The Wii Receives a Storage Solution

By: Pedro Hernandez, Staff Writer

One of the biggest problems Wii had ever since its launch was the lack of a proper storage medium. While the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 have hard drives as their method of storage, Wii only has an internal memory of 512MB. This didn't seem to cause much problem for Wii owners...until they decided to download a lot of Virtual Console games. They soon realized that downloading games and new channels ate up memory very quickly. With WiiWare on the horizon this problem would soon be exacerabated. This meant that players had to delete their games in order to make room for new ones. Gamers started to refer to this ritual as "Cleaning the Fridge". Despite the fact that Nintendo offered players the ability to re-download any deleted game, it still was a tedious process that no player ever wanted to go through.

Nintendo listened to their cries. At the Nintendo Fall Conference in 2008, they confirmed that they were indeed working on a storage solution. No details were given, other than it would involve the use of SD cards.

The next year, at the Games Developer Conference, Nintendo unveiled the storage solution in the form of Wii System Menu Update 4.0, and made it available for Wii owners to download the minute it was announced. When players updated their Wii consoles, an SD card icon appeared in the left corner of the Wii menu. When players clicked on it they could see all the games and channels they had stored on the card, giving them easy access to all their favorite titles. The storage solution did involve the use of SD cards, but there was more. Not only could games and channels be downloaded directly onto a card; they could also be played off it, meaning that the Wii's internal memory would not be needed to play a game. The update even allowed players to use SDHC cards up to 32 GB in size.

Wii System Menu Update 4.0 was a blessing for gamers and developers

It was like a dream come true for many. The storage solution even improved sales of some WiiWare games. A few days after the update was made available, TellTale Games (creators of Sam and Max, the Strong Bad games, and the latest Monkey Island series) confirmed that sales of their Strong Bad games doubled. This was due to the fact that players could finally download as many games as they wanted without worrying about running out of memory.

Strong Bad's cool game received many additional sales thanks to the new storage solution

The only downside to this, however, is that in order to run a game off of the SD card there had to be enough space in the Wii's internal memory. This meant that if the internal memory was full, no game could be played off of the SD card. This was seen as a minor issue, however. Since all games and channels could be moved to the SD card, creating enough memory within the console for all games to be played was a trivial task.

Only one complain came from gamers, and that was "What took you guys so long?" We may never know the answer, but the fact is that a storage solution is a reality, making it one of the most significant events in the Wii's third year.