Remember last month when we found out the Game Coins aspect of the Nintendo 3DS?  It's the feature that allows you to earn special tokens that can be used to unlock in-game content just by walking around with your 3DS in your pocket.  The joke at the time was that it would be simpler to just put the 3DS in a paint shaker and jolt your way to 999 coins (or whatever the limit may be) rather than walk for miles and miles.  Well, leave it to Nintendo to think a move ahead of you and plan for that kind of thing.  Tiny Cartridge has the news that there's a limit to how many coins you can earn per day and a maximum coin limit far below that hypothetical 999.

According to these new details, the 3DS will give you a single Game Coin whenever you take 100 steps, even when you have the system closed (in Sleep Mode).

You won’t be able to come up with weird hacks or tricks to stockpile Game Coins, though, as you can only earn 10 of them each day, and you can only store a max of 300 Game Coins. According to calculations, you only need to walk around half a mile each day to get those 10 coins.

Obviously, Game Coins are serious business.  With those limits in place, suddenly the quest to collect the coins has turned the feature into a minor amusement instead of a major way to game the system, as it were.  Of course, I'm still assuming that Game Coins will still be around eight months from now and that developers won't ignore them on a mass scale.  If left unimplemented, Game Coins could well become the next PictoChat: something that sounded neat prior to the DS's launch, but ended up being completely wasted and impractical after launch.