We have a Wii. We’ve had it pretty much since they hit the market. We love it, yes Wii do. Except for one thing: the unbelievably small amount of internal storage the thing has. It only has 512M of storage that is used for game save data. For people who don’t have a lot of games, that’s probably plenty. It was plenty for us, too, until we started buying lots of games and downloading games from the Shop Channel. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve wanted to download something new from the Shop Channel, only to be told we don’t have enough free space. Some of the games, especially the old console games, are tiny. Most take up only a single “block.” But some, like the episodes of Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People, and the save file for Super Smash Bros. Brawl, are huge. As in hundreds of blocks, huge.

So, what can we do? Well, there’s an SD slot on the front, and we have a 2G SD card in there. But that’s considered completely separate from the internal storage, and none of the games that we have can run with their data file on the SD card. On a few occasions we’ve moved things temporarily to the SD card to free up space on the internal storage, but if we ever want to play that game again, we have to shuffle files around again. Guitar Hero World Tour will, apparently, let you keep downloaded songs on an SD card, but the kicker is that you can only download them to the internal storage and then copy them. But when you already don’t have enough space on the internal storage, you’re still screwed. And last night when I fired up Rock Band 2 for the first time, it told me that it could store “extras” and such on the SD card, and was that OK? I said it was, and it then told me that I didn’t have enough free space to install the bits that would allow me to keep stuff on the SD card. Grrrrr.

There are two USB ports on the back of our Wii. I have an external drive that’s something like 150G that I’m not using for anything. It’s not even plugged in. If Nintendo would allow it, I could plug that into the Wii, and our storage problems would be solved. But they don’t allow that. Well, it’s not that they disallow it, it’s just that plugging the drive in won’t do anything. They have to patch the OS to make it look in other places for data files. And they can do that; they’ve just chosen to ignore the pleas of their users. Much the way Apple has turned a deaf ear to our demands for cut & paste on the iPhone, Nintendo has gone far too long without giving us a reasonable storage solution. My cynical friend is convinced that the solution will be to buy a new “Nintendo Wii Version 2, Now With More Internal Storage!” I sure hope he’s wrong.

Come on, Nintendo, give us a workable storage solution. Soon!