Call it pathetic, but I’m actually genuinely excited about something small today.
And now to translate that last sentence.
The Wii: I’m pretty sure you’re familiar with Nintendo’s console which somehow is still selling obscenely well (753,000 last month alone compared to 391k for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 276k).
Virtual Console: Games from older Nintendo consoles that people can buy and download to play on the Wii.
WiiWare: New games that can be downloaded and played on the Wii without dealing with a disc.
Internal memory: Kind of a no-brainer. It’s the memory inside the machine. Before today, it was the only place you could start a game from other than a disc. There was only a paltry 512 MB of space inside it. To get more space you could put in an SD card, but that began what I like to call the SD card shuffle: clearing space on your Wii then copying over the game.
SD card: I’m sure you have a few of these floating around the house, especially if you have a digital camera. They’re the thin rectangular cards with one of the corners that looks like it was cut off. There’s sort of a double whammy of announcements here. First off, there’s the launching of a game from the card, which is big enough in itself. But the Wii until today supported cards up to 2 GB because it wasn’t compatible with SDHC cards.
SDHC card: It’s an SD card that can hold more data. The HC stands for “high capacity.” Now the Wii can support cards up to 32 GB.
Of course you can’t load game saves from an SD card yet, but those files are small enough that it doesn’t matter…yet.
Now Nintendo needs to start pumping in more Virtual Console content. Donkey Kong Jr. Math isn’t going to cut it anymore. Bring on the Smash Bros., etc.