Excitebike: World Rally looks good, so this is the first WiiWare title I'll be buying after a long, long time. Unfortunately it highlighted all the problems with Nintendo's download service:
1) Have to buy points in blocks. So I get into the Wii Shop Channel, and see that I have 600 Wii Points. All right, I know I have to buy more points in set blocks, but the lowest is 1000 points. Really? I only need $4 worth, but I have to buy $10? I would have preferred and been fine with a 500 point option.
2) Have to input your credit card information and address every single time you buy points. No, Nintendo doesn't save your information or give you the option to do that. You have to input your credit card number, expiration date, security code, city, state, zip code, and country any time you want to buy something. It really hurts the impulse purchase factor of these games if I have to crawl over to my wallet and read a bunch of numbers off of a card any time I want to try something out.
3) YES AND NO ARE REVERSED AT THE CONFIRMATION SCREEN. This is really the worst. Every single menu you go through up to this point has "Yes" on the right and "No" on the left, but at the very last confirmation screen, they switch them! So I instinctively press the button on the right wanting to confirm my purchase, but of course now this button is "No", so I'm taken back to the very beginning of the Add Wii Points sequence.
And to make matters worse, I have to input all my information all over again to get back to that confirmation screen (credit card number, address, etc.).
ALSO, while inputting my information this second time, I accidentally misspelled my city, and instead of being able to just go back and correct it, it gave me an authorization error and completely restarted the Wii Shop Channel!
So, finally, I got my 1000 points (for $10.70, since they charge sales tax, which isn't out of the ordinary, but wouldn't be as annoying/unexpected if they just charged real money in the first place), then went to buy Excitebike. It turns out they don't tell you how many blocks the game takes up until the final confirmation screen before you buy it, which wasn't a problem for me this time, but I can see it being extremely annoying to go through all these screens then be told you can't buy the game because you don't have enough space, then having to exit all the way back to the Wii System Menu to free up some space. Maybe it's possible to pop in an SD card while you're still at the Wii Shop Channel if it turns out you're out of space on your Wii, but I'm not sure... And even in that case, loading games off the SD card is slower than loading them off the Wii's internal memory, so I'd still rather download my new game on the faster internal memory directly.
Anyway, that's my rant. I think I'll go play the game now.