Nintendo points won’t be interchangeable

Planning to buy software for both the Nintendo DSi and the Wii? Well you’ll need two lots of points for that.

With the new Nintendo DSi eventually coming out here and no imports being allowed by the region locking that Nintendo will be doing, you’d think that the points you use to buy things on Nintendo’s online store for the Wii would allow you to use them on Nintendo’s store for the DSi.

You’d be wrong.

While many of us buy points for the Wii in order to get WiiWare, the classic games, or some of the software the Wii channel has to offer, we won’t be allowed to transfer those points between purchases for each system.

Instead, Nintendo will force you to choose which system you’d like to spend all your points on and make you stay with that choice for the duration of the points in your account. This means that if you buy a card with 3000 points on it for either the DSi or the Wii and you want to buy WiiWare, any remainder points you have left over won’t work with anything other than purchases for the Wii.

And here I thought that the region locking and delayed release of the DSi was irritating enough!