A bit sad to see that the scale of the game Penny Arcade is making just wasn't what WiiWare had in mind.

360 version it is then, ah well.

Can Wii have a hard drive now, please?

This article is a DISGRACE TO PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISM, PALE YOU ARE A FAILURE AND SO IS NINTENDO WORLD REPORT

Let's hope the storage solution Iwata and the other guy were talking about is more than just talk, I want to see something at or before E3.

Seriously...After purchasing two WiiWare titles already my Flash Memory is nearly gone, Thank god i don't have a N64 Virtual console game yet or it would all be gone.  How do they expect me to purchase WiiWare titles if i don't have the room to even download them.

QFT

Its a shame. With WiiWare now out in the wild, space is indeed a precious commodity.  Hopefully the big N has a solution to this problem as one of their surprises at E3...

Release it on disc for $30.

$10 more for a shiny disc? Try again

But then why would developers ever bother to optimize their titles? We'd end up with the same bloatware that modern games, even the episodic ones, have become.

I'd rather be a little bloated than have to clean out the fridge.

Set a size requirement? With possible exceptions? 

Best of both worlds right there...

Even with an optional hard drive, it'd still be in developers' best interest to minimize file sizes to reach the largest possible audience (i.e., to not exclude those who haven't purchased a hard drive).

Hmm what's the Nintendumb thing to do here..

Nintendo will sell a proprietary hard drive and update the wii so only nintendo-brand h-drives are recognized. Of course the hard drive will last 1000 years so it'll be a trade-off.

Can I preorder one of those now or do I have to wait?

How so? My game is bigger than yours, give me more?

I think the mention of exceptions is because of the original article this is a TalkBack thread of, where it mentioned that the Penny Arcade game needed an exception from the size limit of Xbox Live Arcade.

The fact that they had to ask Microsoft's permission to break their hard limit for XBLA games, as well as build a customized compression technique to keep space to a minimum, is a credit to them. They could have just said "Buy it on PC" (its available on freaking Linux for crying out loud)!

Don't paint all developers as lazy.

And that "clean out the fridge" spiel they came up with is a pathetic response to the issue at hand. You can't continue to offer more games on WiiWare/VC and simply tell people to micromanage the paltry space they have.

I can almost guarantee that Nintendo has a hard-drive add-on ready for a reveal at or around E3 and a release date set just soon after.

The fact that it will be an accessory to be purchased separately will actually benefit the Wii in the long-term.
If the Wii had a hard-drive from the start developers would have flooded it with bloated games and patches - the usual garbage. But the fact that the majority of non-hardcore Wii owners will never have one and stick to the supplied internal memory will prevent things from going down that route, while still supplying the hardcore VC/Wiiware downloaders a viable solution.

Haha, way to be an extremist. I'm still waiting for a chance to get my GHIII disc replaced. Its great being from a place that isn't the USA. If the Wii had the functionality to slipstream patches the issue would have been resolved a couple of weeks after it came out, without mailing the damn discs back.

Look at it this way:
Nintendo can already patch the firmware at anytime (sup Fwiiloader) by phoning home.
Nintendo controls what content appears in the VC and Wiiware channels, and licenses all the games.
Why does everyone think that enabling patches is going to cause hell to break loose? Nintendo already run their platform with an iron fist.

It'd need significant changes to the firmware (depends on the architecture and how the updates are actually used when you run the game - I haven't looked into it seriously).

And do you have a source for this hard-drive thingymajig rumour? If it does eventuate, it would go against everything coming out of NCL, NOA, hell, just about any Nintendo subsidiary.

I do want to know this.  Since this is episodic content why not just split it up a little and lower the price?

Maybe when all of the episodes are released they will put together a compilation disc for all of the systems.

Episodes still have beginnings and endings. You can't just chop it up. Although it feels like they did that with LostWinds...

Hence the already announced sequel??

With Nintendo I always assume it's all talk until I see otherwise.  The storage issue has two problems that will prohibit possible solutions:

1. It's a Nintendo f*ck up and Nintendo is pretty damn stubborn about admiting mistakes.  Fixing the issue admits that their original design was stupid and short-sighted.  Uh oh.  Can't have that.

2. While a hard drive is a likely solution it can't be done because it's an idea someone else thought of first.  Microsoft came up with that idea and to use it would be admitting the competition has good ideas.  I can't think of any time Nintendo took a good idea from the competition without doing it in some wacky way to make it distinctly Nintendo.  That's why we have friend codes.  That's why Nintendo has never distributed a demo disc in a logical fashion.  If we get a hard drive it will have some sort of stupid Nintendo fashioned flaw that just pisses us off.  Hell part of this whole storage issue is that Nintendo couldn't even do SD cards in a normal fashion.  They had to do it differently.

Regardless of what Nintendo does any solution they come up with for this issue will not be the least bit satisfying.  That just isn't their style.

Iwata's acknowledged awareness of the storage issue problem, so it's definitely on Nintendo's radar. The only question is if and when they deliver a solution.

I personally envision a sort of SD channel that would virtually access your SD card, decompress the data into memory, then recompress it back onto the SD card when you're done, thereby using the Wii's flash memory as memory, and the SD as permanent secondary storage? ... I dunno, I'm just shooting in the breeze here!

The way Nintendo handled the SD slot on the Wii is annoying and I hate it and I wish you could access things directly from it, but it's done for a simple and somewhat logical reason: piracy. It's not Nintendo trying the be wacky; while Nintendo does sometimes go a little overboard about it, piracy is a real issue for them.

As Kairon pointed out, Satoru Iwata, not just somebody who works there but the President of Nintendo, has already admitted that the storage situation is a problem, at least for some people, so I don't know how fixing it would make it any worse.

I don't buy the piracy argument at all for the SD suckiness.  If the Wii can handle people trying to copy VC games they didn't buy off the SD card, then the Wii can handle checking the legitimacy of a VC game right before someone tries to play it, or before it even puts it on the screen.

Anti-piracy measures always just end up as annoyances for paying customers.

The encryption process, the reason it takes so long to copy something to the SD card, is the reason you can't play something directly off the SD card and the reason you can't copy someone else's game onto your Wii. Nintendo would have to change the way things work in this regard (a firmware update, and a major one, also probably requiring everyone to download new, updated copies of all their VC games and in the process make me lose my Balloon Fight high score) to change that. I'd love to see it happen, but it would be a major undertaking and I think it's much more likely that we'll see a hard drive or a bigger external flash drive.

This is an annoyance, but unlike most anti-piracy measures this one seems to be effective, I haven't heard of anyone successfully pirating VC games.

And piracy always ends up as an annoyance to a company's bottom line.

Couldn't the Wii just set aside 400 blocks permanently for an SD channel that would be used as a temporary space to load VC or WiiWare games into? Then when you exit, the SD channel would free up that space again...?

Really? I heard they'd already pretty much cracked it completely?

Like I said, they'd have to set it up so that the games on the SD card aren't encrypted or can be used while encrypted to be able to use them directly from the SD card, which means a more sophisticated encryption system, which would most likely involve the big update I talked about.

What I'd like to see is a stopgap measure for until we get a hard drive. I'd like to be able to copy all my game saves to an SD card (it would have to include Brawl and all the other ones that don't currently let you do that or it wouldn't be worth it) and use them directly from there. Piracy wouldn't be an issue for that. The space that would free up on my Wii would be enough for me to be able to download LostWinds.