Can't Link Your 3DS To Your Club Nintendo Account? Here's How...

You're in the 3DS eShop for the first time, and it offers to link your Club Nintendo account to your 3DS, presumably to help you rack up stars and benefits. You judiciously input your email address and password, only to have an error message appear, telling you that your email address and/or password is incorrect. So you hop on your computer and login to the Club Nintendo website without issue...

???!

According to the Troubleshooting section of Nintendo's website, this error can be caused by two things, neither of which are mentioned in the original error message, and neither of which has anything to do with an incorrect email address or password.

Here it is:

1. Login to your Club Nintendo account via the relevant Nintendo website (on your PC, laptop, phone - basically anything other than your 3DS!).
2. Click on the "EDIT MY PERSONAL DATA" button.
3. Under the "User Data" section, click on the little "EDIT >" button.
4. Click into the "Username:" field and remove any "special characters" from your username. This includes underscores ("_"), and I assume other symbols used for swearing like !@#$%^&*()-+=, etc. If you've always hated your username, here's your opportunity to change it.
5. Check the "Date of birth:" to ensure that you are registered as being born more than 13 years ago.

 If you're under 13, or you entered a fake date of birth that's less than 13 years ago, then I'm afraid you're out of luck. Nintendo has pre-emptively "protected" you from the evils of the internet! There appears to be no method of editing the date of birth after an account has been registered.

That being the case, I would recommend trying to contact Nintendo customer service to see if they can change it on their end (which is probably more time consuming than it's worth), or failing that, give up and create a new Club Nintendo account. A date of birth greater than 21 should have you covered, but you might want to make yourself 100 years old just to be on the safe side...

I wrote this because I found Nintendo's troubleshooting instructions to be woefully low on detail and generally unhelpful. I am a trainer by day, so I thought I would try writing some instructions that were quite the opposite!

Beer Pong Too Strong For Wii

By Adam Redsell on July 7, 2008 at 10:41 AM

Beer Pong fans will have to settle for the real thing, thanks to outraged parent and university groups. Beer Pong was to be released on Wii Ware last month as part of JV Games' Frat Party Games line, but those plans came to a grinding halt when the cries of hot mothers and stuffy deans reached the ears of Connecticut attorney-general Richard Blumenthal.

Blumenthal determined that the ESRB had made a grievous error in clearing the game for young teens, expressing concerns that future games in the Frat Party Games series will be approved for that age group. In what appeared to be a panic-propelled backflip, JV Games VP Jag Jaeger [hello, deed poll!] announced that the game will be renamed "Pong Toss" and all references to alcohol removed. Thing is, the game contained no alcoholic references to begin with, according to the ESRB president Patricia Vance:

"Despite being premised on a drinking game, the game's content involves essentially nothing more than tossing pingpong balls into plastic cups. We are thus unsure of the basis for the statement in your letter suggesting that this content 'glorifies alcohol abuse and binge drinking."

Touche. Blumenthal [blue menthol?] responded by pointing out that "beer" was explicitly referred to in the title, accompanied by a depiction of said beverage. He added that kegs and beer mugs were clearly visible at some of the beer pong tables, and that there was even a full bar in the background. Clearly Richard has spent a lot of time with the game.

So "Beer Pong" is now "Pong Toss" and the oldies are satisfied. Where this leaves the follow-up title, "Bong Toss", remains to be seen.

'Beer Pong' Video Game Has Controversy Brewing [Fox News]