The Wii's Least Used Gimmick | The Golden Bolt 

INSERT DISC 2: A Brief History of Multi-Disc Video Games ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-9gpCYOYi-I8.html *POST-UPLOAD NOTES AND ADDITIONS:* There are a few games I've gotta add to this list, as expected with such a narrow and under-covered topic! But first, a couple folks have commented on me using the word "ROM" to describe the chip on the WiiMote, since ROMs can't have data written to them - some genuinely interested, some snarky as expected. Well, tell that to _EEPROM,_ the chip in question here! EEPROM is a special type of memory that can have data erased and rewritten at the byte-level - similar to flash memory, except that it takes longer to rewrite things byte by byte, and that EEPROM has a longer lifespan than flash memory. You can't actually "write" data to it, since you have to use an electrical charge to reprogram each byte rather than, say, drag and drop a file, which is at least as far as I'd ever understood it why it's referred to as ROM - even though it feels like a misnomer! I had a chunk of script that I cut out before recording, because frankly opening the video with 1-2 minutes of explaining what ROM is vs. EEPROM vs. flash memory and going into the weeds would just make for a fundamentally worse video that people would tune out of quickly, as much as I like digging into that stuff. (Plus, half the comments that tried calling me out on the ROM part would still have left a snarky comment anyway, so hey.) Beyond that, I went in and tested out a handful of the game series in the comments that folks mentioned also possibly used the WiiMote's onboard memory - at some point I have to tweak the thumbnail! I went with 10 to buy myself a bit of headroom knowing that at least a few others had to exist (I already didn't like the thumbnail feeling a bit baitier than my usual style, after all) but it looks like it's closer to 15 as of right now! Other series include: 2010 FIFA World Cup (shoutout to a commenter below for mentioning it in this very thread!), where you could save your dream team to the controller and bring it to a friend's house. Similarly, Inazuma Eleven Strikers let you do the same thing, and I'm guessing that probably means that the Japan-only Strikers sequels also have this functionality. Some of the Wii PES games might also do this (I have to check PES to confirm, however). Petz: Dogs 2 and Petz: Catz 2, which let you transfer your pet to the controller. I have no idea whether there are other Petz games yet, but odds are that any others released on the Wii in the same timespan have the feature since those were pretty close to asset-flips. Mario Party 8 let you save the Miis to your remote for the Extras Zone to play a handful of minigames with your Miis, as did Fortune Street, although Fortune Street let you play in regular gameplay with those Miis rather than just a side mode, and you could customize them with different outfits and gear. I've played Fortune Street at least a few times before so I'm surprised I just missed that option! and lastly there's apparently a Yu-Gi-Oh kart game that exists(?) called Wheelie Breakers that lets you save some data to the WiiMote.

I remember using this feature exactly one time when I was 12. My friend and I were so excited when it worked, but we never remembered its existence again lol

I remember this feature saving me time once. My Wii died a few years back and I was so sad that I'd have to recreate all the family miis and funny ones but my young self backed up every mii he liked across like 4 remotes, including all the family miis

Oh man I completely forgot you could save Mii's to the remote, I remember reading that in Nintendo Power when I was young but never tried it lol

Pokémon Rumble speedruns actually utilize this feature since you can save a bunch of strong Pokémon from one save to your WiiMote and import them to a different save. Some Pokémon have traits that give extra speed which, combined with certain moves, can cut the time to beat dungeons by over half. Also cuts down on the grinding since you already have strong Pokémon that can beat all of the tough battles.

I honestly do like the idea of saving some game data to the controller and taking it to a friend's house. Kinda like a more modern version of taking memory cards with you

Fortune Street (released in December 2011, FIVE WHOLE YEARS after the Wii released) used this feature as well. It was used to transfer your custom characters which, while based on your miis, could be equipped with custom outfits, accessories, and even playstyles if you wanted it to be a CPU-controlled character. Like Mysims Racing, this could transfer unlockables, meaning you didn't need your friend to grind to get bone dragon wings so you could put it on your mii in a property-buying board game.

