Wii Store

One of the interesting things about the Nintendo Wii is the online store. Actually, all three of the new consoles have online stores, though as I don't have a PS3 or an XBox 360 I can not comment on them. While it is nice that you can instantly buy a low-cost game right from the console, there are still a lot to not like. Here are my top five complaints about the Wii store:

1. Where are the RPGs? So far I have only been able to find one non-action based RPG in the store. I know the NES and the SNES had a lot of turn based RPGs released for them so why is the only turn based RPG in the store a Turbo Graphics 16 game. It wouldn't be too bad if Double Dungeon was a great game but it is 22 simple hunt the boss games combined into one. I'll review it in a future blog entry.

2. The games in the Wii store are all older games, so why do they cost so much? $5 for a NES game? $10 for a Nintendo 64 game? I think the price is quite high considering what you are getting. Had the price been half as high, I would probably be buying three to four times as many games as I am going to buy at the current prices so Nintendo is probably losing a lot of money with such high prices. Lets hope that in the future they cut the price!

3. Speaking of cost, the points system sucks. I don't know why this is such a big trend with big companies. Actually I do. By forcing users to buy their own points (non refundable, of course) they are guaranteeing that they will get a set amount of money from you. Likewise, you are probably not going to be using the points all at once, so they get to hold on to your extra money and earn interest off of it.

4. The games are stored in the small amount of flash memory that the Wii comes with and can not be transferred. If I could put the games on an SD card and then use that card to play the games, that would be great. Sadly, this is currently not allowed. Granted, you can re-download any game that you bought so if you are running out of space, then you can always delete games and then if you ever want to play a deleted game again, re-download it.

5. finally, the in-game manuals that come with the games are very poor. Mind you, this could be because the manuals that came with the games were poor, but why not provide pdf versions of the manuals that the buyers could download?

Of course, these are just my thoughts and I highly doubt that Nintendo will ever see this list.