I'm reluctant to come across as a totally ungrateful jerk, but I'll have to confess bemusement over Nintendo's "solution" to its much-publicized storage issues. The reaction to Ninty's announcement has also confused me -- most people seem to be content with a quick fix answer yanked straight out of 1999. As far as I can see, Nintendo's solution is slow, impractical, hardly future-proof, and technically already exists.
What Nintendo has essentially offered us is a chance to inflate our Wii's memory to just under four times its current size. That may sound great on paper, but when you realize how utterly teensy the Wii's built-in memory was to begin with, it quickly becomes a lot less impressive. I'd wager that most people reading this will have managed to max out their Wii's memory with Virtual Console and WiiWare titles, and to those individuals Nintendo's storage update will be a blessing when it arrives next spring ... for the time being.
Will they be as satisfied a few years from now, by which time the Virtual Console and WiiWare combined will contain closer to 1,000 games than 300? Will they be chuffed at the prospect of storing, inserting and ejecting multiple SD cards in 2011? Is this really the future?
And what of other content that needs storing? DLC is already picking up pace on WiiWare. A single Guitar Hero or Rock Band song is around the size of a WiiWare game. Collecting SD cards is nobody's idea of fun, yet we'll soon be squeezed into that uncomfortable corner by Nintendo's lazy, old-fashioned thinking. I, for one, would infinitely prefer to store all necessary data on a single, sleek box, and such a device would almost certainly represent superior value.
Let's also not forget about the issue of transfer speeds. If, at some point in the future, I wish to play my downloaded copy of China Warrior, I'll first have to transfer it from my SD card. Swapping content between the Wii's memory and SD cards is already an arduous and frustrating process, with even relatively small Virtual Console files taking minutes to make the journey. It's slow, and in 2008, this feels shamefully antediluvian.
I do appreciate that Nintendo now has a solution. I just think it's selected the wrong answer to the problem, one that won't stand the test of time, and which looks painfully primitive next to the spacious hard drives served up by its rivals.
