I was definitely upset. I wanted a palpable reward for my collectables' shelf after registering about $600 worth of Nintendo games in the last year and filling out countless surveys.

And what made it even worse is, this is the first year I'd gotten platinum status. The first two years of North American Club Nintendo, I didn't think I could ever get to Elite Status since there were so few products which qualified for the program. But as the selection expanded, I figured I should give it a try. The first year I didn't get to gold; the second year, I got gold and picked the paper calendar; the third year, I got gold and chose the Smash Bros. (N64) download because I didn't want to wait until December to get my reward and the only thing I qualified for tangible prize-wise was that year's paper calendar. Well this year, thanks to a lot of 3DS games, some DSi titles, a few Wii games, and some games given as gifts to me, I was able to make the coveted platinum status. And what's this year's offering? A bunch of Wii U titles (does no good for those of us without a Wii U like myself), DKCR3D (already have it), early NES games through Virtual Console (have most of them through the 3DS Ambassador program or from their original NES release), a few GB games (have half of them), and 3DSWare titles developed by third parties for Nintendo that weren't good enough for a brick-and-mortar retail release that cost ten to eleven bucks to buy... all of which can be bought directly by anyone without the rigamarole of dealing with Club Nintendo and its registrations and surveys. And none of the downloads are even in any way marked as special - no exclusives, timed exclusives, not even anything with its menu icon changed to indicate it was gotten from the Club as a reward only for the dedicated fans. And most of those games that I don't have for the 3DS are ones I'm not even interested in getting.

So I'm pretty disappointed. But what are you going to do? Therefore I picked "Mario and Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move" and redeemed that. Funny though: I have three of the games from this series (#1, #3, & #5) but I didn't buy any of them. #1 was a 3DS Ambassador program game, #3 was a Christmas gift, and of course #5 was via Club Nintendo as a reward.

I'm not a fan of the "Mario vs. Donkey Kong" series, but this 3DS one plays like "Pipe Mania"/"Pipe Dream" (or "EmPipe," for those that played that classic Windows 3.1 freeware game). I'm quite the fan of this style of game play, and though I don't like the presentation in Minis on the Move, the game play does provide a unique spin on the Pipe Mania formula that isn't just a cookie cutter copy. Plus it has a lot of content to it, and the option of playing user-generated levels which can be uploaded & downloaded from online. So Mario vs. Donkey Kong 5 is not too bad a package.

But like others, I see this as the beginning of the end of physical prizes from North American Club Nintendo. I believe they will distribute what they have left on offer and will not re-order or re-produce any additional merchandise - not what they already offer and definitely not new things. But I think this "cost savings" measure will return to bite Nintendo on the nose. Many people have been made disgruntled and will stop registering games and filling out their surveys, surveys which in aggregate provides useful information. And those who will continue to go through these steps will probably scale back on purchasing Nintendo-owned downloads - after all, why "waste" their money buying games they know will eventually be on offer as a redeemable reward on Club Nintendo for their virtual coins instead of real-world currency? Sure people will probably buy the "big games" in the same quantities, but the cheap download-only games might see a dip in sales as a result of all this.