Nintendo develops Hard-Drive, Wii capable of game installation like 360/PS3, but....

....neither of these features are available to the average Wii consumer

Now you may be thinking; "uwhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat!?"

And you'd be right to do so.

So, Nintendo is a very charitable company, they like to help the kiddies and give mass quantities of their products to childrens charities, hospitals, schools, and the like. Now, one of Nintendo's more recent ventures was their "Starlight Foundation Fun Centers", which are Wii system kiosks that Nintendo gifted to several Children's Hospitals throughout the country for all the kiddies to play with. It just so happens that a particular Wii hacker and system modder from WiiHacks.com got the opportunity to come in contact with these new fangled kiosks when he took his son to a Children's Hospital for a broken leg, and he discovered something very interesting:

The Wii systems in the Starlight Fun Centers had Hard-Drives, and not only that, with the use of the Hard-Drives, the Wii was capable of installing and booting entire retail Wii games, akin to what the PS3 has taken advantage of with several titles, and what Microsoft recently announced the 360 would obtain capabilities of with the "New Xbox Experience" Dashboard update this fall

So, Nintendo has already developed a fully functioning Wii Hard-Drive, and system functionality for installing and booting entire full games from the system with no need for the disc to be in the system, showing that the system is capable of game patching, installations to help texture rendering and load times, etc....but the catch here is, they haven't given any of this to the consumers at all! Nintendo has made no mention of these functionalities having been in development, much less that they would be available in future firmware updates, or that Developers would be able to make use of them at all

http://www.nintendowiifanboy.com/2008/09/17/wii-fans-wish-come-true-nintendo-fun-center-in-action/

The Starlight Foundation Fun Center kiosks come installed with over 20 full retail Wii titles including Mario Galaxy, Elebits, Excite Truck, Carnival Games, Zack & Wiki, Super Paper Mario, Fire Emblem, and more that can all be booted and played straight from the Wii startup menu. Now, even if we were to be conservative here and say that the average Wii game is only around 1GB in size, at the very least the Wii Hard Drive in these Kiosks could be estimated to be over 20GBs in size....

 

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lol, I kinda laughed at this...though I shouldn't cuz the only new gen I have is the Wii.

Anyways, I am kinda angry at Nintendo for holding these stuff against the general public. Though I can kinda understand their intentions and stuff so...meh.

I really do hope they release this into the public someday...preferably soon.

 

Nintendo has been doing some rather odd things lately. Almost makes me glad I went with Microsoft and bought a 360. Almost. I kinda feel sorry for the people who actually do have a Wii. Must really suck to find out that something you've wanted so bad has already been out, and it was never announced. I guess I could always pretend to be sick, and then go to the Children's Hospital about thirty minutes from my house and see if they have one.

 

it's doesn't seem like a big deal to me. i mean inserting a disc into the Wii isn't like a hard thing to do. i mean if booting games without the disc is all it can do then i don't care about this feature.

 

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Honestly, most of this stuff does not make sense to me, but I think I get the most of it. To me, I think it would be better to have some more DLC, although well IDK, I really don't think that putting in a game disk is that hard, as EvilMan_89 said.

 

....yeah, you both seemed to have severely missed the point here

 

As I re-read I believe I am getting to the point more, but I believe I will just stop now before I make a fool of myself.

 

Maybe Nintendo developed this new Hard-Drive for testing for future projects. When they didn't need it anymore, or thought that it wouldn't sell as a new version of Wii, they gave it away through charity.

Just speculating.

 

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Okay, I guess I'll completely spell this all out because people don't seem to get the implication here :|

Storage has been an issue for the Wii since it launched, the Wii provides a lot of downloadable services via Wii Channels like the "Check Mii Out", a ridiculous amount of Virtual Console games, the new WiiWare service, Wii game saves, and the potential for games to have downloadable content.

The problem being, that the Wii's internal memory is 512mb big :| Wii owners who enjoy the services that Nintendo provides and thus have plenty of VC games and WiiWare games are finding that there is not enough storage to hold the games, and they reach a point where the Wii tells them they have to remove other content off the system to fit it. So it reached the point where people would have to delete and redownload games if they want to play them, or put them on an SD card and swap them out constantly

So people wanted a storage solution, like an external hard-drive for the system so that they can enjoy the many services without having to worry about space, and perhaps other things that the PS3 and 360 get to enjoy because of their hard-drives would be available to Wii owners, and Developers could make use of it as well for their games.

