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."
Link is wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the link I originally submitted: http://www.wiimedia.com/news/view/club_nintendo_goes_live/ [wiimedia.com]
The information is more or less the same, but Ars takes a very negative view on the service and the issues they're having.
Re:Link is wrong (Score:5, Funny)
First post on a story you submitted yourself.
Congratulation! The obsessive-refresh-click is strong in this one.
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. ;-)
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No doubt all the gamers are too busy being enthralled by the bundle of excitement that called "Home".
Insightful? (Score:1, Troll)
In case any other potential mods are reading my description of Home as a "bundle of excitement" was intended to be sarcastic.
Perhaps someone misread my post as saying "bundle of excrement".
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Sarcasm is one form of communicating insight, I suppose.
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Yep, it's Java alright. ;^)
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I'm excited about the potential to get a Super Famicom controller for the Wii, but at the rate that it takes to get points, it may be easier to just pay for it to be imported [play-asia.com].
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Ars' complaint about having to spend $800 to get a $20 game misses the point.
The complaint is only silly because Ars emphasized the wrong thing. What they meant to say is that there's nothing on the Wii worth spending $800 for to begin with. The point being that the Wii has problems that Nintendo should look into before putting effort into something like Club Nintendo.
Rob
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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.
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It would be silly to fear the resale market, because there's a reasonable expectation that the coins would already have been registered to the original owner of the game.
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The two collector zelda discs (the one mentioned and "Master quest") have to be the best gamecube discs ever
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It's not the resale market, as from what I understand the codes are unique per disk and thus one time use only. Most "points" programs have some sort of timeout on their points, I imagine it's partially to ensure they continue to get business and partially some sort of legal CYA.
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Re:Less than I'd hoped for. (Score:4, Informative)
Coins don't reset every year. Gold/Platinum status resets every year. Coins expire between 2 and 3 years.
From the FAQ [nintendo.com], Coins and Status (Gold, Platinum):
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?
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Probably because it's easier for Nintendo of Japan to negotiate payment for marketing data than with Nintendo of America. That's what registration is -- marketing research. Prizes is the cost of doing business, and a substantial number of US distributors don't make the game, just localize and distribute.
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Well, maybe they have to work out deals with the publishers first? Things take time, especially when dealing with companies like EA who would rather have their own program than participate in Nintendo's.
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And none of my old GC games are eligible? Why?
Because your ongoing possession of them is not floating more money in Nintendo's direction?
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Has always been limited mostly to first party published games in Europe.
My experience (Score:3, Interesting)
little dissapointing (Score:2, Informative)
The Japanese version of this has much more interesting rewards. I know the Super Mario Galaxy soundtrack was offered. There were limited edition DS's (just a special skin) and I can't remember what else.
Hopefully I'll be able to add the rest of my wii/ds games and the consoles. It's kinda weird how the eligible games are picked. I bought my Wii on launch day with Twilight Princess and Excite Truck but only TP was eligible.
Good luck (Score:2)
If it is anything like Nintendo's European efforts, good luck with actually getting anything worthwhile.
The best you'll end up with is a crappy wallpaper as they'll only have 5 DS cases available between the hundreds of thousands of users.
Warning: Nintendo might screw you in the long run (Score:3, Informative)
That's not entirely true. There are many interesting prizes, such as games, which are still available, but the problem is that they cost an awful lot of points. Here's the top items that you can buy at the moment in the European Club Nintendo 's Stars Catalogue [nintendo.co.uk] with their sale price in points:
If you're lucky, it'll be like the European one (Score:2)
Where you can amass 6000 points having spent a small fortune on games, only to receive an e-mail telling you unused points will be whiped after 6months. You then wait around for something interesting to come up and when it does you find they already whiped your points... after 3 months.
It is at this point where I decided club nintendo is little more than a con, there is no reason whatsoever than ripping off customers to erase unused points, let alone in a time period less than that stated.
In other words, I
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As far as I know, this only happened once, a half year back. I've been a Club Nintendo member for years. And it was only applying to stars of a certain age.
I bought a Mario Kart stopwatch one month before the partial wipe for 3500 stars.
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I don't think the frequency of it really matters, it's the fact it was done at all and done earlier than stated that bugged me.
I could've got a £25 game out of it had anything decent came up so I do feel like I've been somewhat ripped off when I had the decency to buy enough games to get that many points in the first place.
What's more is they said at one point we'd be able to convert points into Wii points to buy Wii arcade games and so originally I was waiting for that to come along. Storing my point
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Did you try to contact them about it? If not, why not?
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Yep, I've never had anything from Nintendo support, I had an issue with the Wii whereby some of the downloadable games (like super mario world) don't display correctly on my screen. They never got back to me on that either and the fault still exists to this day despite being reported by many.
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Make sure your Wii is configured for Widescreen/Progressive or Standard/Interlaced. Occasionally the system can end up being set to Widescreen/Interlaced which reeks all kinds of havoc with Virtual Console games.
(This particularly happens with Gamecube games that offered Progressive scan support. If you forget to press the magic combination when you start the game, it will happily
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I previously tried all resolutions, and have tried both S-Video and Component connections to see if they make a difference. The only way I got it to work was switching to a different screen altogether which is of little use as that TV isn't in this room where I want to play! When I bring up the Wii menu the game display is correct in the background, but as soon as you close the menu it warps back to fucked up mode, so it does seem to be a rendering issue with the Wii itself.
I did find something in some supp
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That was the exact same problem I had.
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Er, the Wii points store was opened before the stars started expiring.
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If you are super lucky, you'll be like me and have registered for "My Nintendo" using a valid email address and be unable to convert the numerous games you've purchased to "Club Nintendo" because the only way to merge accounts is to provide the address you registered "My Nintendo" under and their new email validator is too stupid to realize it's been given a valid address.
1UP (Score:4, Funny)
If I get 100 coins, do I get another chance at life?
Good luck, suckers (Score:1)
Exchange rate? (Score:2)
Japanese one is more stable than the US site (Score:1)
W00t! Great news! (Score:2)
I was just saying to myself the other day, "Self, you really need to involve more corporations in your purchasing decisions." I mean, I already had a customer loyalty card from the grocery store and just finished taking a survey from Slashdot that roamed from which websites I view to my wife's income to the kind of underwear I prefer, but that just wasn't enough! Thanks, Nintendo, for being there for me when I really needed someone to monitor everything I buy and then reward me with a pittance so long as
I can't for the life of me remember my Login (Score:1)
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Which is made worse by that little problem. I've tried going through all possible usernames to no avail. I wonder how many times I've tried the right one only for the system to reject it due to their server load.
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I don't want your steenking pointz. (Score:2)
The biggest fail in all this .. not calling them rupees.*
* no, not really
yay! i've been registering my games for years! (Score:2)
and of course, it doesn't count for beans NOW, even though it shows that i've already registered tons of stuff. yay, punished for my loyalty!