This weekend I purchased what I expect will be my Final Memory Cards for this generation, a GameCube 1019 and a PS2 8mb two-pack (one of which Mike wanted.) I've always been terrible at memory card management. I now have 5 PS2 8 meggers and 6 Nintendo cards of various sizes (1 1019, 2 251s, and 3 59s - one that came with Animal Crossing and one from Pokemon Box.) I can't stand to delete old saves - and I refuse to buy the cheaper third party cards - so the whole thing is ugly expensive by now.
Memory cards are a fading technology, as any Xbox fan will be happy to tell you. (Just don't let them get too smug on you, since no one is telling if Xbox2 will have a hard drive or not.) I like memory cards. I would like them more if they stored more and cost less... that would certainly take the bite out of using them. The price factor is always trumpeted by the pro-HD crowd, and it's a good example of Sony/Nintendo holding you by the balls. You want to save that game, laddie? Then you'll be buying our unique-format cards.
That Nintendo 1019 card goes for $30 and the PS2 two-pack was $40. Ugh.
A memory card's big advantage over an HD is that it is portable. If I take a new game down to show off at Mike's - and that happens quite a bit - I can bring my own card along so we can pick up my saved games on his PS2. You can't do that with an Xbox unless you drag along the whole Xbox. Or unless you have an Xbox memory card, which lives on the shelves as sort of a bastard child of Xbox accessories... and can't even help you in all cases.
And you know, hard drives are flaky. I like that my PS2/GameCube saves are safe on non-spinning, damn-near-industructible, backupable media. Here's hoping we can feel that secure about whatever comes next.
I, for one, will not mind at all if memory cards stick around for the PS3 and Nintendo 2600. They've treated me well so far. I haven't been able to clog them up with my own MP3s, or download new levels and patches... but I haven't been overly compelled on that front yet anyway.
Not that I'm going to support mem cards forever; there are as-yet-unimagined ways to combine the best features of both. An online storage option, for one... although that leaves your all-important saves in the hands of somebody else's hardware, which I don't like. Maybe just as a backup, where you could store a duplicate file, which could then be re-downloaded to any system you happen to be on... and yet that could get messy as well, forcing you to track the modification dates of formerly identical saves.
Or make the entire HD portable like a USB thumb drive. That would combine the size of an HD with the swap-and-go mentality of a memory card... but likely be buttload pricy. How about making the entire future game system small? The GameCube is a great size for carrying around, but I would love to see it get even smaller. If the PS3 comes out a large as a paperback book, they can keep the CD/DVD game sizing, make it easy to move around like a memory card, plus it becomes a great plug-and-play multiplayer LAN system to boot. That would be optimum. The original version PS2 is largely empty space anyway - which is emphasized by the entirely backward design of the PStwo - so it seems possible to make the base unit smaller than it currently is. I'm no electrical engineer, but I'd bet you could smash the next wave of systems into a very small case.
And wireless. All future controllers must be wireless. I don't care if they run on batteries (as long as we get notification of low power). I don't care if we (temporarily) lose vibration effects. I don't care if you can't use them within 50 feet of somebody with a pacemaker. The next generation must be wireless.
And 4-player. The Sony Multi-Tap must die.
