After more than two years of Wii owners begging for a new solution to storing games, Nintendo has finally offered one, though in typical Nintendo fashion it’s not a complete “win” for users.

During Nintendo President Satoru Iwata’s keynote speech today at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the company unveiled the Wii System Menu 4.0 firmware update and the corresponding SD Card Channel. Once you’ve updated your system software, you can plug in an SDHC card up to 32GB and download games from the Wii Store directly to it. With the SD Card Channel interface offering 12 games per page and up to 20 pages, that’s 240 titles.

Nintendo says games can be launched directly from the card, but there’s a catch: The Wii will first transfer the game data from the SD card to the system’s internal memory, meaning that even with this new solution you’ll still need as much free space in the internal memory as the game requires. In other words, you’ll have to shuffle some titles currently on your Wii onto the card to clear up the temporary free space.

This raises two issues, both relatively minor: loading time, and flash lifespan. The 15-20 seconds to transfer game data from the SD card, while noticeable, isn’t too bad considering how much time would be needed to delete and re-download games to free up space (aka Nintendo’s earlier suggested solution).

The internal flash memory is the bigger question, but even that fear can be calmed with some basic math. Flash memory is usually said to be able to be rewritten to 100,000 times before its integrity is compromised, so if you transfer three Virtual Console titles from the card a day, the Wii internal memory will be good for 33,000 days. If you played the Wii five days a week, that would be 6,600 weeks, or just over 126 years. While the Wii is a big seller now, odds are very good that Nintendo will have a new system out (with it’s own memory storage issues, undoubtedly) by 2135. (As every gamer’s needs are different, your mileage may vary, but you get the general gist.)

The keynote had several other points of interest, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll touch on only one more. When you now go into the Wii Store, you will see a new option alongside the channels dedicated to the SNES, Genesis and TGFX: Virtual Console Arcade. For $5 or $6 bucks, you can download original classic games, starting with ‘Mappy,’ ‘Tower of Druaga’, ‘Gaplus’ (aka Galaga 3), all from Namco, as well as Tecmo’s ‘Starforce’. While ‘Mappy’ and ‘Druaga’ have been included in several Namco anthologies for various systems, ‘Gaplus’ is relatively port-free, and vertical shmup ‘Starforce’ hasn’t been seen much since the ’80s.