CantGetAWii
WiiChat Member
The Nintendo Wii doesn’t have an internal hard drive and no hard drive peripheral or add-on has been announced or even remotely leaked by the big “N” – Why hasn’t this happened yet? Well I suppose the only two answers that would ever slip out of Nintendo’s water-tight sphincter of a press department would be either that they are still focusing on their supply issues with producing the console itself, or that they believe the paltry 512mb of internal flash memory is sufficient for gamer’s needs.
Lets go ahead and tackle the first issue right off the bat. It’s easy to conclude that the “N” is full of **** and the Wii can’t POSSIBLY be that hard to produce and they are intentionally holding back their supply to fuel the insatiable demand that gamers and geriatrics have developed for the damn thing. This, however, has one big flaw: the ****ing thing is still the #1 system every single month. So the little white beast’s must be on the shelves somewhere because droves of people keep finding a way to get them into their homes and hand Nintendo a nice $250 loan. I say loan because I’ve had my system since a month after launch and I could still throw the damn thing up on eBay and get my $250 dollars back, and probably a little more for my trouble. So the system is selling. To who? Gamers, non-gamers, semi-gamers, ultra-gamers, hardcore-gamers, softcore-gamers, casual-gamers, naked-gamers, clothed-gamers, straight-gamers, gay-gamers, and your Aunt Linda. Where? **** if I know! Since launch I’ve only seen them on store shelves once, and that was at Walmart at 2 o’clock in the morning. Myth Busted.
Now, lets take a look at the number 512. 512 is a power of two. It’s also the number 8 cubed. It also happens to be the number of megabytes the Wii has in terms of flash memory to store game saves, system configurations, and Virtual Console games. 512 is tiny. I mean small. Very small. Miniscule. It’s enough to download a couple of pages of 16 bit games from the VC without deleting anything. Oh, what’s that you say? You want to download several N64 games you never got a chance to play? Well that cuts that storage space down quicker than ABC cancels it’s fall line-up. Still think it’s not an issue? Let me put it into perspective. There’s an Ace Of Base CD somewhere in my disc holder (I swear it’s not mine…) that can hold 750 megabytes of raw data. That’s right, the original recording of “I Saw The Sign” is sitting on a disc that outweighs the entire storage capacity of the Wii by 238 tasty megabytes.
I can hear the Nintendoids screaming at their computers right now: “YOU FORGOT ABOUT THE SD CARDS!!!”.
No, I didn’t. Nintendo forgot about the SD cards. Yes, you can store games on them. No, you cannot play games off of them. It’s no more efficient than deleting games from the flash memory and re-downloading them later. It’s a waste of time and an afterthought. Nintendo included the SD card slot for custom music (see: Excite Truck) and not to use as a bin to toss VC games that you can’t play anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the virtual console. I really do. I’ve downloaded a number of games from it and enjoyed them thoroughly. I don’t ***** about the prices, I don’t mind paying a premium for high-quality rom images that carry no risk of being laced with pixilated tentacle-porn. But if I’m paying $10 or more for the games, I want to be able to play them when I want and not have to sort through them on a weekly basis and throw out the ones I don’t want to play THIS MINUTE just to have enough room to download and play some goddamn Gunstar Heroes.
In conclusion, there is no apparent solution in sight. Reggie Fils-Aime just recently was asked about the Wii’s popularity and responded that they haven’t even started releasing new colors of Wii-motes yet… Seriously Reggie? How about releasing the console you should have released right off the bat. And while you’re at it, give me some 1st party rechargeable battery packs for christ’ sake.
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