The Wii's Least Used Feature

so you know how every game system has that feature or two that we just kind of forget about over time and that even the developer quietly drops you know an expansion slot that never gets used or the PS3's 3D TV compatibility or the connect you know stuff like that well among all of the Nintendo Wii's quirks and unique features is one really neat one that went so underused that Nintendo just straight up removed it and no it's not the Wii Shop Channel I'm talking about the ability to save data directly to your Wii Remote and bring it with you to other Wii systems sort of like a precursor to amiibos now most wireless controllers of course do have some amount of data that's saved on them whether it's controller firmware or pairing data or anything like that but that's not what I'm referring to here see built into every early Wiimote is a ROM chip that would allow you to transfer data to and from your system so that you could do things like for example bring your Pokemon Battle Revolution team to a friend's house and battle with it or if you were playing Monster Hunter Co-op you could bring your control roller and character with you save the rewards from your hunts and earn them back on your own system once you got back home it wouldn't really be Nintendo if they didn't fully embrace the local experience after all seemingly the main reason for this feature existing though is so that you could save up to 10 me's from your system to the controller and then bring them over to your friends houses and Export them there but if you're like me you either totally forgot or never even knew this was a thing and instead you just made your Mees from scratch at every new friend's house since there were a ton of Wii systems that weren't connected to the internet back then using the me contest slash check me out channel to upload and download Meez wasn't always an option which might be another part of why this feature exists it's hard to say though it honestly might have just been an afterthought considering the size of the storage available on the controller and speaking of let's go into the hardware details for a sec before talking about some of the other games that use this memory this ROM chip is a whopping 128 kilobits in size I I made that sound big but that's only 16 kilobytes about half the size of the original Super Mario Bros on the NES or for a more save data oriented comparison PlayStation 1 memory cards could store eight times as much data as your Wii controller could the PS1 used save blocks as its memory unit analog sort of like the GameCube and we did afterwards actually fun fact each save block on the Wii was 128 kilobytes or one PS1 memory card and in the ps1's case each of the 15 blocks that were available on any official memory card would take up just over four times as much data as this Wii remote ROM chip had in total so obviously you weren't going to be saving full games on your controller although that would have been really cool better yet 10 kilobytes of that 16 were actually reserved data for storing things like calibration data registers for certain controller peripherals and seemingly allowing for the possibility of controller firmware updates by passing the data through this chip to an another chip on the controller although because there was no firmware update for the Wii remotes that's more of a theory by modders of the remaining six kilobytes that you could use as a player two of that was reserved for saving up to 10 me's like I mentioned earlier and then the remaining four was usable by any game that could figure out a good use for that little space and surprisingly There Were Somehow more than just one or two games that took on that challenge some of them even coming out years after the fact not um not many more games but by my count eight to ten games and one app had Wii remote save data functionality and I wouldn't be shocked whatsoever if I'm missing one or two because this feature is so under the radar that even Nintendo's official site barely discusses it and after spending about 10 hours digging through troves of Niche Wii games I'm ready to call it quits before I we snap so let's talk about the games that I found first up are the systems launch games where you'd expect the vast majority of these games to come from since usually the very earliest titles on any given console try to pack in every gimmick they possibly can before the less useful features are quickly dropped surprisingly only a few of these titles actually did come out in 2006 or 2007 though in Pokemon Battle Revolution like I touched on a bit earlier the Wii remote saving was used for a you not they're called battle passes so the way this game operated was that every Pokemon trainer received a battle pass in order to compete in pokotopia the city featured in this game this battle pass would display a trainer data like their outfit and chosen catchphrases as well as the Pokemon team that saved to that particular pass there are three battle pass types here in pokotopia rental passes which are given to you in the game itself custom passes if you transfer Pokemon data over from Diamond pearl Platinum heart gold or soul silver or friend passes which were what you would save to the controller to put them on Friends save files at their house you could also get friend passes just by battling online the second launch window game to use this feature is a series with the same level of prestige as Pokemon too that would be super Swing Golf okay well maybe not quite the same level but in this one you could save your character and their stats build to bring over to a friend's house however if you wanted to save data from one game to your Wiimote you should probably be prepared to wipe whatever data you already had in that whopping four kilobytes of free space you're not likely to find any two of these games that are kind enough to share and then of course there's the me Channel and me plaza where you would deposit me's after you've copied them to the remote these ones are more of an app than a game of course so it's the technicality of a bunch but it was a launch feature and if you really wanted to argue this you could say that the Wii remote save feature was usable in another 100-ish games besides the