I was thinking this feature on modern joycons would be really cool, if joycons had an actually reasonable amount of storage for saves and stuff. But now that I think about it, that could have great potential for game exploits so it makes sense Nintendo abandoned the idea

You couldn't begin to understand how useful that control transfer feature was for Brawl until you've played with friends who were too impatient to watch you spend 2 minutes to reconfigure your controls. And if I recall correctly, I think it also carried over the stats for the profile that layout was tied to.

Nobody EVER talks about this, but I used it quite a bit as a kid! Mostly for bringing Miis to friends houses or to take my Club Penguin account with me for Club Penguin Game Day! Actually, considering Club Penguin closed down and my original Wii save data was lost, my original Wii Remote is the ONLY way I can legitimately access my original Club Penguin account nowadays. Insanely cool!

For clarity on the Monster Hunter stuff, it was very much next to useless to even do this because a) the Arena had characters that were already premade and you could select from them based on weapon (and they were likely better and more optimized than what you had unless you played online A LOT) and b) the arena tokens that you could transfer back to your game would only give you gear that was essentially cosmetic; as in it didn't give much in terms of skills or armor. It was basically a flex. If you had MH Tri at the time, it was MUCH more useful to just call your friend on the phone (Use those free nights and weekend minutes!) and arrange an online playdate, especially considering that a majority of the content in that game was actually locked to playing online anyway- a handful of monsters and higher level encounters couldn't be played alone or offline, and playing this weird arena mode certainly wasn't going to make you any progress.

If I remember correctly, Rabbids Go Home (and also the Rabbids channel) had a feature where you could save your customized rabbid inside the wii mote, which was really interesting due to the game treating it as though the rabbid is physically trapped inside the remote.

I remember that the Wii game "Inazuma eleven strikers" used this feature to allow you to save a team to your controller to play it on another system.

Phantasy Star Online had some cross-memory card shenanigans. If you wanted to play with characters from two memory cards, the slot 2 card character could “guest” onto slot 1. I think a memory card could only have one guest? And while you didn’t have to be in a hurry to move it back to the original card, it’d play just fine indefinitely, trying to play that character on the original card would say “hey the guest version isn’t going to be able to come back if you do this” and you’ve effectively split the timelines at that point, they’re separate characters, one of which is clogging up the guest slot.

Wow. I knew about the Wii Remote's internal memory and that you could save Miis to it, but I had no idea it actually worked with games. Awesome to learn!

I used this quite a few times actually! I brought my Mii to friends' houses to avoid the setup and took some of their miis home with me. I also transfered some Miis to the 3DS

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I could've sworn Rabbids Go Home also had a way to save custom Rabbids to the Wiimote, and even had a separate app just for that that you could install on the Wii home menu. I remember playing the game myself years ago and could've sworn that that was something you could do in it.

If local play was more common than it is now, I would actually love the idea of being able to bring save data from my system to a friend's, and then take any additional records or progress back to my home system. The Wii Remote storage is a perfect way to implement this. The N64 actually had something similar with the Transfer Pak that could be inserted into the controller. It makes the save data more tied to _you_ rather than just the system you happened to be playing it on. Nowadays I'm more likely to play on my own systems, but there's still the matter of multiple devices that one might want to synchronize their saves across, which is usually only possible by storing them online on someone else's server.

On the topic of GameCube memory cards, Wii games did technically have access to them. The only two I'm aware of are Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn and Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, which look for save data of their respective predecessors and give you bonuses when starting a new save file. I'm not aware of any game that actually saves data to the memory cards, though, and you could also make the point that Nintendo wouldn't want to lock anything too major behind legacy hardware.

I believe the game 'Rabbids Go Home' used this feature to save your own custom Rabbid to the Wii Remote, though it has been a long time since I've played it, so my memory might be fuzzy.

One correction, vWii has this functionality. vWii Mii channel has it disabled, but that can be fixed with homebrew. I can only suppose that it was disabled in software on Wii Mini too.

