Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Nintendo's Nonofferings: The Wii Hard Drive

Everyone who knows me in person (a qualifier which currently also applies to everyone who follows this blog) knows that I'm a pretty big fan of Nintendo and its console/handheld offerings, both present and past. Not that I'm a complete fanatic of the company, though. I currently own a 360 on top of my Wii and DS, and I kind of want a PS3. But Nintendo always has this additional charm that wins me over just a little more. Microsoft and Sony are the kind of corporate giant that sometimes invoke in me a desire for awesome, sloppy makeouts... but only Nintendo makes me want to stay afterwards for cuddles. Smoochy cuddles!

But even I know that Nintendo isn't perfect, and neither are their systems. I'm talking about the Wii in this instance, and one of the console's more glaring flaws that has been plaguing me a lot lately: its lack of storage space.

The title of this blog post is actually technically incorrect, as the Wii actually uses a flash drive for memory. Flash drives are apparently faster, smaller, more power-friendly, and more durable than a regular hard drive. And that's all great. Unfortunately, Nintendo also decided it was a good idea that the drive only held 512 megabytes of memory. And since some of the downloadble content offered on the system's Wii Shop Channel service can be upwards of 50 megabytes in size, that space can tend to fill up really, really quickly.

And what is Nintendo doing about this? So far, nothing. The majority of Wii owners won't have to deal with this problem, as 90% of Wii games available in stores right now use less than 1MB of the system's space for save data. The games that use more than that generally use 30MB at most. Sure, that'll add up eventually, but it'll be nothing to worry about for most of the Wii's lifespan. The only way a consumer could already have filled up the Wii's FD in its 1.5 years of life so far is if they downloaded a lot of Virtual Console games. That has to be a minuscule amount of the Wii's userbase, right?

Well guess what, Nintendo.

I DO DOWNLOAD A LOT OF VIRTUAL CONSOLE GAMES.

IT IS GETTING TO THE POINT WHERE I HAD TO DELETE A COUPLE FOR EVERY NEW GAME I DOWNLOADED, AND TODAY I FINALLY DELETED MOST OF MY CATALOG SO I COULD FEEL LIKE I HAD THE FREEDOM TO DOWNLOAD NEW THINGS AGAIN.


THIS SHOULD NOT BE THE SOLUTION TO MY PROBLEM.



GIVE US AN ALTERNATE STORAGE SOLUTION AT E3, IF NOT BEFORE THEN, OR I WILL MARCH DOWN TO NOA HEADQUARTERS AND EAT YOUR GODDAMN BALLS.









This has been my objective and professional look at Nintendo's storage space.

Tune in next time when I try to update more than twice a month, and probably end up failing again!
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