Nintendo has been stalling on the storage solution for awhile, and the implication here is that this may finally come to an end sometime soon, as it appears Nintendo has developed an external hard-drive that connects to the Wii via the USB ports and is being utilized for these Starlight Foundation Fun Centers. Now, it's rather aggravating that this was basically sneakily implemented by Nintendo, and in no way ever announced that a final product had been developed, much less whether it would be available to consumers any time soon, but regardless this is a sort of proof of concept that the problem may be alleviated soon.

The important factor of the whole "installing and booting games without a disc", is that this was a very significant next-gen features that the PS3 put in place, and then microsoft followed suit and implemented into their console, and it was believed that the Wii probably wouldn't be capable of it. Now the important thing here is not that you can boot a game without having to pop the disc in, the practical thing here is that Developers would have the option of installing portions of games onto the hard-drive in order to allow for better load times, framerate, draw distance, texture rendering, like how PS3 games have been capable of doing for awhile (which is why in games like GTA4 it's been said the PS3 has better load times and less texture pop). And another thing with the Hard-Drive is that Wii games would finally be capable of receiving patching, updates, and downloadable content for games to be stored on the hard-drive

So the significant thing here is that this is a sort of proof of concept that the Wii is capable of a good number of next-gen features that the System was previously left in the dark with and thought unable to take advantage of, and this shows that it has the potential to do those. The unfortunate thing here is that we don't know if this hard-drive, or any of the aforementioned features or services, will actually be delivered to the mass Wii consumer base, or even for Developers to take advantage of in the future...we don't know if they have any plans to actually give this to us :| but yeah, we can hope at the very least that Nintendo won't be completely ******ed.

 

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it's probably just me :o

anyways, i never knew that the storage space on the Wii was a problem. but now that you mention it, 512 MB isn't very big, i never knew the storage was that small.

 

Yeah, honestly it's not that big of a deal if you're using your Wii for just playing Wii games and thus the internal memory goes completely to game saves and maybe some Wii Channels, because when you think about it the majority of you with PS2s probably never needed more then a 16MB memory card, eh?

The thing is that Nintendo is trying to be a next-gen company and deliver some cool next-gen features in the form of Virtual Console downloads and the WiiWare system, but they just didn't build the system very well with stuff like that in mind. So, using the Wii to it's full capability and enjoying great class Nintendo and Sega games on your Wii, and then playing some Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, and then some Final Fantasy: My Life as a King, in no time at all you've completely run out of space on your system and it's just dumb :|

Hence why a storage solution in some facet, be it an external Hard-Drive, building future Wii's with more memory, or some say Nintendo is dabbling in some "virtual memory" prototype research, it's all very important in making the Wii a much better system for both consumers and Developers, and allowing the system to flesh out it's potential.

 

I'm going to just assume that since Nintendo is obviously still making money without the inclusion of this new technology for their platform, they're simply just not going to throw it out to the public until it's 'needed', and by that I mean they might just wait until they have a legitimate reason (from a business/financial standpoint) to give it out to consumers.

Granted, anyone who read that article is now aware that Nintendo is completely backhanding the entire ordeal of storage issues, but considering a large majority of Nintendo's profits are coming from the casual crowd, I'm pretty sure most of them haven't (and probably never will) come across that article which blatantly shows proof of HDD capability. Actually, you know what, I bet a lot of those people who played on those kiosks have no idea of the implications.

In the end, when Nintendo finally does decide to bring HDD capability to the Wii for the mass market, most of them are just going to toss their hands up going "Yay! Finally they did something about it" when in reality the development for such an option started quite some time ago, right under their noses.

 

wait, i just found about something called a 2 GB SD card for the Wii, wouldn't that solve whatever memory issues there are?

 

Yeah. You can just stick your stuff on there and easily switch cards if you ever need a certain game. But people complain about switching them all the time and want just one big harddrive to stick stuff in. Although I think that could be a useless thing to want because nintendo might just charge you much more for a harddrive then its actually worth. Plus I'd rather not have a bulky attachment plugging into the wii. I have enough things in the usb ports as it is~