, hell you can even voice chat separately from the game lobby in private channels on the 360 (I know this since it's apparently the only console I like). I'm not entirely sure how many people can be in one channel.

Although you can chat from the Dashboard, you cannot do multi-party chat from it, hence the Halo 3 lobby, which allows more than two parties to converse simultaneously. This limitation is one of the big gripes many people have with the 360, as multi-party chat was supported in the Dashboard on the original Xbox. Major Nelson stated that for technical and bandwidth reasons, multi-party chat is not enabled while gaming (which makes sense), but allowing multi-party chat while in the Dashboard ONLY (a la video chat) should be supported, in my opinion. For reference, here's Major Nelson's post on the subject.

http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archive/2006/02/08/528321.aspx

Correction, it wasn't Major Nelson who made the post, it was one of the individuals on the Xbox team.