Nintendo President Satoru Iwata took the stage today to announce a few things we'd been waiting to hear for a long time. Some we knew about, and some we didn't, but it's good news all around.
First, there is finally a storage solution for the Wii. You can now save Virtual Console games, WiiWare and Wii Channels to an SD or SDHC card and then play them off of the card. Hooray. No more cleaning out the fridge every time you want to download something or even just save a new game. There's a SD Menu icon on the new Wii Menu, which you can get right now by performing a system update. The high capacity SD format currently tops out at 32GB, but as that is roughly sixty-four times the in-built system memory, it should be enough for now.
Next, on the eve of the DSi's international release, it was revealed that everyone who buys the system and connects it online before October 5th, 2009 will get 1000 DSi points for free. These can be spent in the DSiWare store for games or applications.
Also coming to DS is The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, the sequel to the well-received Phantom Hourglass. This time around, Link will be piloting a steam locomotive, switching with Phantom to explore the dungeons, and solving puzzles with brand new items.
On a disappointing note, there were no new first-party Wii games revealed at the show. Punch-Out!! made an appearance (and was dated for May in the US), while a rock-climbing WiiWare game called Rock N' Roll Climber that uses the Balance Board unveiled. No word on Mario Galaxy 2, though. Still, a good day.
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