Wii 2/Project Café — No Hard Drive? Small Disk Space? No DLC?
For a long time, the Wii 2 (otherwise known as Project Café) has been advertised as “more powerful than both the PS3 and the Xbox 360.” However, we are now getting conflicting reports that say this may not be the case. The guys over at Kotaku have received new information from, once again, an anonymous source which said that the Wii 2 is seriously lacking in some areas.
First of all, Nintendo’s next console will not include a hard drive. Instead, it will include eight gigabytes of on-board flash memory. While this is, in fact, sixteen times the size of the current flash based memory on the Wii, it is also extremely small compared to the 250 GB hard drives we have been seeing on the HD consoles. Space wise, it seems as if downloadable content would fill up this drive rather quickly. Each Call of Duty map pack, for example, would take up approximately a sixteenth of the drive. A few Call of Duties and their DLC would fill up the drive right fast. Then we have massive patches like the AE patch for Street Fighter or the CS2 patch for Blazblue, which would also take up tons of space, and some downloadable indie games that could take up nearly a quarter of the drive! A drive this small would also prevent Nintendo from offering a digital distribution service, such as the one Xbox has been using, and to a lesser extent the PS3. It effectively locks out the Wii 2 from functionality that all the current generation HD consoles have.
The Wii 2 will have the ability to save games on SD cards, and (quite hilariously) this means that you may be able to have more removable storage than the console has internal storage (if you splurge on a high capacity SD card.) There is also a rumor going around that the Wii 2 will support external USB HD’s (much as hacked Wii’s support these days). It would be a genius move that would instantly open up the console to all that functionality we listed above at a capacity that the user can choose by walking into any electronics store. However, the chances of this rumor being true are pretty low. We are skeptical.
Nintendo’s new disc format will actually be lower capacity than the Blu-Ray discs that the Playstation 3 use. The disc will have 25 GB worth of storage, which is significantly bigger than current Wii and 360 discs, but still is not the most powerful storage solution on the market. The discs will supposedly be a Nintendo proprietary storage solution, similar to the Gamecube (though probably not in shape) that can only be read by the Wii 2 itself.
While these rumors seem to suggest that the Wii 2 will not offer downloadable games and movie services, there is still plenty of time for Nintendo to change the Wii 2’s specs. This may be the lowest end model, much like the early Xbox that came out without a hard drive (or with a small hard drive).
The Kotaku article also mentioned a couple new rumors about the Wii 2 controller. Supposedly, the controller may be able to stream a whole game directly to its center screen. That way, if you had to get up and go to the bathroom, you can just switch your output to the controller screen and take the game with you!
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