I was down to my last 77MB or so on the Wii’s 512MB internal flash storage unit, so I repurposed an old 128MB SD card to use as backup storage. This was my first experience with transferring virtual console games to an SD card, and I was not fucking pleased.

I waited more than a dozen minutes, not seconds, to offload the dead weight of Emo & Punishment. The game is a little more than 35MB, and it took FOREVER. The problem is probably two-fold: a) the Wii’s processor is little more than a suped up DSP and b) piracy-obsessed Nintendo is trying to make the poor thing do encryption.

After launching its WiiWare memory hogging games, Nintendo tried to stuff its ears and hum through the weeping and gnashing of teeth from gamers who didn’t want to spend their youths staring at a load screen everytime they went to swap out downloaded games. Nintendo disingenuously tried to say that owners could just delete downloaded games and then re-load them. Yeah, that’s convenient.

Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime finally capitulated this week and told MTV that the memory problem has now become “mainstream.” Duh. What this roughly translates to is “microscopic on-board storage is going to put a hard ceiling on how much money we can make off this thing.” He said Nintendo is “working on it.” Don’t get too excited. I’m expecting a new Wii-Lite SKU with a few new gigs of storage, but not a plug-in solution. USB thumb drives for the Wii? A hacker’s dream.

Anyway, I managed to offload 52MB of games onto the SD card, and I now have about 129MB available on the Wii again, more than half the original open capacity. Lord knows how much my first WiiWare game will eat up.