As far as online systems go, friend codes suck, but why do people ignore all the stuff that you can do?
Brawl offers 4 player stock, time, and team battles with all stages available for online play. It lets you have up to 3 people on one console play online. It has co-op home run contest and multi-man brawl. It has all items and rules available from multiplayer modes. It lets you spectate random matches, record and send matches to friends, send screenshots (with a great screenshot tool btw), and it lets you create and send custom levels.
Mario Kart lets you create custom grand prixs, play 12 players online (with up to 4 playing locally), play by worldwide, regional, or against friends, online regional and worldwide rankings, downloadable ghost data from friends and worldwide, official Nintendo tournaments, and lets you check when friends are online and jump right into a race with them from the Wii menu.
Yes, it's missing voice chat and friend codes still suck, but it's hardly barren and featureless.
