Club Nintendo is a part of the Nintendo website that gives prizes out for registering your games and consoles. You do have to complete relatively short surveys that take no more than a minute or two to fill up. Most of the games share the exact same survey that are mainly, “where did you hear about this game?” questions. Once fill out one, you don’t even need to bother reading the others, just tick away! There are draws, “purchases”, and of course the elite status giveaway for the prizes, and who doesn’t love free stuff?
Keep in mind that this year is coming to an end. This doesn’t really affect your purchases, but if you want to get ahold of the elite status prizes, you need to get 300 or 600 points by JUNE 30TH, 2009!
It started out in Japan, however this is the first year that there is a Club Nintendo America for Canadians and Americans. Apparently in the past, Japanese Club Nintendo members got the usual prizes, Nintendo branded merchandice to games, but also limited edition controllers too. The prizes range from crappy to fantastic, depending on what year you got it from and how you got it.
Obviously draws yield the greatest prizes, limited edition DS Lites were given out in the past. Then you have the elite status prizes, those are given to anyone who reaches 300 or 600 points, but it is sort of a mystery what the prize is. You can spend the points to buy prizes too, Club Nintendo America currently offers a list of prizes that are boring or utterly useless, but Club Nintendo Japan had soundtrack CDs, games, controllers, etc. I’m guessing that Club Nintendo America is still relatively new, and your points are good for 2 years, so I’m hoping better prizes will come in the future.
So what does this have to do with you? Well if you recently purchased a Nintendo DSi, you have 170 points already. You get 160 points for buying the console and you get 10 for downloading the free Opera Web Browser offered in their shop. With 170 points, you are more than halfway to the gold status. It isn’t hard to get another 130 points. You can register any games you downloaded off the DS or Wii, and any Nintendo first party Wii and DS games (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc). You register games by finding the card beside the manual with the PIN number. If you have time, you can state that you intend to buy a game, then buy it to score extra points, etc. I’m not sure why, but Wii Fit is worth a bundle too.
Again if you purchased a DSi recently, you might as well try and go for the gold status. It takes 2 Nintendo Wii games and 1 DS game, or WiiFit and 1 other Wii game, etc. If you are short one game, I’m sure you can ask a friend since people almost never register their games. I managed to score 610 points with the help of my friends, and I’m now officially an Elite Platinum member. 🙂
I can’t wait to see what the prize is, and I’ll definitely update you guys when I get something. Good luck to everyone else attempting this!
And finally, I have a few tips for people trying to register their games and stuff.
No brainer tips:
1. Ask your friends! One or two games here and there goes a long way! People rarely have enough points on their own, and no one ever registers the games, so you might as well call on a favor and grab their PINs. Or even split the prize.
2. Don’t go over the limit. I made the mistake of going over 600 by 10 coins. There’s no point in doing that. Save your extra coins that you can register for the following year. That way you get a higher chance of receiving elite status for the following year.
3. Pretty much the same as #2, if you don’t have the points to reach the elite status, register them after July 1st so that you can get the elite status next year instead.
Better tips:
4. You “cannot” register duplicate games in a single account. You can only claim coins for a game once. HOWEVER, the way to work around this is to create a family account, and tie them with other accounts. Once you do that, you can pool the coins from 2 or more people together, and they still count. Only one person in the family receives the prize, but who cares? It’s most likely yourself creating multiple accounts anyways. I registered 2 copies of Wii Fit this way.
5. You can spend your points on the crappy prizes and your elite status will remain.
I guess that’s all, once again good luck! I hope we get something awesome this year. 🙂