Well, Club Nintendo has finally been implemented for North America. Does this long-awaited turn of events live up to all of the hype?
The best part of the North American Club Nintendo is that it is fully retroactive with all of the games that you have been dutifully registering on your My Nintendo account. As you can see by my awesome amount of points above, many of the games that I have registered in the past were applicable to my coin balance.
One thing of note is that you have to complete the games respective survey about where you bought it and why before the coins are credited to your account. I was unaware of this and became rather upset when I finished migrating my old My Nintendo account over and seeing a balance of 0.
The one downside of the North American Club Nintendo is that the prizes are currently kinda lame. The top two prizes, each costing 800 coins are Nintendo-style Hanafuda cards and a Game & Watch DS collection. I already have both of these and the hanafuda cards, while cool, are rather small, and the G&W collection has maybe three games in it and pales in comparison to the old G&W collections on the GBC that were quite awesome.
You get 50 coins for each Wii game you enter and 30 coins for each DS game you enter, so the coins roughly convert equally to the dollars spent on the games. You get an extra 10 coins for registering a game within 4 weeks of its launch and another extra 10 coins if you say that you plan on buying a game before you do. (You currently cannot use the plan-to-buy feature, but it’s coming). Wii Fit, since it is more expensive, is worth 80 coins when you register it.
Overall, not a bad experience. Will be much better when proper prizes are available.
8.0