Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Future Wii firmware upgrade ideas

Okay, folks, back to business now!



As most of you know already, a major upgrade was released today for the Wii (More info here). These are all great additions (I especially like the ability to check news headlines from the main menu), but so much more can be done. Here are a few ideas I have for some future Wii firmware upgrades (Not all of these are originally my ideas, but I do add to those thought up by others).

Direct play off of SD cards

Many people are running out of storage space on the Wii, what with save files and Virtual Console downloads. The ability to play saved data and VC games directly off of an SD card would be a great way to remedy this dilemma. The update, of course, would be free, and the Wii users would merely have to shell out a few bucks for an SD card (A 1GB card won't cost you more than $25, which would more than double the capacity). With Wii Ware just around the corner, this upgrade needs to be done up quick.

Folders to group together Virtual Console games

Another problem that arises when many Virtual Console games are downloaded is the limit of 48 channels on the Wii Menu. A great way to fix this would be separate "folders" for each Virtual Console platform (One for NES, one for Genesis, etc.). That way, instead of having 20 channels taken up by individual games, we would instead have only 5 (Or less) spots reserved. The same technology should apply to the Wii Ware games coming out next year (One folder for all Wii Ware titles).

Another approach would be to allow users to create as many different folders as they want. For example, if a player wanted to group together all their Mario games into one folder, they would have that option. The folders would be customizable, with different menu images and custom names.

Notification of Virtual Console software updates

As I was browsing the new Shop Channel this afternoon, I noticed that Starfox 64 had been updated. However, I had not been notified of this. It would be great if Nintendo could send us a message whenever one of the Virtual Console games we've downloaded receive an update. Who knows how long that update's been there? I could have been playing broken software for over a month!

A way to send images from the Wii to e-mail addresses

I'm fairly sure we've all wasted a good few hours messing with pictures in the Photo Channel. Putting lipstick marks on characters' faces, drawing mustaches on people. But sadly, these images will always be restricted to Wii consoles. We can send it to our friends' systems, but it can never touch a PC, where it can be uploaded onto the internet for everyone to see. Also, being able to transfer images onto SD cards would be nice.

Well, folks, that's all I've got for now. What do you think of my ideas? More importantly, what ideas do you have?

The Duck Has Spoken.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

actually to tell you something interesting, my girlfriend was able to send a picure message to my wii from her sidekick 3.....
so its possible to recieve pictures from other peoples emails....
but we cannot send them....

Anonymous said...

I just purchased a Playstation 3 a couple of weeks ago. I got a couple of good games for it too. I wonder what good full games are worthy of downloading from the Playstation store?