A Guide to Wii Input, The Basics

For those of you who don’t have a Wii, or who do have a Wii and would like to understand their inner workings and know all the options better, I’ve compiled this guide to Wii input. We’ll start with an explanation of the most obvious, and the driving mechanism for most of the system, the Wiimote.

The Wiimote:

The Wiimote, officially called the Wii Remote, is an extraordinary breakthrough in the gaming world. The Wiimote, as any gamer knows, has almost complete motion detection abilities, which really breaks down the barrier between console gaming and arcade gaming. The Wiimote can detect movement in any direction, but can’t directly detect rotation. Instead, it locates the Wii Sensor Bar to figure out where it is pointing. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work when your pointing away from the Bar. Interestingly, the Sensor Bar doesn’t actually sense anything, the Wii Mote does all the sensing.

In comparison to its only motion sensing competitor, the PS3 Sixaxis controlle, it has pluses and minuses. Plus: The Wiimote — through the use of the sensor bar — can automatically detect whether or not you are pointing on the screen, something the Sixaxis controller can’t do without calibration. This makes it easy to use the Wiimote like a virtual mouse. Minus: The Wimote doesn’t actually have full rotational detection like the Sixaxis does, and basically cannot get any rotational functionality if it doesn’t see the Sensor Bar.

One unique feature of the Wiimote is the speaker set in the middle, which allows sound to come out. This, I find, is very useful in multiplayer games. When normally all the sound would be coming from one place, even if it only concerns one person, the Wiimote can deliver indivisualize sounds cues to each player.

The buttons on the Wiimote are simple, one direction pad with an “A” button underneath it and a “B” trigger behind it as well as a “1″ and “2″ button down at the bottom. In the center, there are “-”, “Home” and “+” buttons. And lastly, the Wiimote has a dock on the bottom which can connect to and communicate to various other attachments, including, next up the Nunchuk.

The Nunchuk:

The Wii Nunchuk comes with the Wii, and connects to the Wiimote though its dock. The Nunchuk has motion sensitivity, but no rotational abilities. It has an analog stick and two trigger buttons in the back — “C” and a smaller “Z”. Typically, you would hold the Wiimote in your right hand, and the Nunchuk in you left hand. The possibilities of control between these two devices are endless. Between them you have 13 axis of movement and 9 buttons.

There extra buttons and the analog stick help bring the Wii up to a normal amount of traditional controls. With the non-traditional aspect of motion sensitivity, it isn’t really necessary, but it gives traditional gamers a better feel of control and gives traditional game developers an easier time porting games. But, the movement detectors in the Nunchuk assure Wii fans that Nintendo is serious about taking gaming to the next level.

Unfortunately, few games so far have really taken advantage of the creative possibilities waiting in the Nunchuk. Hopefully developers will get the hang of things soon.

There are many other attachments designed for Wii input, and I’ll be covering the basics of those in a future article.