At last night’s Nintendo Press Conference in Japan, Kotaku’s liveblog delivered an update on the one feature all of us geeks and otaku have been waiting for: A solution to the Wii’s criminally small storage capacity. After a lengthy presentation on the new DSi handheld, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata made the admission, “We have to address the console’s insufficient memory storage,” and explained Nintendo’s proposed solution: by Spring 2009, Wii owners will be able to download software onto SD Cards via the Wii Shop Channel.
Iwata’s statement should likely be applied to Japanese audiences only, but it’s fair to assume stateside gamers ought to have the same ability around the same time, or at least shortly thereafter. We’re also holding out hope that gamers will also be able to execute software from their SD cards, because they can’t right now; the SD card functions as archival storage only, requiring gamers to copy games back into the Wii’s internal memory before playing them. This process is long and cumbersome, and is a poor solution at best — if you own merely a handful of high-volume WiiWare titles like My Life as a King or SBCG4AP, you’re going to need to start deleting games or slowly copying them to SD cards before you have room for any more. Taken at its literal meaning, being able to just download games directly to the SD card would merely circumvent the initial copying process without actually allowing you to immediately play your new game. That doesn’t seem to make sense, so we’re going to give Nintendo the benefit of the doubt.
An improved SD card functionality would certainly be a good first step towards an agreeable Wii storage solution, but will it be enough? SD Cards have the advantage of being cheap, and easy to interchange — an organized gamer can pop cards in and out in order to accomodate a growing library. On the other hand, the Wii cannot read SDHC cards, meaning a 4GB card is the biggest option available. A single 4GB card, adding eight times the Wii’s existing internal memory, will certainly hold its fair share of WiiWare downloads, for now. But what about later on? Suppose Nintendo wants to increase the maximum size of WiiWare games at some point. It’s unlikely that Wii owners will be downloading PS3-style full games of the 1GB+ caliber, but even raising the size to a few hundred megabytes will start eating up those SD cards fairly fast. And then there’s games like Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero: World Tour, both of which use DLC on a regular basis. I realize I’m outside the norm, but my Rock Band DLC collection already exceeds 5 gigs — I know I certainly wouldn’t want to have to keep swapping SD cards to browse my entire tracklist. The Wii version may compress its songs differently, but the point stands.
We’ll keep an eye on this new feature as details become available, staying optimistic but wary. What do you think? Is an improved SD Card function going to do it for you?
Leave a Reply