I love online games.
When I first started college in 1999, and finally had a broadband connection and a badass new PC, boy did I ever play some online games. We hosted regular Team Fortress Classic servers in our dorms, with 6 of us on the hall playing in the same clan. Definitely some of the best multiplayer fun I've ever had.
That said, online is not a huge selling point for me unless competitive or cooperative play is the essence of the game. In a game like Gran Turismo 4, the whole point of the game is to compete. I badly wanted to race my friends around the Nurburgring, so I was highly disappointed when it was announced that the game was missing online play. Most of my college buddies and high school friends live in different states now, and I only see them in person a few times a year, so it's not like we can regularly get all our PS2s and a bunch of TVs together and have a LAN party.
Similarly, I love playing games like Serious Sam cooperatively with my friends online. The essence of Serious Sam is absolute insanity with hundreds of enemies attacking you all at once. Adding a few guns to your side (and a crapton more enemies too) just makes perfect sense for the game. I played deathmatch a few times in Sam, but it didn't interest me because it's really not what the game was about. Games like TFC, UT, etc. were designed to be online-competitive from the ground-up and had a lot more to offer in terms of varied game modes. This was one of the reasons I worked on Serious Fortress, trying to bring some more MP fun to the game, but that project fizzled for various reasons.
I'm not at all disappointed that Metroid Prime 3 will be lacking in online play. I never expected it to have online play, and it has nothing at all to do with why I've been looking forward to the game. But I'm no Nintendo apologist -- I'll be disappointed if Brawl doesn't have online. One of these games is about exploring, by yourself, collecting powerups, accessing new areas of the game, you vs. the world. The other is about beating the ever-loving shit out of your friends in a zany environment.
Anyway, online games are great, but games should not try to be all things to all people. If they did, all of them would end up being exactly the same. Who wants that? It's just not possible to make one game that everyone will love. Hell, people shouldn't even just like one type of game. I like to play a whole bunch of different kinds of games, and my library shows it.
