Nintendo fanboys clamoring to cash in on their collection of DS and Wii hardware and games through Club Nintendo may have to wait a little while longer, or at least take a little time to figure out what they have bopping around in the old game box that qualifies.

The North American version of Club Nintendo launched yesterday and is designed to offer Nintendo-themed freebies to Wii and DS players who take the time to register their consoles and Nintendo-published games, indicate their interest in upcoming games and take surveys. In doing these things members earn 'coins,' which in turn are redeemed for rewards, aka freebies. Seems like a goldmine of Nintendo shwag for the faithful, but there have been some issues. Shortly after the site went up yesterday it came down again, probably due to traffic, which is understandable. It was noted in various places last night that it was back up. This is true. I went there myself and since I was already registered with Nintendo was able to migrate that info over easily to my Club Nintendo account. Unfortunately there is still a fairly severe loading time on many of the pages, a tendency for the system to log you out when changing pages and a problem with the functionality that lets you indicate your buying interest in titles. Also, for Nintendo fans with their own back catalog in 'the box' I mentioned, there is the limited number of past DS, Wii and Wii Shopping Channel games that can be registered for coins and the delay on seeing the points appear in their account. I'm sure the fanboys in the house can live with the list of nearly 90 titles on the list. This is actually not too bad, unless you have been very heavy in your old school virtual console purchases. Either way you may want to wait until the site is fully operational before doing any registering of games in order to maximize the number of coins you walk away with.

--Hobson's Choice

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