Topic: How far can WiiWare Go?

A while ago I was thinking about the games I most hoped would get a re-birth on WiiWare. I decided that of all the systems from the past, there is none that I feel I missed out on more than the Neo Geo. There are many Neo Geo games I've always wanted to play but never had the chance. I think this systems output is one of the most exiting elements of the whole service. Where in the past these games were so expensive, and so prohibitive due to hardware costs, they can now be ours for a very reasonable amount.

The Neo Geo is very much a fighting gamers console, with many classic beat-em-ups released for it in it's lifespan. It's these games that I want to play more than almost any other oldschool releases. Games like King Of Fighters 98', Last Blade 2, Garou: Mark of the Wolves. Will these games ever be released on WiiWare. What worries me the most is their size. Last Blade 2 is 554mb , bigger than the Wii's built in internal memory itself. King Of Fighters 98's and Garou: Mark of the Wolves are both around 680mb. What will become of these classics? Will Nintendo release them? Can they? With the size and relative value of SD cards these days, the size pales into insignificance, but is it even possible for the Wii hardware to download them?

Well, it is possible for the Wii to download that much of data, but the thing is that the SD card is just a holder for the games. The Wii doesn't play the game off of the SD card; the Wii actually downloads it onto the console first from the SD card and then begins to play said game. Since the Wii console can't hold that much memory with the channels uselessly blocking up a few good megabytes, Nintendo probably won't release the games at all.

Nintendo just needs to increase the file size.

the best way for snk to get the larger neogeo games out there on the wii, would be compilation disk games.
but that`s then down to snk to go ahead and make such a compilation.

to here

I wish there were more fresh ideas in wiiware rather than the trend of remaking rettro titles and sadly often is that they are not as good as the originals on nes/snes or whatever.

Wish more games used motion controls where suited I mean heck where are all the sports wiiware titles?
Very few use the balance board either.

I have a pc and play older retro titles via emulators for the respective machine.

Nope, it can't

How far can WiiWare go? Not very.

The WiiWare limit is 320 Blocks = 40MB. Most games have around 300 blocks, so...

@MmBuddha - Nintendo might lift the file size restriction, and these games can take up far less size today.. Compression technology is constantly evolving and it's much better than it used to be.. it's where the future is.

invmat: not exactly: space invaders get even is around 600 blocks

I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo gave them more wiggle room soon. Not only space-wise, but also in what they're able to do in terms of features such as WC24.

A file size cap isn't really a problem, in my opinion. It just forces the developers to be efficient with how they use resources. For example, the rhythm game Helix has 26 songs. World of Goo has high quality music and lots of polish. The Final Fantasy games on Wiiware have hours and hours of gameplay. So, I don't see any problem.

Then again, most of my favorite games are retro. When I consider that Super Mario Bros. 1,2,3 combined have a total file size of less than 1 MB... well, then I think 40 MB is more than enough to make a good game.

Also, I think the Wiiware service is designed for inexpensive games. So, it's good for games with less content than retail releases. If a company wants to release a bigger game on Wii, then they probably want to charge more money... and that means a retail disc is the way to go.

In regard to Neo-Geo games - they used to advertise the cartridge size in Megabits... not the Megabytes we use today. So, a game advertised as "680 megs" was actually 680 Mbits, which is 85 MB. According to Wikipedia, the Neo-Geo spec was originally 330 Mbits (41.25 MB) per game, but they later figured out how to make games as large as 716 Mbit (89.5 MB). So yeah, those games are better suited for disc compilations.

Are you sure? Btw, the 320 Blocks-limit is for the main game. As far as I know, there is no limit for DLC.

@Argus: Super Mario Bros. 3 had around 32 blocks, so that's 4 MB. But I could be wrong about the size of the game, I'll check it out soon.
EDIT: 31 Blocks in the EU, and 27 Blocks in the US. I was right.

Each game comes with the emulator built in hence the large file size for basic NES games. NEOGEO games are limited by the Wii's smallish amount of RAM but also the built-in storage. It's too bad you can't load directly from SD instead it loads from SD to the system (so you need enough free blocks at all times) and then into RAM.

Neo geo games aren't nearly as big as you listed. I'm thinking the size you listed is in bits and not bytes so you'd divide that number by 8. Still some games might be too big. Though they have fit pc engine cd games on there and even got that neo geo cd shoot em up on VC too.

Anyway the main issue is if they are even gonna try as most of the stuff on there is already on disc compilations and those compilations are a much better deal per game. They need to put out games like garou that were mentioned.