I guess I just want to show up Stephen

By Joe Fourhman | January 3, 2009

Stephen covered the weirdness of Club Nintendo’s coins program last week, but my coda to his story is quite different. As you can see, my years of buying and registering Nintendo games has turned into over 1000 coins. About twice what Stephen tallied! Suck it!

As Stephen discovered, the new system really only cares about first party Wii and DS games. In my to-do list of 27 surveys, I had only one WiiWare/VC appearance… a 10-coin post-play survey on Tetris Party. While I do not have as many VC games as Stephen, it is indeed odd that Nintendo doesn’t want to reward those who have spent good money on first party WW/VC purchases.

Out of my collection, I received survey points for every first party Wii game and most DS games. My guess on the missing older DS games is that Nintendo is only awarding coins for games that still have a chance of selling. Animal Crossing: Wild World, Mario Kart DS, even Super Mario 64 still have legs at retail… while early DS also-rans like Warioware: Touched and Yoshi Touch-n-Go do not. That doesn’t explain Elite Beat Agents getting me coins, however, unless they’re polling for a long deserved EBA sequel.

Whether Nintendo will retroactively add in credit for various VC games remains to be seen (safe bet? they won’t), but right now it’s new-at-retail or nothing.