Oh, Microsoft. When will you learn that downloadable games are sometimes going to want to be bigger than a memory unit. First, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night bumped up against the then-50MB limit for XBLA games, leading to a ceiling raise. Then promising platformer Eternity's Child got chased to the Wii when it ran up against the new 150MB limit. Now, anticipated HD remake of Street Fighter II is apparently having trouble squeezing all its high-res graphics and remixed music into the imposed size limit.

Speaking to VideoGamer.com, director David Sirlin said that it was "difficult to store so many 1080p graphics in such a small download size." According to Sirlin, the 150MB limit "also makes it difficult or impossible to include all the original game's music AND [an] all remixed set of music."

Xbox-owning fighting fans shouldn't lose hope, though -- Sirlin says his team is "still doing our best to fit within the limit we've been given." Still, we have to wonder why they should have to go through the aggravation at all. To satisfy the three hardcore fighting fans that own a 360 but not a hard drive? Don't punish the many for the questionable purchasing decisions of the few, Microsoft.

Game industry business stories in 2007 were a pretty one note affair -- record-breaking this, unprecedented sales that, blah blah blah. But the boom times might be ending soon, as the Consumer Entertainment Association is predicting that games industry growth will begin to slow in 2008.

To be clear, this doesn't mean the industry is going to get smaller, by any means. The CEA is still predicting that the industry will grow 13 percent, to $17.9 billion, in the coming year. What's getting smaller is the rate of growth, which was a ridiculously high 22 percent from 2006 to 2007.

This isn't all that distressing, considering economic analysts are pointing to recession across the economic board. In fact, plenty of industries would be positively giddy with 13 percent growth these days. Then again, declining growth is the first step to actual industry shrinkage, which is the first step to the total evaporation of the industry. Then again again, given that we're entering the middle of the current console generation, this is probably just a sign that the chronically cyclical game industry is going through yet another one of its regular cycles. Amid all the uncertainty, one thing is for sure ... economic analysis makes our heads hurt.

Never again can we be accused of obsessing over the relative size of things. We admit, we're guilty of a chart here or there, and we've been known to calculate cubic volume like a mofo, but a poster at the GameFAQ's forums has just shown us how it's done.

DocCRP has crafted a pair of meticulous Wii mockups, complete with Wiimote, and proceeded to take pictures of the diminutive box next to ... well, just about everything. NES? Yup. Atari 2600? Sure. Ketchup bottle? Yeah. Dreamcatcher? Errr, yeah, that's here. John Philip Sousa award? Now it's just getting weird.

If you're really curious how the Wii sizes up compared to a 1998 US Mint Proof Set, I've handily hyperlinked the entire forum thread's worth of images after the break.

[Via DigitalBattle]