Huang's comment also solidifies the fact that the Wii build of Guitar Hero III will feature a robust online mode and the option for gamers to download and play new songs from the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. There are, of course, some inherent hurdles the development studio will need to address if it's going to make the online experience as seamless as it might be. For starters, it needs to bypass the Wii Shop Channel altogether and keep gamers in the Guitar Hero III user interface when they purchase new songs. And on top of that, the company would do well to store entered credit card information in the game so that potential buyers needn't re-enter all of their data with every purchase, as the Shop Channel requires. And, of course, there's the issue of lag - a streamlined online component must facilitate the means to enable online competitive matches: one guitarist against the other. Nintendo's online network is unproven, to say the least, and as a result Activision's development team will need to become a pioneer if it's to deliver a Guitar Hero endeavor worth taking online.
Easily the biggest challenge, however, is the issue of space - or in Wii's case, lack there of. The console features 512 megabytes of onboard flash memory (about 312 megabytes is usable), which is there to store saved game data, Virtual Console titles and Channels. When one considers that some N64 titles alone can weight in at 64 megabytes, well, that space doesn't amount for much. Each track in Guitar Hero III can be upward of 15 megabytes since they are multi-layered and there are dozens upon dozens of possible songs. Do you see where we're going with this? There are only two possible solutions: the songs will need to be saved to either an unreleased hard drive attachment or they will alternatively need to go to an SD card - the latter is now available in sizes up to eight gigabytes. But there issues that comes with SD cards on Wii, too. So far, games cannot store data directly to SD cards -- it goes into Wii system memory and then it can be copied over -- so downloading songs could be a troublesome affair at the very least. Depending on what kind of DRM protection the songs included, if any, matters could be made all the more difficult.