Saturday, December 8, 2007

Club Nintendo Europe

Finally Nintendo of Europe did something right.

No, I am not talking about the pathetic 4:1 Nintendo VIP:24 star points exchange rate for Wii points, which is worse than the American exchange rate. With SNES games costing 800 Wii points, what this means is to get a free SNES game worth £5.60 it would cost the customer roughly £520 in purchases. That is about 1% back! Which is pathetic. As far as customer loyalty schemes go this is even worse than the dreadful Nectar card. Even Boots offers at least 4p back for every one quid spent, not to mention the numerous triple points offers on weekends.

But I digress. The right thing that NoE did do which I was referring to is the fact that NoE finally decides to offer us some Club Nintendo goodies which were previously only available for members of Club Nintendo Japan. So after trying to access the site for much of the yesterday I finally decided to trade in 4500 star points (the equivalent of registering two systems and 14 games) for a Mario Game Rack. Still a huge rip-off, but at least it is something physical, rare and can't be bought in any shops. Fingers crossed that NoE does not screw up and really does ship this in four weeks time.


I still have 5700+ star points with more being added soon (as long as I can find some misplaced VIP scratch cards). So what should I get next? The NES Classic Notebook looks nice and the Mushroom Kingdom Bracelet is perfect as a gift, if not useless. Or should I order another rack and auction it off? There are loads of Mario Kart replicas but these are easily obtainable at GAME or Gamestation, so no thanks. Maybe I should wait for something uber rare like the Game & Watch DS game. One thing that is definite is no way will I trade in my star points for Wii points.

2 comments:

EvilRedEye said...

I did actually trade in all my Stars for Wii Points, although being a young whipper-snapper it's only in the last few years I've been buying games first-hand, so I didn't have a really huge stock of Stars to buy stuff with. The game rack looked like the best thing on there to me, decided not to get one in the end as I don't really have space for it. Hope you get many long years of use (or money from eBay) out of yours though.

Jon Choo said...

I will hold the fort and wait for something else to come from Japan.