How To Spend Your First $10 In The DSiWare Shop

Consumers of a new Nintendo DSi get $10 (1000 Nintendo points) for free if they connect their new system online. So how should you spend them? Here's what I did over the weekend.

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Like many things with Nintendo, the weekend launch of the American DSiWare online store for the new Nintendo DSi presented a mix of good design and head-scratching frustration.

My first experience with the store, at least, was a positive one.

Logging onto the DSiWare store with my DSi required me to upgrade its firmware. This was the first positive of the DSi because it proved that  a) can have its firmware upgraded (the DS and DS Lite couldn't) and b) it allowed me to connect to the Internet through a WPA-encrypted Wi-Fi signal (the only Wi-Fi signal I can use in my apartment). The firmware upgrade took less than a minute. I hope Nintendo will use this capability to improve the system software, as Sony has done repeatedly with the PSP.

Next, I started shopping. The DSi needed to reboot but then allowed me access to the DSiWare store. Just logging in rewarded me with 1000 Nintendo points, which is a limited time offer. Here's the first aggravation: those Nintendo points were committed to the DSi. I could not use them on my Wii. I was told by a Nintendo p.r. rep that I can purchase Nintendo points cards and use them on either my DSi or Wii -- but that even those cards, once committed to one system, must have all of their points spent only on that system. So expect to carry leftover points balances on your Wii and DSi if you buy points in bulk without spending all of those points right away on games and other downloads. I need to find out from Nintendo why Dsi/Wii-owners can't carry one overall Nintendo points balance.

I had many shopping options for my 1000 DSiWare points. Nintendo is offering a DSi magic trick prpgram, a math tutor, a "WarioWare" game and other downlaods. I chose none of those first three. The "WarioWare: Snapped" game uses the system's camera and forces the player to wave their hands and face in front of the system. That's nice. But I play my DSi on the subway, which isn't where I want to be acting like a fool.

So I chose to buy:

1) DSi Web Browser -- This was free and now lets me... browse the web. Why not?

2) "Bird & Beans" -- This is a single-screen arcade-style game they're selling for 200 points. It's a port of a mini-game from the original "WarioWare." You control a bird who can't fly but can stick his tongue out at diagonal angles. You run him across the bottom of the screen trying to get his tongue to snag beans that fall from the sky. The higher he catches the beans, the more points the beans are worth. It's simple. It's solid. It's worth two bucks.

3) "Art Style Aquia" -- This is yet another of the "Art Style" games from development studio Skip. All of these games have a simple modern-art aesthetic, though this one adds in the visual of a SCUBA diver descending down the right side of the screen and some bubbles. "Aquia" is a dual-screen "Tetris"-with-a-twist, set to a SCUBA diving theme. You're matching blocks in order to power the diver to get to the bottom of the sea floor, but you have to deal with your screen darkening as he runs out of air (counter this by combining rare blocks of air). The game has a gentle underwater aesthetic and, as a bonus, allows you to unlock "aquarium" levels that show sea-life floating on your DS screens. This game is 500 points and is already proving to be a catchy amusement during my commutes. As I play it more, I am discovering that the time pressure of later levels makes this game intense. My screen was blacking out quickly.

I had no problems getting this software onto my DSi. All of these games downloaded briskly. Nintendo uses an attractive progress screen to amuse you while you wait. The screen shows Mario, Luigi, Peach and Toad all tossing blue circles into a box that fills in order to show you your download progress. None of the downloads took more than a couple of minutes.

The downloads were all tiny. The Web browser takes up 96 blocks of system memory. "Bird & Beans" occupies 11, and "Aquia" uses 91. That has left me with 827 blocks of system memory free, to say nothing of what I could save on an SD card.

After making my three "free" purchases, I wound up with 300 points leftover. I'll let you know when I find reason to spend them. For starters, I'm having fun with the two games I bought. I just haven't browsed the web once.

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