Club Nintendo Goes Live 59
AKAImBatman writes "Nintendo has launched their new North American Club Nintendo service that allows customers to earn 'coins' for purchasing Nintendo products. Coins can then be redeemed for items like exclusive DS games, playing cards, Wii Remote holders, DS cases, and other Nintendo branded items. Points are earned by registering Wii games (50 points), DS games (30 points), or by purchasing Wii Shop items (10 points) after your Wii Shop account has been linked to your Club Nintendo account. Users may link their account under the 'Settings' area of the Wii Shop channel. Prices range from 300 coins for a Wii Remote holder to 800 coins for the Game & Watch Collection for the Nintendo DS."
Re:Link is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it's kind of dead in here. I would have expected more people to be excited about this. Granted, the technical problems are putting a real dampener on things. (When I submitted the story, the site was operating fine. Didn't take long for that to change.) But it's still kind of cool. Ars' complaint about having to spend $800 to get a $20 game misses the point. The point is that if you already spent the money (which a lot of gaming fans have), then this program offers some nice rewards for being a loyal customer. Spending money for the explicit purpose of getting stuff on the site seems a bit silly.
On another subject, anyone else notice that the site uses the Struts framework? If the issues they're experiencing are any indication, I'd say this is a perfect example of why Struts should never be used for a scalable solution. In my experience, far too much logic gets executed on every request while accomplishing very little. Especially when programmers are tempted into putting session initializer actions into their webapp. Then things just go haywire. ;-)
Re:Link is wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
No doubt all the gamers are too busy being enthralled by the bundle of excitement that called "Home".
Less than I'd hoped for. (Score:5, Insightful)
The reset on coins every "year" really sucks out any enthusiasm I'd have for this. Not sure if it is fear of the resale market (register games I'd paid $10 for instead of $60) or simply another inducement for kids to buy the next copy of Pokemon garnet-spiral ham, but as a long time consumer of the Big N's products this comes off as kind of dickish.
Why only first party titles? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is it that the only retail games purchased with codes redeemable are Nintendo's first-party titles? In Japan, pretty much every game, including third-party, comes with a Club Nintendo code to redeem. It's much easier there to gain codes than it is here.
Sure, the only games for Wii that I'd be willing to spend money on are most likely first-party, but for the DS? My money is on third-party.
And none of my old GC games are eligible? Why?