Two Downloadable Wii Games Can Now Be Purchased Without Your Wii - News

by VGChartz Staff , posted on 30 March 2010 / 7,029 Views

For those of you in the U.S. and/or Canada who have been holding off downloadable game purchases until there was a way to spend only $5 at a time instead of $10 at a time, you're in luck. Nintendo is making some games available at their online store. You can purchase them online with any PC and receive a "Wii download ticket number" that can then be entered into the Shop Channel to start the download to your Wii at a later time.

The catch: the only two games available are the Virtual Console's Super Mario Bros. 3 for $5 and WiiWare's Pokemon Rumble for $15. Now instead of buying a card worth 2000 Points for $20, or buying 2000 Points for $20 via the Wii's Shop Channel, you can now spend $20 directly at Nintendo's online store. But now you can spend just $5 or just $15 and not worry about 100 or 200 Points burning a hole in your virtual pocket.

We'll have to wait and see if this new experiment is successful, or if more games are added, but for now there is one thing we know for certain: there is no longer an excuse for U.S. and Canadian Wii owners to not have Super Mario Bros. 3.

Source: store.nintendo.com via NintendoLife

11 Comments

moondeep (on 30 March 2010)

This isn't a new idea for Nintendo though. Amazon was selling codes for World of Goo on the Wii back in 2009.

famousringo (on 30 March 2010)

Meh.

scorptile (on 30 March 2010)

i agree with alot here they should have it to where if you have the cartridge you should be ab le to use their game codes to download the games via virtual console. but then again i have games that nintendo wont put on virtual console wihtout permission of the 3 rd party. like mk1,2,3,trilogy, goldeneye 64, cool spot, etc.

LokeSTL (on 30 March 2010)

I don't purchase VC and Wii-ware games because I can only play them on one system. A license should allow me to load and play it on a few systems like Sony does. They would make a lot of money off of me if this were the case.

kupomogli (on 30 March 2010)

"but for now there is one thing we know for certain: there is no longer an excuse for U.S. and Canadian Wii owners to not have Super Mario Bros. 3."

There's still an excuse. Owning a downloadable NES game for $5 is stupid when there are those of us who own the game with cartridge and packaging or that you can download a rom of the game.

Purchasing most NES games as loose cartridges are less even when shipped than you can buy them on the Virtual Console, and you actually have something to show.