Samba de Amigo is on shelves across the country now, and bears the first red “Nintendo Wi-Fi connection” logo to be seen in New Zealand.

Pay and Play was earlier announced by Nintendo, opening up the platform for paid content which could (and will) range from additional downloadable content for games, to paid access for online gaming (an Animal Crack MMORPG could have Nintendo execs licking their lips all the way to the bank).

The back of the Samba box mentions that the DLC for this game consists of additional songs that you can pay for. The game does not support online multiplayer but does have online leaderboards (one presumes these remain free to use).

On the back of Nintendo’s recent TV advertising blitz, game sales have been on the increase as Newsboy has covered in his look at the weekly sales charts. We had already seen the exposure of Nintendo products being increased in EB Games stores prior to this, with rumours being that this was the kind of exposure that only money could buy (ie. it would thought that someone was paying for the Nintendo games section to be moved from the cellars to the front of EB Games stores). An EB staffer’s explanation to me had been that the shift of products to the front of the store was more to do with EB Games being seen as a “sole distributor” of Nintendo at the time (Softprint had just gone down the toilet and only EB Games were getting new stock through their own supply channels), but feel free to believe who you want to.

Today I walked into The Warehouse to find that a new dedicated shelf space had been set up for Nintendo. I’m not sure how long it has actually been there, but it would be recent, and is a great sign for Nintendo in New Zealand, even if it has come almost 2 years after the launch of their flagship Wii console.

It will be an interesting Christmas indeed – popularity grows for the $499 Wii (retail price unchanged for 2 years!), while the Arcade 360 package regularly finds its way down to an incredible $349.