There are a handful of Racing Games that can load from 2 Memory cards. Some Gran Turismo games allow both players to load cars from their own Garage to race against each other. The most unique implementation of this was the High Stakes Mode in Need for Speed: High Stakes. Here both player pick a car from their safe file and they race for the virtual pink slips, winner will get the car from the looser, and this meant that is was deleted from the loosers safe file and adder to the file of the winner.

I feel this feature would have been used way more if nintendo made the memory in the controller bigger, like maybe 128kbytes instead of kbits

I knew about this feature - it actually uses Bluetooth, so it was possible to hook up the Wiimote to a PC and transfer Miis onto it using a command line tool. You could get Special Miis (so called "golden pants" Miis) this way. In case you're wondering: you couldn't then transfer them to 3DS. Although the 3DS could transfer Miis from the Wii, Special Miis required a signature on the 3DS, so it could know it was a fake. Also, honourable mention for least used feature goes to the Wii's USB port, which exists solely to allow plugging in a keyboard for use with the Internet Browser channel (EDIT: apparently according to the replies it was used for a lot more stuff that I wasn't aware of, so thanks everyone for pointing that out.) Or possibly the Nintendo Channel's demo feature which could download game demos to your Nintendo DS. Or the Messages feature where you could send notes and photos to friends. The Wii has a lot of barely used features, come to think of it...

the Wii U gamepad is region locked because it is not a Bluetooth device, it is a Wifi 5ghz peripheral. Like routers, it has to function based on the laws of the country it is released, for example, american wifi routers operate on a certain wavelenght, japanese ones operate on different channels and so on. I dont remember about the channels available for 5ghz wifi but for example, american 2,4ghz wifi devices have channels from 1 to 11, japanese ones operate from 1 to 13... The Wii U is kinda like an router, it uses a hidden network to connect to 2 gamepads (this feature wasnt used but it is there).

Fun Fact: During Development Strongbad's cool game 4 Attractive people, was also planned on incorporating this feature to transfer Strongbad's unlockable outfits to other wii systems. There's even some cut dialogue of Strongbad himself explaining the feature as well. However it got scrapped for unknown reasons, most likely it wasn't a popular feature.

13:00 So Mario Party 5 also used this feature for its Garage mode. The gamemode would let you build and customize a mech that you could use to fight against other mechs. You could transfer up to three additional mechs onto one console useing your freinds memory cards. Yall could then fight against eachother or fight with each other against Bowser and his minions.

This feature really came in handy after I lost my original Wii to a shady 3rd-party support site and got a different one back from them (the Wii stopped reading dual-layer discs and Nintendo refused to do anything because it had homebrew). For a long time I assumed the Miis on that system were lost forever, but a decade later I happened to rediscover the Miis saved on one of the remotes. Really made me feel nostalgic.

Actually, GameCube memory cards weren’t only usable for GameCube games. While I don’t think there were many uses, you could use your data from your memory card of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance to get stuff for Radiant Dawn.

Actually used this a few times and it was absolutely awesome and surprised the people who I showed it to. It's the kind of feature that should really 'just be there' to be honest and it felt so natural and immersive to use

You just brought back a memory of me discovering this feature before going to a friends house, I was so excited when I just plopped my mii onto his console and we went on to play Mario kart.

Both soulcalibur 3 & mortal kombat Armageddon used 2 memory cards so you could fight each other's create-a-characters against each other, much like the robo-ky example you brought up. There's probably more like those examples I'm not thinking of.

mario party 5 had super duel which used the second memory card slot so you can use the mech over there to verse them, it's kind of a tiny feature on the game but it is kinda neat

Mario Party 8 used the Mii data feature to let you use Miis saved on the Wii Remote for the game's Extra Zone, without having to go to the Mii Channel. I suppose that counts as another game that used the feature, but probably in the worst way imaginable?

