The long promised Nintendo Channel launched last night for Wii owners.

Supposedly, the channel lets you buy games directly, watch trailers of current and upcoming games and feed Nintendo information on the games that you are playing.

You’d think some other company than Nintendo would be the first to let consumers buy a new disc-based game via their console without taking their hands off a controller. Nope. It’s Nintendo.

The channel tracks and recommends games.

The Nintendo Channel adds features to the Wii. If you opt in, the channel will track the games you play, the time you play them and tabulate rankings you can manually apply to games in the channel’s menu — all supposedly to your shopping and gaming benefit.

This is the nonsense that Nintendo says in their official statement:

We would like to offer you the opportunity to receive game recommendations based on your actual game play.

To receive this service, you must agree to allow Nintendo to collect nonidentifiable info from your console, such as the games you play and the time you play them. Nintendo will hen use this information to recommend games to you and develop new games and services.

*Sent information may include the following:
-The information posted daily to the Wii Message Board regarding the number of times and duration software titles have been played.
-Information on your picture, Sensor Bar, Internet usage, etc., from the Wii System Settings.

To thank you for sharing your anonymous data with Nintendo, we would like to make available to you the DS Download Service. No information that personally identifies ou o your console will be shared with Nintendo by agreeing to share your game-play data.

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