I knew there would be a problem with the Wii’s hard drive when I saw the limited amount of space on the Wii Menu. Each time you download a game for your Wii, it takes up one of the menu’s squares. If you downloaded a lot of games for your Virtual Console, your hard drive would fill up and you’d be forced to delete games to free up space for new ones. And remember: these are games you paid for.

Not to make the Wii sound inferior, but here’s a rundown of this generations’ memory:

X-Box 360: 20 GB to 120 GB

PS3: 20 GB to 80 GB

Wii: 512 MB plus 2 GB of memory on the SD card.

With the Virtual Console and WiiWare games increasing in both number and size, 512 MB of hard drive space is unacceptable. For perspective: the flash drive in my pocket is 256 MB. While my flash drive doesn’t play Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, it also didn’t cost $300.

Thankfully, Nintendo president himself Satoru Iwata himself has admitted to this oversight and claims that it will be rectified. In the same breath, Iwata mentions that those complaining about the lack of memory are a minority of the really hardcore gamers. It sounds like a thinly-veiled attempt to save face, but at least he promises to something about it.

The obvious solution is to provider current Wii owners with an add-on hard drive to expand the system’s memory. For future iterations of the Wii, they should take the same route that the competition has taken and offer the Wii in various hard drive sizes depending on the gamer’s needs.

It worked for the iPod.