The Wii is such an interesting system, I don’t have too many memories of it since I was 5 when it released. I kinda wished most of the games didn’t poorly utilized motion controls stigmatizing the concept.

I remember that one of the things my sister did with this feature is that she loved the 'Petz' games and would bring them over to sleepovers with her friends, and she would *always* save her cats to the wii remote so they could play together with her custom character.

Im not sure the bit about Wii games not being able to use Gamecube mempry cards is entirely accurate. Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn was able to detect Path of Radiance saves and would transfer character stats from your first playthrough to the new game. As for Wii games that actually write data to the memory card, these Im not sure exist.

I think the only game I used this feature with the Inazuma Eleven games, you could save your team to play with your friends on another Wii with your own team, it was really cool

Carnival Games Mini golf is honestly one of my favorite games of all times. It’s basically just nostalgia but it was a surprisingly solid golf game. I should really replay it at some point.

At least one more game that utilized this feature was Petz Catz 2. I'm not sure about the other Petz games, but in that one you could transfer accessories to a friends console. That is if you could find another person with that game. It sold about 370,000 copies, which is honestly more than I thought it did.

My friend used to take her miis to my house using her remote, it was cool and fun. I don't think I used it because I didnt mind making a new one at my other friends' houses

I knew about the Mii Transfer feature, I was always curious about the 'Wii Remote' tab in Wii Sports so experimented with it, but then it turned to be a huge advantage when I had to get a new Wii. Shame the Mii's save data couldn't be transferred, though.

I remember I used to store my Miis in my Wii Remote so I can make more Miis and that’s pretty much the only reason why I’ve used that feature.

"I'll buy you the Battle Pass, Miles."

Yup I completely forgot about this, and I knew about it because of Smash Brawl, I found it quite interesting because you could save your name, I think records, but also controller setup that for a game compatible with mostly anything you could connect to the Wii it's quite handy, but my friends never cared to try and everytime we got to play on a new Wii we have to take our sweet time configuring our own control schemes, although years later in college I was finally able to try the feature, and yeah, it saved my name and control config into someone's Wii, then I completely forgot about it until now.

Inazuma Eleven Strikers (and presumably their two Japanese exclusive sequels) use this feature, it is exactly the same as Pokemon Battle Revolution where you can take your team to a mates house. But I don't blame TGB for missing it as the games did not release in the US.

i've always wondered why wii sports resort & wii party never had support for miis on the wii remote, especially considering part of the mii's simplicity is so that they could fit 10 in one remote... (at the very least, you can import the wii remote's miis into another console's mii channel and use them in games that way)

Reminds me of how GameCube was capable of some highly advanced type of multisample anti-aliasing but the only games that made use of it are Rogue Squadron 2 and 3. The main console menu used it too I think, but other than that nothing else. That's even more underutilized than this Wiimote internal memory, at least that was supported by 10 games many of which were fairly high profile (I either own or wanted to own at least 6-7 of them).

I actually used it to move my Miis from my old busted Wii to my new one. My old Wii got stuck reading only Gamecube games but not Wii games and I was 10 so my parents wouldn't really let me rip it open to fix it.

12:39 i don't think they removed the feature from wii remotes, i have two somewhat recent wii remotes(both with remoteplus integrated), and i think i can still save stuff from pokémon battle revolution for example

Mom the golden bolt uploaded give me your phone

Makes me nostalgic for Dreamcast VMUs again. I'd love to see another controller do something to that extent, but I feel like we're more likely to see Nintendo expand on their companion app for phones.

I don't know that you asked, but Sonic Adventure 2 Battle allowed you to race Chao between memory cards. Since each Chao Garden is tied to specific Memory Cards, my Cousins and I used to take our Memory cards to each other's houses to race our Chao against each other. I can't remember if Sonic Adventure DX had a similar feature or not, but I also remember being able to chose your Save File from both Memory Cards inserted. Other than SA2 and Animal Crossing however, I can't remember any games that could utilize both Memory Card Slots unless you count transferring files between them, or using the Gamecube Microphone. As far as the Wii Remote's memory, I could have sworn you could save user profiles in Brawl to it, but my memory may be faulty on that one. I used Tri's Character transfer a handful of times when playing Tri at my Cousin's house, but after the two or three times of fighting in that little arena, we lost interest and decided to stick with online play.

