Buying Wii Points
Did you know that through the Wii Shopping Channel you can buy Wii points? What I like is that you can buy 1000 Wii points at a time. I wanted to be Mario Kart 64, so since I was 800 points short (game is 1000 points and I had 200 points), I was excited to buy the points through the Wii. Yes! No extra trip to town to satisfy my desire to play Mario Kart now.
We have satellite Internet, so it seems to take a long time for the Wii shop to finally load. But it finally does and I make my selection to buy 1000 Wii points. Next I put in my credit card information and then have to put in some information for verification purposes. I type all the in and click confirm.
Much to my surprise, I get an error about the postal zip not being correct. No problem. I will double check it. I re-enter the information at least two more times and get the same error. When I check my credit card that is also a debit card, I notice that the charges have been pinged to my account. So the money is now on ‘virtual hold’ and I still have no Wii points. Wondering what the deal is, I call Nintendo. After listening to the options I make several selections. Since none seem to fit my solution, I opt to talk to a live person. At first I’m discouraged by the message because the voice sounds like I may have a long wait on my hands since he warned they get a lot of calls. Then I’m pleasantly surprised to be talking to an actual person at Nintendo not a minute later.
I tell him my problem. He takes some information and then starts to go over the information that I’m putting in on the verification screen. He asks if I’m putting the right county in. This is where the virtual light bulb over my head goes off. Not only one time did I read county as country, but four times. Four times I had tried to put in my verification information and each time had read to put country in that block. The Nintendo tech tried to make me feel better about my obvious stupidity by saying it happens a lot.
So, I went back and put in the right information. Viola! It worked! I had my 1000 Wii points and I bought them from the Wii Shop channel. I downloaded Mario Kart 64 and anxiously began to play a race with my husband. Wouldn’t you know that in the second race, both Wiimote’s batteries die. Such is life, right?
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:48 am
I actually hate the fact that you have to buy at least 1000 points every time. Why can’t we just pay for what we need, Nintendo?
April 4th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
This sounds like a cool feature. I have actually totally avoided the shopping channel because I thought you had to go buy the Wii points cards. Now you can do it on your system I might do that, but first I will wait until I move back to my house end of this month where I have a reliable internet connection. In my apartment the connection almost always gets disconnected in the middle of doing stuff on the Wii (happens on the computer, too, so not a Wii connectivity issue).