Nintendo today has provided a solution for the Wii's painfully underdeveloped onboard storage by endowing the console with the ability to boot games directly off of SD cards.

Previously, any downloaded games could only be launched if they were installed on the Wii, but with the System's meager 512 MB flash memory, that only left space for a handful of titles. While this was manageable early on, when all that was available were Virtual Console emulator titles that didn't consume much space, the introduction of WiiWare titles made that small amount of storage seem even smaller.

Three properly-chosen WiiWare games could fill up the entire system memory.

So to free up storage for new games, users were forced to move their games onto SD cards. While this was handy, if the user wanted to play any of the SD-stored games, he'd have to re-install them to the Wii drive.

Today, with the 4.0 System update, the "SD Card Channel" has appeared. The small icon of an SD card appears in the lower left hand corner of the screen when an SD card is loaded in the Wii console. When clicked, it opens an alternate Wii Menu in black instead of white, aptly titled the SD Menu.

From here, any games stored on the SD card can be launched and played without having to fully install them. When selected, the title must briefly load, and then can be played almost normally. The only difference is that game save data cannot be written to the SD card, and must remain in the system memory. Fortunately, save data is tiny in comparison to the games themselves, so the risk of running out of space for those is much less. With this update, Nintendo also added support for SDHC cards up to 32 GB in size; Before, the Wii only supported up to 2 GB.