Great video. The lack of documantation about what games use that feature reminds me of the thumbstick for the DS. I really would like to know which games support it., besides Metroid Prime Hunters and Mario 64 DS

If i remember correctly Inazuma 11 Strikers used this feature. In the game you could make your own team and put it on the wiimote to bring it to a friends house and use your team vs theirs.

For loading data from multiple cards, the game that springs to mind for me is Powerstone 2’s ability to load a separate file that would cause VMU shaped chests to appear in game that only you could open

I had such a well curated list of important miis on my remote. I always brough my own remote to friends' houses!

I think I might have a game with this functionality that you missed, specifically Worms: A Space Oddity. I might be misremembering, but I think it allowed you to save your team

The bit about making your Mii from scratch at every friend's house cracked me up because we used to make such weird Miis every time, my favorite that I made was a really tall and excessively skinny Asian guy with long hair and red tinted sunglasses and I named him Benadryl.

One game I have which I know had this feature is a Carnival Mini Golf game (Which I didn't think was going to be shown tbh)

I remember using this feature for the miis but also completely forgot about it. That’s nuts!

A 16min video? What a heresy.

Or the IR-Sensor on the right Joycon. The only time I've seen it is in Ringfit to get my heart rate. Actually kinda weird since amiibos are scanned with the right one as well and the home button is also on it. Makes the left one useless in comparison.

My friend used this to bring his mii to my house back in the day. This set up me moving his mii from the wii to the 3ds to the wiiu into an amiibo to the switch. All for the payoff of putting his mii as the mii gunner under the Sans costume.

Imagine being the developer of this feature and realizing not a single person in the world used it.

I definitely saved my miis to my wii remote a few times to bring to other consoles.

I sunk a great many hours into Super Swing Golf’s PC counterpart, Albatross 18, and this video unlocked that memory for me.

I used it in Wii Sports and Brawl a lot, but never knew about the other games. As I was pretty Wii addicted I sadly knew about this from day one, as it is explained in Wii Sports itself.

Say what you like Super Swing / Pangya was a friggen amazing fantasy golf series and I really hope it manages to come back somehow... that isn't the still fun but sketchy mobile game they shut down a few years ago.

There's an even more rare feature: not using motion controls

M8, when u mentioned my sims, you brought back a bunch of memories of me and my sisters playing that game and it made me cry a little bit.

Holy shit I haven't thought about Battle Revolution in like a decade, crazy to think there was time when a "Battle Pass" being in a video game didn't make me want to headbutt holes into drywall

I own 2 wiis and I never knew this feature existed 😂 very cool video!

I recall using this feature exactly once: to take Miis from the home console to my uncle's when we went cross-country to visit for a week. I also remember seeing it in the Pokemon Battle Revolution manual, but never used it because I used my DS for everything and just re-made the passes when I'd play on a friend's Wii

god i love videos on incredibly specific things i didn't know existed

If I remember correctly, the raving rabbits franchise had a couple iterations but the one on Wii and DS both had a feature where you can make your own rabbit with outfits and such and the one on the wii allowed you to save these rabbits to your Wii remote so I guess that's another use of it.

Me and my friends actually used this anytime we changed something about our Miis. This was exciting! I didn't even know about other uses than Miis or Smash. Also we had our Wiis connected to the internet very early and used the message feature extensively. It was always great seeing that blue glow, because it meant I had some funny message in my inbox 🥰 But because our parents didn't have the most recent routers at the time, we had to use the weird Nintendo WiFi stick. You would plug it into a computer that was connected to the internet and it would open a network for Nintendo consoles. We also played Animal Crossing for hours with that mic 😅

It was used so little that documentation for this was minimized for the next system that came after so dev;s didn't even know about it unless they studied the controller more, but with that next system controller support for so many controllers took priority, and that gamepad made things complicated.

