A few weeks ago we talked about Nintendo Wii’s hard drive problem. If you’re too lazy to click on that link, let me sum it up: the Nintendo Wii has a 512 MB of storage, and this is not enough for a system with an ever-expanding library of downloadable games and a long history of old games one would want to download.

Nintendo of America’s President and Chief Operating Officer Reggie Fils-Aime has said Nintendo is working on the hard drive problem. He was unwilling to specify what the solution would be, but that players would have a better way of storing their games than the Wii’s tiny storage space.

What could it be? Some people are speculating that it’s some sort of online storage system, but that sounds like it defeats the purpose of downloading games. This would only work if it were like those item boxes in Resident Evil where you traded stored items for items you want to use at the moment only to find out later that you forgot the Jade Key and now have to walk back through miles of ominous pre-rendered backgrounds to get it back. But that would be stupid.

Also, let’s keep the idea of streaming games completely out of the conversation, as I want to be able to play Mario: The Lost Levels without any lag.

Enough guessing. If Nintendo is smart, it will release some sort of affordable external hard drive to hook up via the Wii’s USB ports. It’s the most obvious solution.

Either that or carve a path into the 4th Dimension so we can have a physical place to store our downloads of Excitebike.

Written for thewiitards.com by Danny Djeljosevic

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.

The New York Times reported our friend Reggie as saying:

Mr. Fils-Aime said that future DS device will be more tightly integrated with its Wii console. Complete games as well as game samplers will be able to be downloaded into the Wii using its broadband connection, and then transferred wirelessly to the DS.

This is very promising for a few reasons. As talked about since the Gamecube/GBA days, there has been a want to integrate Nintendo’s awesome hand held systems and their consoles but it has never really been taken advantage of save for Crystal Chronicles. What Reggie is saying is far better than just interactivity between the two systems. In addition the Wii will function as a portal to download demos and full games to the DS.

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