Nintendo's "Club Nintendo" reward program has unveiled a handful of new exclusive items that its members can redeem by using the "coins" they earn from registering their Nintendo products and participating in various surveys.

The first type of new reward consists of two sets of twelve greeting cards, each including three different designs of characters from the Super Mario Bros. and Nintendogs series. Each set of greeting cards can be obtained for 300 Coins each. Read more »

Industry magazine Develop recently surveyed a number of game developers for their thoughts about making games for the Nintendo Wii. Developers were asked if they have been able to take advantage of the Wii's potential given its global leadership in the home console environment. Their responses, while not entirely surprising, clearly illustrate some common concerns.

One of the chief issues cited by those surveyed was that when a 3rd-party introduces a new IP on the Wii, they do so from a commercially tenuous proposition. According to an anonymous studio head of a "leading international developer," the ease of Wii development compared to other consoles is partly at fault in that "it has become too easy to flood the market with under-developed product(s) which have the potential to confuse and disappoint the public." Ed Daly, General Manager of Zoe Mode, further supported the view that oversaturation makes bigger developers wary stating that, "fear that over-supply and fatigue from the mainstream Wii adopters is holding back some publishers and suppressing dev budgets." Read more »