I hit up a local Hastings to check on more PSP game prices (I still haven't bought one), because I remembered how often they have new copies of fairly old current gen games. After scoping out PSP game prices, I decided to look at what they had available for rent. Friend and great person coffeewithgames had an article on his site about Dead Space Extraction for Wii, and it got me considering renting it again or buying it outright. But I noticed something different; a "favorite rentals" section with half-price rentals. Same rental period, just half the price ($4). Maybe I've mentioned it before, but if not, I don't often rent games because it feels like I'm throwing money away if I end up loving the game. When I heard that Redbox was going to start video game rentals, I was pretty interested because of how cheap it would be to just try a game ($2 a day). It was really a great selection, but I picked out We Ski & Snowboard because I was just interested in something with fairly extensive use of motion controls, and I remembered seeing some screen-shots that made the game seem like a visual stunner (still up for debate). The game includes a feature that lets you take photos/screenshots taken in the game and post them to your Wii's Message Board, where you can then send them to friends. Funnily enough, this was the only game with this feature that I've ever seen with a warning about posting too many pictures for the sake of filling up your built-in flash memory. I posted one and didn't give it a second thought.
Later that day, I turned on my Wii, looking forward to playing Bit.Trip BEAT for that series of pieces I've been talking about, and my Wii had determined that my Wii's Message Board was full (must have been that photo that did it). It asked me if I wanted to move Message Board data to the SD card. Without thinking I said yes because I wasn't sure if it would ever ask again. If I had been thinking, I would have popped in my bigger SD card that I started using because demos were filling up the one I had been using since they opened up the SD Card Menu on the Wii. I'm honestly surprised that they put this procedure into place. I had figured that they set aside part of the Wii's built-in 512 MB flash memory right from the beginning for Message Board applications, but when it was full it would delete the oldest stuff as needed to accommodate the new stuff.
Proof of my first day owning the Wii, still intact.
Sorry for the wavy noise.
Unfortunately, this process took almost 30 minutes (I whipped out a timer as quickly as I could, got 27 minutes), and I could be wrong, but I think it knocked off a few dozen usable blocks from the area of the memory that I was using for Channels. I specifically remember trying to keep enough space open to load up anything from the SD Card Menu (325+ blocks or so), but when I tried to play BEAT it gave me the old "Manage your Wii System Memory to launch this channel" message which prompted me to see how much space I had open: 257 blocks; not enough for any of the Bit.Trip games, and many other delightful WiiWare games. I could definitely be remembering it incorrectly, though, since I was swapping things out while paying attention to a podcast. As you can see, the messages that are stored on the SD card now have an image of an SD card on them, since they are stored on an SD card.
The last day of SD card stored messages, from 2009.
With a lucky guess, this took less than two minutes to find.
Has anyone else's Wii given them this message? Did you accept the transfer? Let me know in the comments.
