I was shocked when I first read the Wii would have built in 512 MB of hard drive space. Compared to the Xbox 360’s 20 gigabyte drive, this is hardly anything at all. However, I gave them the benefit of the doubt when I also read the Wii would support SD cards and include two usb ports. However, to my horror, I found that you can not use the SD cards as an active hard drive. Meaning, you can’t run any games or saved games directly off the card, nor can you use any usb hard drive for that purpose.

So far the extra channels on my Wii are the Internet channel, news channel, weather channel, and the everybody votes channel. I added the Mario Kart and Wii fit channels since I own both games. I can only hold five Wii Ware games. I had to remove all Virtual console games, delete save files and other pointless channels like the ‘check Mii out’ channel. So I guess that’s it, no more Wii Ware for me. Nintendo’s genius (yes sarcasm) solution is to keep moving games off the system memory and place them on the SD card. But what if you are currently playing them? So Nintendo expects you to play Dr. Mario for an hour, stop copy the game onto the SD card, re-copy another game in it’s place to play for an hour and repeat? This is their solution?

Perhaps this means that any game an independent developer plans to place in Wii Ware are subject complete failure simply because consumers don’t have the space to download them. I personally really want to play Toki Tori, but I just don’t feel like moving games onto the SD card, especially since i’m actively playing the ones I have. If anyone has tried moving games, you’ll recall it’s a painful process. The copy speed is as slow as a 5 1/4″ floppy disc.

Nintendo, all that we ask is that you allow games to play directly off the SD card so we don’t have to keep copying them back and forth. If you don’t want to do that then you should have written the operating system to move the games back and forth automatically in the background. In the end, consumers will only stop buying Wii Ware games which will leave independent developers no choice but to flock back to XBox Live.

Tags: Rant or Rave

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Nintendo, Wii, Wii Ware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.