Great video, I laughed really hard at the slight break in professionalism at @15:23, lol; I like when that happens. I didn't even know Wii's had this feature, but damn, 4kb is not a lot of space so I can kinda see why it didn't get utilized much

As soon as I saw the title, I knew what this video was gonna be about. I remember always seeing the ability to transfer data from Petz Dogz 2 to the Wiimote, so that's another random game that utilized the feature. This feature honestly sounded so cool when I was younger, and I wish Nintendo had supported it more.

another game that used this is Petz Cats!! I remember being a kid and discovering this feature, thinking it was the coolest thing ever, but not having any friends to play with lol. I think it just transferred your character over, but I was still amazed haha.

We used this when I was a kid, we were collecting cool miis and this is how we would share them.

When I was in high school, I started using my Wii U again, and one thing I made use of was the 10 possible miis on a wii remote. Essentially, I had four wii remotes, so I designed 50 miis, put 40 on the wii remotes, and let the other 10 stay as the "main characters" on the console. Whenever I would play games with friends on the wii, each person would have 20 miis to choose from: the 10 main miis plus the 10 "dlc" miis. It was honestly one of the most fun ideas I've ever had, but the remotes eventually got worn out once I went to college.

I remember this being super big for Club Penguin because this was one of the few non-member ways to get clothes including the Gold Viking Helmet (RIP)

I've never heard about this and I still play my Wii since 2008.

I totally forgot about the Mii save feature until I went to play Mario Party 8 in 2020 on a Wii remote we had from our first Wii. Still had my Mii from 2008. Little blast from the past.

I remember discovering the wiimote memory feature when I was a young teenager, I always wanted to use it someday but the opportunity never came. It was a very novel concept and I find it a darn shame that Nintento failed to advertise its very existence and capitalise on it. It is like they just gave up on it without even trying.

I didn’t expect to have actually used this feature, but as soon as the video started I got a flashback to Pokémon Battle Revolution

I only did this once but it was awesome thanks for unlocking this memory

"But if you're like me, you" Didn't have any friends? "just recreated your Miis at every friend's place" Oh, OK...

I only knew about the Mii functionality but it still blew my mind coming from the era of memory cards and battery saves.

Inazuma Eleven Strikers also used this wiimote save feature. It would allow you to save your custom football team, with each teams different movesets, player, uniform and emblem. Used it a lot to surprise my friends when playing at their their places.

Wow... I guess I was one of the few who actually used the Wii Remote Mii data feature very often, I thought it was a well-known feature. Even my local friends used it. No idea that it was this obscure, very interesting... 🤔 Fun video, nice to see more about what this save feature actually can do!

I remember my dad told me about this feature, specifically for miis. I don't remember ever using it so it's been a while since I thought about it. He had big ambitions for our wii - he bought two of those wii video chat devices, one for us and one for a good friend. We still have it lying around and I always have a chuckle when I see it!

I'm pretty sure Inazuma Eleven Go Strikers 2013 (and by extent 2012 Xtreme and the original) had functionality for wii remote saving The game is based on the anime and in the campaign you build your own team using characters from it, if I remember correctly the game lets you save that team to your Wii Remote to use in the vs mode (so you can battle your friend's team at their house)

I remember this feature. Im pretty sure the wiiware title my pokemon ranch used this too, to transfer your pokemon to your friends ranch so they can play with your friends pokemon.

The moment I saw the title of this video I knew it was going to be about the Wii remote save feature.

The only time I ever used this feature was when the disc reader of our first wii broke and we had to transfer all our miis to the new one.

I actually learned about this feature from screwing around with the Mii Channel on Dolphin. It was a fun suprise being able to use an emulator and actually use the feature.

It's not gone. The feature still works. There was no update that removed it. The feature works on offbrand and wiimotionplus wiimotes too.