Lately, I have become an avid use of Media Monkey and Amazon MP3. Media Monkey’s interface can be a bit clunky in places, almost offering too many choices, but its performance is excellent, especially compared to iTunes. It scans my 150GB drive to update the music library very quickly, seemingly in less than a minute.  But it’s Amazon’s MP3 site that I’m enjoying. Sure, I have to download a file and then install it to my PC, all of which isn’t nearly as one-step friendly as iTunes. But, besides the DRM-free files, I like Amazon’s prices, not to mention the wealth of bargains and free songs. While iTunes gives customers a free song each day, Amazon has over 500 free songs.

So, do you use Amazon for downloading songs? And do you take advantage of their free songs?

Whatever happened to the customer is right? We keep referring to the Wii’s ‘storage problem,’ but it seems that the real problem is Nintendo’s attitude.

First, we had Nintendo claiming that only okatu and geeks want a hard drive. Nintendo then apologized for that remark.

Then, Perrin Kaplan insulted users.

“If your refrigerator’s full, you’ve got to pull something out and put something else back in,” said Kaplan. “That’s just the normal issue of space. I mean, really, are you using every single thing on there?”

Thanks for telling us how to manage our lives. But instead of blaming gamers for poor management skills and a lack of perspective, let’s get back to the real problem.

This is your normal refrigerator:

This is the Wii’s idea of a normal refrigerator:

Reggie is preparing us for basically the same small fridge:

We have never said that it will be a hard drive, nor have we mentioned how we will fix this issue, but we are going to deliver a better way to store games.

I doubt that I’m atypical of gamers: I don’t always play games to completion before picking up another game. So, I skip around and play different games, especially on the Wii. Add to the fact that, probably like many other Wii homes, more than one person plays it, thus the need for more games.

I can keep roughly a combination of 6 Wiiware and VC games. Currently, I have Lost Winds, My Life as King, Defend Your Castle, Pirates, Paper Mario, and, yes, My Aquarium . . . for my daughter. Actually, My Aquarium highlights a different problem to Kaplan’s refrigerator analogy because it’s not a game in the usual sense and is less likely to be completed, even if it even can be. Still, we moved several unfinished VC games to the SD card so that we could play Wiiware. My son likes to play Donkey Kong Country. My daughter likes to play Pokemon Snap. But those are all offline now. With the increasing number of Wiiware and VC releases, I see the problem worsening.

And that’s not including downloadable content for other games.

I’ve not been too concerned about this issue, but frankly, Kaplan and Reggie’s comments just irked me to the point of now being dissatisfied with the Wii storage. The fact is that the Wii’s storage is insufficient, and in a time of extremely cheap storage, why does Nintendo see fit to criticize gamers rather than offer a solution?