Off topic..
It isn't "clever."
Nintendo doesn't give a fuck about online gaming-- they don't care. They're not going around trying to make people forget about online gaming. The only ones who want to make it seem so are the ones bitter Nintendo is not doing what they-- and the industry-- want to. Whoever made that alternate reality in the comic just to put Nintendo in a bad light just to belive what he wants to is quite sad really.
What's funny here is that when the online market is profitable enough for Nintendo, they'll enter it and kick-ass with more innovation then the competition like Nintendo always does and those same people will start to bitch on how "late" they were and ignore Nintendo's almost-guaranteed success. (mario kart online, animal crossing online, advance wars/cube wars online, metroid mulitplayer online-- imagine different bounty hunters going after the same bounty in a puzzle and back-stabbing oriented map... *drool*)