How to buy Nintendo DSi Points

Our favourite money is Monopoly money because it comes in pretty colours and when your brother's back is turned you can steal some notes without him noticing. Our second favourite money is dollars, but only because it reminds us of Monopoly money.

We're not sure whether we like Nintendo DSi Points yet. That's the made up currency that Nintendo charges you if you want to buy/download DSiWare games from the DSi Shop.

For some reason, DSi Points aren't the same as Wii Points, and you can't transfer your Points between your different Nintendo consoles (although before too long, someone in China or Nigeria will probably claim they can do it for you.)

And unlike Monopoly money, you do have to give Nintendo real cash in order to get your hands on DSi Points. At the moment, Nintendo charges £9 per 1000 points.

This is how you swap money for points.

To buy your DSi Points you have to switch on your DSi and select the Nintendo DSi Shop option.

In order to do this, you must be able to connect your DSi to the internet using a wi-fi network. Check out our How To set up wi-fi on your Nintendo DS guide if you haven't done this yet. We have previously connected though, so we just have to wait...

Here we are in the Nintendo DSi Shop. We can see some Recommended Titles to download but in order to buy our points, we need to Start Shopping.

Now we click on the Add Nintendo DSi Points button.

There are two options. If you have a Nintendo Points Card, bought at a retailer such as Amazon, you just scratch the silver area off the back of the card and enter the number into the box (as shown two below).

Sadly no one has been nice enough to give us a Nintendo Points Card so it's going to have to be the Credit Card option.

Here you can see the conversion rate between real money and Nintendo money. We're going to buy 3000 points.

Now the choice is between MasterCard and Visa card.

Fill in your details. They aren't saved onto the DSi so you will have to enter them every time you want to more DSi Points but that's best in terms of security. (N.B. You can also lock down use of DSi Points via the DSi's Parental Controls).

We think this legalese is funny because Nintendo is about to charge us £27 for something it says "has no momentary value".

A transaction is made.

We've now added 3000 DSi Points to our Shop account, which combined with the 1000 points Nintendo gave us for buying a launch DSi, means we have 4000 in total.

Being careful though, we check the receipt and find out that Nintendo of Europe is based in Germany.

Okay, now it's time to get spending...

You can check out more of our How To guides here.