ones I'm talking about since once you transfer a me from your controller it'd be usable on that Wii in any game that uses me's whether that's Wii Fit Mario Kart or the dozens of games that use me's as your save icon and nothing else by the way for how prevalent me's were it's kind of surprising browsing the comprehensive list and seeing how few actually use me is when you look back but since just about none of those games directly support the actual transfer process from system to controller and vice versa I'm not going to count them here the two I will count however are Wii Sports and we play because at one point this me transfer feature ended up being removed from the me Channel and other system level features of later model Wii's I couldn't check every single one of the Wii insert subtitle Hero games because I don't have all of them but at least in these two you could still finish up that me transfer process from controller to system although your character's sport stats wouldn't come with it sadly once we move past the Wii's launch window we've gotta Jump Ahead to 2008 to get to the next game on this list Super Smash Brothers Brawl although Miis were considered as a possible playable character that they could have included in Brawl for and this is a quote about a minute after that minute Sakurai said no to the idea because he was afraid that it could be used for bullying thinking about that possibility though not the bullying part but the the me Fighters part seeing how the me Fighters event eventually worked when they were in Smash 4 and smash ultimate it might have potentially made for the most comprehensive use of this Wiimote transfer feature instead what you can do here is save your control layout to your Wii mode so that you can bring it over and it's ready to go when you visit friends rather than have to spend a minute setting up your own profile on every new console you play on the only other 2008 game that used this feature was carnival games mini golf the second golf game on this list which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice this was one of those games that decided not to use me's and instead give you your own me like Avatar which was another fun Trend during the Wii era as Studios tried to create their own fad that's all this one did though you just transferred your avatar to your Wiimote and then brought it over to your friend's house if for whatever reason you wanted to play carnival games mini golf at their house with your own character there's no stats or anything and this game-specific Avatar category is what I'm guessing at any of the games that I might have missed would fall into as far as Wii transfer stuff goes actually the final game to release that has controllers save data September 2010's Club Penguin game day is also one of these so I'll just mention it here and get it out of the way perhaps the most noteworthy Wii series to use store brand Meez is the MySims franchise which replaced normal Sims with well my Sims and it's actually thanks to this series that this video I'm making right now even exists while I was working on my video covering my Sims I discovered that 2009's my Sims racing had maybe the coolest implementation of the Wiimote save function a thing that again I had completely forgotten existed see my Sims racing might sound like a shitty cash and card game to capitalize on yet another gaming fad of that era but it's actually not just competent but genuinely really fun one of the better card games out there that doesn't have Mario Sonic or crash on the box it limits the gimmicky motion controls to just shaking up to jump it's got creative levels and it's got fully customizable carts that let you fine-tune the stats and looks of your vehicle you can save up to one car of each of the three sizes small medium and large and transfer these along with your own my sim to other friends Wii's by sending that data to and from your controller that way you wouldn't have to just use a stock vehicle or put together your own Frankenstein cart based on whatever items your friend had unlocked you can just use the card that you know is perfect for you now you've just got to find a friend who bought my Sims racing on the Wii kinda surprisingly none of the other my Sims games ended up utilizing this feature it does make sense since all but the bad party game are predominantly single player experiences but since the first two my Sims games are sort of Animal Crossing adjacent I'm almost a little surprised that you couldn't transfer your villager to the controller and then give them to a friend's town so they could live there too now if you want to hear more about that series when you're done here go check out that video it's actually a really interesting franchise that stood out way more than I expected given its well shovel weary look and reputation and that four of the six games in the my Sims franchise released in a calendar year there's even an official dead space crossover because they were made by some of the same team that gay to watch I don't know what will just a few days after MySims racing released Pokemon Rumble dropped in Japan in this weird little beat em Up game the first downloadable we wear title and maybe the only one to use the controller saving gimmick you could save up to a dozen of your Pokemon to the Wii mode and bring them to a friend's house for Co-Op your Pokemon don't level up in this game though so it's not like you get an actual reward or experience to bring back home for doing so it's just for bringing whatever ones you have with you about about six weeks after Rumble though Japanese players did get a game that used the Wii remote to transfer rewards from local co-op and it's the final game we're gonna talk about today Monster Hunter Tri which released in America and elsewhere the following year in addition to having a seamless online co-op feature that led up to four players work together in the single player campaign and also being one of only about a dozen games ever to use the we speak peripheral that you didn't know existed which let you chat online with your party while playing Monster Hunter Tri also featured a mission-based Arena mode that you could play locally via split screen aside from the three missions that are unlocked