Games & Gadgets

Nintendo's Wii took the world by storm when it was released in November 2006. The innovative motion controls combined with the company's cast of memorable characters caught the eyes of children and adults alike.

However, it was the promise of downloadable games from Nintendo's past that caught my attention.

This service, dubbed the Virtual Console, allows gamers to download titles from classic systems, for a fee, of course. I feel that Nintendo has done a pretty good job in keeping the flow of additions steady.

In fact, there is only one glaring issue with Nintendo's blast-from-the-past program. It's a problem that can affect all elements of the machine in the blink of an eye.

It has nothing to do with the Wii's power, or the fact that it's not a high-definition console in an age where pretty graphics are proclaimed to be just as important as gameplay. Performance is not an issue either, as most games run just as good as the original cart did back in the day.

You see, the real crutch in Nintendo's latest console is storage space, or lack thereof.

The Wii boasts 512 megabytes of storage onboard, which is enough to save your games and download a few classic titles. However, that minuscule amount of space quickly fills when dealing with bigger games such as hits from the Nintendo 64 era.

The recent release of WiiWare hasn't done much to help the situation, either. Many of these built-for-Wii downloadable games have fairly big file sizes. Your virtual fridge can be filled to the brim before you know it.

One way to free up space is to move Virtual Console games to an SD card, a device that is used for storage purposes in many cameras and cell phones. However, the games are unable to be played from the card, which defeats the purpose.

Nintendo will also allow you to re-download any game that you've purchased from the Wii store. This allows you to delete games that you may not play as much, but may want to revisit later.

Both of these rather inconvenient options work, but the truth of the matter is that the company simply needs to get with the times. Nintendo needs to allow hard drives in either internal or external form.

For a company that loves selling useless Pokemon-themed accessories and controllers, a 20-gigabyte Wii hard drive seems like a no-brainer.

I've read complaints all over the Internet from people refusing to download games because of the lack of space. This is lost revenue that Nintendo could gain by making the right decision. It would only help the company in the long run.

Sony and Microsoft both offer hard drives in their consoles, with the Playstation 3 supporting a number of USB devices.

That's not to say that the competition has software saving down to a science, but they are certainly in a better position than the big N.

In a generation defined by digital distribution, the amount of space available is crucial. In Nintendo's case, the Wii's current wee amount of storage is simply inexcusable.

Chris Pittman works in the online department of The Anniston Star.