Your Yearly Reminder: Club Nintendo's 2012 Prize Deadline Approaches

For the fourth year in a row, the Club Nintendo "year" is coming to an end. It's once again time to jump over to Nintendo of America's customer rewards site and register your product codes and fill out surveys, because after this Saturday your status is getting reset again.

For those unfamiliar with what that means, a bit lengthier explanation now. Club Nintendo is Nintendo of America's customer reward service. If you log on to their website at http://club.nintendo.com and create a profile for yourself, then help the company out with some feedback activities like typing in the registration codes contained in game packages and filling out some questionnaires about what you did and didn't like about each game, you'll earn Coins. Save up enough Coins and you can redeem them for Nintendo swag, like carrying cases for your 3DS cartridges or posters featuring Mario and the gang.

Further, if you save up several hundred Coins in a single calendar year, you can achieve "Elite Status" – 300 Coins gets you to the Gold level, and 600 earns you Platinum. If it's possible for you to reach those thresholds, you want to make every effort – because extra bonuses are bestowed on those who do. In 2009, Elite members who got all the way up to Platinum got to choose, for free, between getting a swanky official Mario hat or an exclusive download of Doc Louis's Punch-Out!! on WiiWare – a game you could only get through this program.

The Platinum Prize from 2010. What will this year's be?

In 2010, a snazzy exclusive figurine featuring Mario, Luigi, Bowser and a few other familiar Mushroom Kingdom faces was the sought-after Platinum prize. Then, last year, the Platinum award was the "Mario & Friends Pin Badge Collection," a set of buttons emblazoned with classic 8-bit Mario art.

The Gold-level reward? Usually a Nintendo-themed desk calendar for the year ahead.

So this is just an article reminding you that the deadline is coming up again very soon.  This Club Nintendo year runs from July 1, 2011 to June 30, 2012, so you've got until Saturday to push your Coin total up over either the Gold or Platinum threshold and put yourself into free swag territory.

We don't yet know what this year's Elite rewards will be, but traditionally they've been revealed on the day after the deadline, July 1. That's this Sunday this time around, if they stick to the same timetable. The track record is pretty solid no matter what the prizes end up being, though, so you should definitely get to work quick.

Oh, and some of the Coin values for completing surveys and registering game codes will be changing this Saturday as well. (Many older games' values are decreasing, so if you've got old codes still un-entered into the website, now's the time to use them.)

And that concludes our yearly Club Nintendo public service announcement. Happy surveying!



Source : ign[dot]com