Wii to Get New Hardware - Possibly Hard Drive? 151
HoboBob writes "It has been suggested that Nintendo will be unveiling some new hardware for the Wii at the E3 media festival, and some are speculating that it could be a hard drive. According to the article: 'Confirmation back in April that Neo Geo games will begin being added to Wii's Virtual Console download service adds weight to the speculation, considering Neo Geo games are huge — some clocking in it at up to 330MB. One of those bad boys would put serious strain on the Wii's memory.'"
Form factor (Score:5, Interesting)
Wii Hardware Wishlist (Score:2, Interesting)
what would be more profitable? (Score:4, Interesting)
Saturn Games (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm also on the USB train... (Score:4, Interesting)
a) USB HD
b) USB keyboard
Do that and I am peachy keen fine with the world.
Re:Saturn Games (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Neo Geo games? (Score:4, Interesting)
I did not notice any flickering or "playability issues," but actually, I think the speed issue is a bugfix rather than a bug. The NES PAL version ran too slow compared to the Japanese and US versions, right? Nintendo fixed that for the Wii release.
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
DVD playback is more likely, because it wouldn't require much in terms of hardware changes, the Wii already has pretty much what it needs to play DVDs.
Re:Form factor (Score:3, Interesting)
What I'd actually like instead of a hard drive is the ability for the Wii to read directly from the SD card, instead of forcing me to copy the data from the SD card to the Wii's internal memory before using it. Would make managing backups much easier, and even at 300MB, a NeoGeo game can easily fit on a 1GB SD card, which I can then copy to my computer's hard drive for backup when I need more space on the SD card.
Could that be done with a simple firmware update instead of a hardware upgrade?
Re:Another positive for the Wii. (Score:5, Interesting)
However, once you offer something as a choice to the consumer, it means that you for the most part cannot use that to enhance the gaming experience for the consumer. In the case of the optional 360 hard drive vs. the PS3's built in hard drive, many games on the PS3 use the HD for streaming data to for optimizing load times, like Oblivion or some upcoming games like Uncharted (which, due to the hard drive, will have no load times). They can do that because it's standard. Likewise, when Microsoft chose to keep DVD as the standard format for game delivery, I have a feeling that they'll be coming to regret that decision in a year or two. It's not going to be a dealbreaker, but it will definitely become more apparent as time goes on that with all the space assets take up in HD games, you really do need a higher capacity storage medium. They left consumers the option of the HD-DVD drive addon in case they wanted to watch HD movies, but that approach doesn't let them take advantage of the superior storage those discs have to offer.
What does this have to do with the Wii? Well, the tone of your post seems to be touting the Wii as the superior choice because you think Nintendo is doing you a favor. For the Wii, the exclusion of the hard drive and HD/DVD playback works, because it's not an HD system and there isn't enough content to really support the inclusion of a hard drive. But to try and draw parallels to the other systems which frankly are offering completely different experiences just reeks of fanboyism to me.
Hard Drive for all games (Disc based as well) (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's assume they use a 10GB 1.8" harddrive (or flash equivalent) that's integrated into the angled stand that ships with the console (if one can even purchase bulk quantities of those anymore). That would let you buy roughly 150 of the largest N64 games to fill that storage space. Or over 100 of the largest Neo Geo games. That seems to be more purchasing than the smallest tiny niche portion of the Wii market would buy. This argument disappears if original downloadable content ever arrives for the Wii.
So, if you are going to come out with a harddrive attachement, give it a "normal" size of 80 GB or larger, and allow us to "store" our Wii disc based games on there. Now you would have the ultimate system for lazy people like me that click around in the Wii menu to play old VC games instead of getting up and walking across the room to put in a new Wii disc to play something different. It would be great if we could "surf our Wii channels" and have access to all of our games.