Geeks to Nintendo: We need more memory

Hey Nintendo, WAKE UP! Oh, wait, you don’t care about my opinion. That must be because I’m one of those ”geeks” that your European Marketing boss, Laurent Fischer, claimed me to be at your June press event in Europe. You know what? Maybe I am a “hardcore gamer,” and maybe I have been playing games since your original 8-bit Nintendo. So you’re right, it’s probably best to short change and insult the people that have stuck with you from the beginning. Yeah, I even bought the “Crap-Cube.” Appreciate the heads up on that one.

So, the launch of WiiWare back in March shed light on some glaring technical issues with the Wii platform. Specifically, the main issue is a lack of any external hard drive to store games on your Wii. The built-in 512Mb of flash memory that comes standard with a new Wii purchase just isn’t enough to download anything significant to, and those of us that spent our hard-earned money on the system are the ones suffering.

Nintendo’s President Satoru Iwata stated at the end of April that “a small number of gamers have voiced concern over the size of the Wii’s flash memory.” However, as of July no official solution has been announced, and the concern was ignored at E3. The only solution available now is to either buy an SD memory card and/or delete Virtual Console channels. But wait—that’s not it. Neither the WiiWare service nor the Virtual Console games can be booted from the SD card, meaning you have to transfer them back to the flash memory.

Get ready to waste at least 20 minutes of your life. I did find a helpful tutorial here, but is this really necessary, Nintendo? Add this lack of resolve on Nintendo’s part to the aforementioned statements of Laurent Fischer, and you have a lot of angry gamers. Fischer did release an official apology shortly after the fact, but he still said it. He’s not sorry that Nintendo isn’t working towards a solution for its most loyal fans; he’s sorry he got caught. I, for one, won’t be sorry when I spend my next hard-earned dollar on an Xbox Live Arcade game, and you shouldn’t either.