As we’ve said, one of Nintendo’s big reveals at GDC today is the long, long awaited solution to the Wii’s storage woes. It's so obvious it's not even worthy of a condescending drum roll: it’s just the ability to load Virtual Console and WiiWare games off an SD card. Could someone please explain to me why this took two years to roll out?
From today’s Nintendo GDC keynote, we know that this solution adds 32GB SDHC card support and is implemented via an SD card menu that looks a lot like the Wii menu. But I’ve been playing with it, and so have all the extra little details after the jump. This might be rather fine data for something as pedestrian as a storage solution, but don’t blame me: Nintendo has given me way too long to think about what I want from this.
Here’s the breakdown:
- There’s load time. The Wii still can’t actually load games in-place off the SD card; instead it has to copy them to system memory temporarily, and then load it. This means you will be twiddling your thumbs while the copy takes place, and on a big game like Sin & Punishment this load can be nearly twenty seconds long.
Read More...