WW + VC games finally playable on SD card!
Hooray, at long last, Virtual Console and WiiWare games have become available to play when they’re on your SD card via a Wii system update. This has only been announced in the past 10 minutes, so I’m still not quite fully clear on the story, but my 12,000 block SD card, can now be used for something other than Guitar Hero games.
Many customers bought the SD card before now with intentions of putting their VC / WiiWare games on there. Not being able to do that was one of the most disappointing features about the SD card, but now it’s been altered to how we like, and despite a very long download time, it’ll be very well worth it!
However, the uploading is slightly different than we’d expect. The download puts a little SD card icon at the bottom of the Wii Menu, then it opens up and it shows you the content of the SD card, if you start a game it copies to the Wii memory before it loads, but after you’re done playing, it deletes it. Althought it may sound confusing, it’s rather simple and I’m sure this can be a benefit to all users, and it saves us copying to the SD card, ourselves!
It has been a long time coming. I was just talkng to my sons about this proposed update this morning, wondering when it would appear.
The really exciting news is that it accomodates cards up to 32GB in size.
*goes off to Amazon to find the cheapest offers*
Well, Sue bravo for calling the implementation method (pretty sure you were the one who suggested an SD card icon on the main menu; I don’t recall anyone elsewhere making that prediction), and more kudos for not being smug about it ;-).
One important thing to note is that the SD card method does copy to the Wii’s internal flash in the background. It’s very fast; faster than loading to/from the SD card was after the 3.4 update. Games over 300 blocks loaded in a few seconds and there’s a nice status bar to show you this. The Wii menu graphic and sound for the game pops up briefly after this completes and then the game starts.
After you run a game if you check your memory there will be a save file called SD Data or SD Cache which will be the same size and have the name referenced for the last game played, so you need as much space in your Wii internals as the largest game you want to run.
No save game data appears to be usable from the card (I’ve not tried putting my Space Invaders Get Even DLC there yet to test, but I will tonight. Guitar Hero has the programming to do this, so unless Taito was forward thinking in the same way that’s over 600 blocks gone. But since the only stuff I have on my Wii now are the stock channels and the Wii Fit channel that still leaves me with over 1000 blocks, so no pressure, though some games do have large save files, so in a couple year’s time unless my Wii purchases are limited to Virtual Console Arcade (yay!) titles, could be the Nintendo Channel even gets axed from my SD card…
I think this will work for many people, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some kind of flash drive add-on from Nintendo anyway for the true game collectors out there who need expanded storage that’s transparent to the system and can be used to load save game and DLC from; this could be something that only gets released in Japan like the exclusive controllers.
Still yesterday’s update was the only must-have update Nintendo has released for me since I’ve had my Wii and the VCA was even more brilliant news that was a complete surprise!
Sick!
I just got MOTHER 1 on my Wii!
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