"Lego City: Undercover" players with a "standard" model Wii U will need an external hard drive to purchase and play the game from the Nintendo eShop.
The game's official website features a pre-order page, which comes with a warning for digital customers in fine print:
"An external hard drive is required to download this software. Visit support.nintendo.com for information about storage options."
The Nintendo support website recommends that customers planning to download games digitally use a USB HDD (hard disk drive) no larger than 2TB. The console also supports SD storage, though it can only be used to store QR codes, Mii data and game save data, though the latter must be enabled manually.
"Undercover" requires about 22GB of space to download. The standard edition Wii U comes with a built-in 8GB hard drive, with only 3GB available with the OS installed. The deluxe edition console, which comes with a 32GB hard drive, has 25GB of free space, which is just enough space to store the game, but only if players haven't purchased anything else on the eShop.
The Wii U storage situation had been a point of concern from the Wii U's specs were announced last year. At the time, Nintendo suggested that users would likely want to augment the console's hard drive with extra storage, but the idea that the console is unable to download even one game is worse than most consumers could reasonably imagine. The fact that consumers are already seeing the console's hardware limitations less than six months after launch is, frankly, shocking.
