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Pros: It’s free. It’s something to do.
Cons: Amiibos are locked to a single demo, game doesn’t check your purchased titles.

Nintendo’s free download, Amiibo Tap: Nintendo’s Greatest Bits, involves touching an amiibo to the gamepad so you can play bits of SNES and NES games. It can be seen as one of two things; a cute little diversion for people with Amiibos, or a piece of software designed to sell Amiibos and Virtual Console games.


As the former, it’s not bad. As the latter it seems poorly conceived.

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Developed and published by: Nintendo
Genre: Game demos.
For ages: All
Platform: Wii U
Release Date: May 1, 2015
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The Basics: Play Snippets of a Different Game for Each Amiibo

When you start Amiibo Tap you are asked to tap an amiibo to the Wii U gamepad, at which point you will be assigned a game from the 30 available. Once an amiibo is assigned a game, it can only access that game.

You will then be dropped at some place in the game and can play for three minutes, at which point you will be kicked out again. Tap the amiibo again and you’ll find yourself in a new place in the game. These points are not random; you have a set number of starting points that you cycle through.

I only have one Amiibo, so I got one game: Kirby’s Adventure, which had seven scenes to choose from. It’s a cute little game, and there is somet fun in seeing how far you can get in your three minutes.

Of course, a total of 21 minutes of a game isn’t very much, so each game includes a link to the eShop where you can buy the whole thing.

The Downside: A Missed Sales Opportunity

Of course, if I buy the game, then my one amiibo becomes useless in Amiibo Tap, because I’ve got the one game it will give me. And players have reported that you can be assigned a game you have already downloaded, in which case you don’t get anything useful, and Nintendo doesn’t get a chance to sell you anything. That seems pretty dumb on their part; if you’ve got a gimmick for selling games, make it smart enough to recognize the purchased ones.

While Amiibo Tapmight lure you into buying a game - if your amiibo gives you one you don’t already have - it will certainly not lure you into buying an Amiibo for the sake of getting some snippets from a game you may already own.

A good write up at Nintendo Life complained that Nintendo’s plan for Amiibo Tap was fundamentally flawed, because the sort of people who own a lot of amiibos are the sort of people who own a lot of virtual console titles already. It’s an interesting point, but I don’t think it’s entirely true. There are kids who like toys and got a few amiibos for new games like Super Smash Bros. and Mario Kart 8, and those are exactly the people who might play an old game and think, I’ve never played this before but it’s actually pretty fun.

The Verdict: Hey, It’s Free

Amiibo Tap is free, so if players don’t get anything out of it that’s not the end of the world. I’m actually more bothered by seeing Nintendo fumble a simple promotional gimmick so badly. I’m not a Nintendo shareholder, and whether they make money or not doesn’t affect me in the slightest, yet I am offended that they couldn’t figure out the flaws in their system, which are painfully obvious.

The issue is perfectly fixable. Just patch the game so it can look at a player’s purchases; any amiibo attached to a purchased game is freed for a different one. Also patch it so after a set amount of time an amiibo can be detached from a game; if someone has been playing the demo for a game for a month and still hasn’t bought it, maybe it’s time to show them something else.

Amiibo Tap offers an interesting approach to the game demo concept. And in a month with very little coming out, it gives amiibo owners something new to play with. And if that’s all it’s meant to be, then it’s just fine.