Actually I don't think that's ever going to happen, because it would make it easier for people to play games they're not supposed to have access to. 

I don't think it's a huge hardship to have to have the stuff on the Wii itself to use it -- but I do wish we could just hook up a standard external hard drive and be done with it!  SD cards will last me a long time though; 1 and 2 gig ones are pretty cheap now where I am.   

Whether it's a USB hard drive or the ability to play directly off your SD card, it'd allow you to take your games to your friend's house, which is what they want to stop.  Neither are going to happen.  By the time I fill up my Wii, I'll have passed most of my VC games and be able to put them on an SD.  This might be a bitch.  I'm just saying, I don't know yet, and won't know until I fill up my shit, which is a long way away.

Generally I don't trust anything Kaplan says. She's funny and all, but her facts are wrong ALL the time, whereas other Nintendo Execs are much better at the cloak and dagger (mis)information work.

Now that they actually opened up the USB ports for standard keyboard drivers, I have no doubt Nintendo have been figuring out their external memory plans for a while. It's just a question of how late they think they can leave it, and when they think they can protect their interests (i.e. totally encrypted on foreign devices).

right now you can copy your game to your SD, you just can't play it right?  And when you take that SD to your friends house and try to bring it up, you can't because it recognizes that it wasn't downloaded on that system. 

I don't know much about code and such, but couldn't they have it so you can only load the game off of the card if your on the wii that the game was downloaded on... 

Quoted for great idea. Have a large preset block of space set aside on the Wii, and then you can put all the stuff you move onto SD cards (or whatever) organized into large blocks of equal or lesser size. Then you can just pick a block -- say, "Sonic games" or "TG-16 games" -- and load it all into the Wii in one go.

[edit: this would also come in very handy for another reason for some people: I believe you can also do the same thing with game save data. Let's say some guy plays dozens or even hundreds of games on his Wii. All of those games leave saved data that takes up space. Even if it's only 1 block per game (as many are), that will add up for people who play many games. Transferring those saves back and forth would be tedious, but not if they had a massive "Old saves of all the games I don't play much" block. Then it would be easy to swap out whatever block of VC games were in the Wii for for the block of old game saves.

[The more I think about this idea, the more awesome it is. Does Nintendo have a "Wii software idea submission" email address?]

My thoughts exactly!  Don't let the refridgerator door hit your ass on the way out, Perrin.

@ konnichiwa - As to how many games you can store on your Wii, that really depends on what games you download.  You could technically put hundreds on NES games on the Wii.  They're pretty small.  And you could have a lot of Genesis, SNES, and TG-16 games too.  But when you start DLing N64 and Neo Geo games, then you're going to severely limit yourself.  (The average N64 game is about 8MB in size plus whatever the emulator and save files take up.)  I think there is also a limit of 48 channels that you can have at any one time on the main Wii Menu.  (Keep in mind that each VC title counts as its own channel and a few slots are already taken up by other functions.)

Perrin's a foxy mama but this is crap. My Mii Parade has already reached 100 and I gotta start dumping Miis. I love that Wii has internal storage but it's gonna need some add-ons for the stuff they're planning for this system. Something form fitting where it doesn't detract from the design. I actually miss the memory card function that exists on Gamecube. Wii's filling up day by day and one day it will be full. They need more storage options.

My fridge is packed too. None of the stuff in my fridge nor my Wii is disposable.

John Lucas

Classic

John Lucas 

I guess there philosophy for us is that if your done playing with a game, then you should erase it or move it to an SD card. If you did this with games you weren't currently playing and kept an ample amount of space free, then you wouldn't run into a problem. It's a bit of a hassle, but it's not like SD cards are big and bulky to store either.

my wii is like my fridge. full of stuff, but for some reason i never want any of the stuff in it.

(im in Aus - no mp3 yet...also ive downloaded like 6vc games but i rarely play them)