from the start you would obtain up to 7 more missions by catching specific monsters in quests during the main story then in this Arena you and maybe a friend could battle those monsters and try to beat the target time to get a bunch of different rewards that all lump together since this game's called Monster Hunter try and I'll call them try points that you could then bring back to the story to upgrade your character more on your own system now I'm not a huge monster hunter guy but this apparently wasn't a super in interesting feature on the Wii some players just sort of referred to it as a demo to try and convince other friends to buy the game since the online play was just the full game but with friends rather than this separate segmented very limited game mode but whatever the case I think it's kind of cool that you could transfer your character to the controller bring it to a friend's house and then bring back some of those try points to your own save file once you got back home if this were the case for a more involved mode than just this little side mode I would probably put this above my Sims as the best way a game used this whole controller saving gimmick but it's a cool bone to throw out either way if nothing else after 2010 and that aforementioned Club Penguin game I couldn't find any later games that utilized the feature which kinda makes sense since later software and even Hardware revisions seem to have dropped the feature entirely the Wii Mini for example doesn't have this feature included whatsoever alongside all the other cutbacks that thing has whether it's having zero online connectivity no SD card slot or any other thing they could do to try and cut costs the Wii U's virtual Wii menus dropped the functionality as well and the Wii channel itself seems to have removed the feature on later base Wii models either that or the Wii remote revisions themselves cut the feature I'm genuinely not sure and Nintendo's own documentation doesn't help clear it up whatever the case I'm surprised the idea even lasted past launch let alone that Studios found new and kind of innovative ways to use such a limited space as time went on now with all of this said you might be wondering why this sort of save data couldn't just be saved to a proper memory card wouldn't that just be easier well for one at least as far as I can think of there are only a couple games that actually ever used two memory card slots at once time Splitters would let you save and load multiple player profiles although I believe only one per memory card if my memory serves right in Animal Crossing on the GameCube you could load your save and memory slot a and then visit the town in slot B like if you brought your card over to a friend's house to show your friend your village and in Guilty Gear iska you could simultaneously load from multiple save slots so that each player can fight with their own version of that game's customizable character Robo Kai 2. again I am certain there are others out there that I'm missing there's probably some sports game that has a multi-tap feature where you could link up eight Madden games and save files and play a franchise motor something like that that has to exist I'm sure do let me know in the comments which ones I'm missing but generally pulling data simultaneously from multiple memory cards just wasn't a thing that was done all that often so I guess it also wasn't the most elegant solution here for it's such a small thing like moving me's plus although the Wii at least the very first models did have GameCube memory card slots it couldn't use them unless you are playing GameCube games and even though the system has an SD card slot it took until 2009 for Nintendo to add an SD card manager app via system update prior to that you had to manually transfer anything over to internal storage whenever you wanted to actually use it not to mention who wants to carry around SD cards with them you can just throw one of those things in your pocket and suddenly it's gone forever and so are all your saves lastly there's USB storage which would be easy enough but the only Wii game I can think of that let you use USB memory sticks was Dragon Quest 10. solely because that game had two discs and needed to install them to that USB stick so well in short the Wii remote save solution seems to actually have been a pretty solid one again as limited as it was as a fun little bonus fact by the way the Wii U's Gamepad actually has a similar onboard storage thing going on every Gamepad has 32 megabytes of storage specifically to be able to store any possible firmware updates to the gamepad as well as act as a region lock because you know the one thing the Wii U needed was for its expensive controller to eventually be even harder to find over time as more and more of those gamepads start to fail great anyway that's pretty close to the full story behind one of the many weird features that game consoles have had over the years and it's a rabbit hole I went down solely because of my Sims if you want another answer to a question you've probably we never had until I ask it right this moment check out my video diving into the intricacies of how multi-disc video games like Final Fantasy worked on different systems over the years it's another fun one plus I get to talk about the 8-disc Sega Saturn game so you know you should you should check it out thanks for watching and as always until next time stay golden a special thanks to wonderful patreon supporters like cloudy boy goldstorm07 Josh Gourmet jump Rock common CJ karatana and more for making videos like this possible if you'd like to get early or add free access to these videos join the exclusive Discord server and more visit patreon.com thegoldenbolt thank you

Channel: The Golden Bolt

Views: 19,593

Keywords: the golden bolt, wii remote, wii remote save data, wii save data, wii remote mii saves, the wii's least used feature, wii's least used feature, wii remote forgotten features, the wii remote's forgotten save feature, the wii remote's forgotten feature, wiimote, wiimote save feature, wiimote peripherals, wii history, wii development history, forgotten wii games, nintendo wii

Id: tPtl8NNpcD8

Length: 16min 8sec (968 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 24 2023