A new system update arrived for the Wii today - hitting at the same time as Nintendo’s President Satoru Iwata’s keynote speech at GDC (Game Developer’s Conference)  - that adds a new SD card menu option to the Wii menu.

The new update allows Wii owners to launch extra channels straight from an SD card, and can also download directly from the Wii shop channel to an SD card. This means you can launch games directly from the SD card, effectively creating a cheap storage system for the Wii.  However, save game data must still be stored on the Wii itself.

After clicking the new “SD” icon in the bottom left of the Wii menu a group of 20 screens of 12 channels a piece will launch. This means that you can store up to 240 games with the right size of card, of which up to 32GB are available for use.

This should finally put to rest complaints that the Wii doesn’t have enough storage for downloading games, as there’s no limit to how many SD cards you can buy and fill.

Update 4.0 also came with four new games for the Wii’s Virtual Console, priced at around £3.50 a piece. These games are the side-scroller Mappy, Gaplus (Galaga 3), the vertical shoot-’em-up Starforce, and a maze game adapted modified from Super Pac-Man hardware called The Tower of Druaga.