Yes. I had a third party N64 card and a 3rd party PS1 card die on me and lost tons of hours of gameplay. And I've read numerous reports online of people having 3rd party cards die on them, including for more recent consoles like the GC and PS2.

I'll never buy a 3rd party memory card ever again.

That's good to know in case I do get a Wii and go with some GC games. I would have assumed there would be no problem because flash memory is flash memory. I guess not, though.

People have been saying that forever. I have a NYCO for my GC and have been using it for 2+ years. Never had a problem. However if you're bent on getting a Nintendo brand card, you can probably score used ones anywhere.

It's YMMV on the controllers, I've seen them at $20 and I've seen them at $30, within same city.

Well, of course the failure rate isn't 100%. It is just higher than for first party cards, so you are taking more of a risk.

It's not worth it to me, as the price difference usually isn't that substantial.

But thankfully, with HDs and internal memory/SD cards seemingly the norm now we shouldn't have to deal with memory cards again outside of retro gaming.

My only failure was with a 3rd party PS1 card on my PS2. Same game died at the same spot twice (DW7 for PS1, about 50 hours in, the second time I was periodically backing up to the PS2 card in case it happened again).

I've never used non-first party on Nintendo, so the story may be different there.