Nintendo's community have been pretty vocal over the past year on the issue of lack of storage provided by Wii, which currently only offers a 512MB flash drive to store your Virtual Console titles and game saves .

A solution, of sorts, has today been announced at a Nintendo Media Conference in Japan, though it was almost missed due to the exciting news that a new DS is on its way next year. Perhaps it would have been better if it had been missed, because as far as we can see, it's not much of a solution at all.

Company President, Satoru Iwata, revealed that a new firmware update, that will initially roll out in Japan in Spring 2009, will allow users to download Virtual Console and Wii Ware games from the Wii shopping channel directly onto its new 2GB 'Wii-branded' SD card.

We initially presumed that this would mean that you can play games directly from the card, but apparently not! We've checked a few sources, mainly the ones that blogged live from event, including Kotaku, and it seems that you still have to transfer the games to the Wii's internal memory before you can play them.

So, let's get this right. We'll spend time transferring content from the Wii to the SD card to initally free up space, before transferring the new games - that we've spent time waiting to download - back from the SD card to the internal memory in order to play them. Seems like a lot of faffing around.

Furthermore, the 2GB 'Wii branded' SD card is bound to be more expensive than standard SD cards, which no doubt will work perfectly as well.

And this is from a company that prides itself on innovation.