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Why didn't more games use the Wii Remote's internal memory?

Elija2

Member
Do you guys remember how every Wiimote has a small amount of internal memory (6 kilobytes to be exact)? Probably not because it was such an unused feature. The idea was that you could store information on your Wiimote and then take it to a friend's house to use on their Wii. I think the feature that most people remember is how you could store 10 Miis on a Wiimote. Nobody I know ever brought their Wiimotes over to someone else's house so I can imagine this feature was largely unused.

According to Wikipedia, only 4 games ever used this feature. That kinda sucks because it was actually a pretty cool idea. What if more games allowed you to put your profile on the Wiimote? Then you could take your progress over to a friend's house (and you wouldn't have to buy a $10 toy to do it). The main problem is the minuscule amount of memory available. Only 4 kilobytes was available to stuff outside of the Mii Channel which means that you wouldn't be able to store anything fancy, but basic profiles should fit. I never played much of Monster Hunter Tri but apparently you could store your profile on a Wiimote which I assume includes all of your gear and items.

What Wii games do you guys wish used this feature (you can disregard the tiny storage size if you want)? For me an interesting one would be Animal Crossing: City Folk. Imagine being able to put your villager into your Wiimote and taking him to move into a friend's town. Another good idea would be Mario Kart Wii, just so that you could use all of the karts that you unlocked on someone else's Wii if they haven't unlocked them all and also so you could rack up VR for yourself while playing split-screen online. But a game that I think they dropped the ball on was Brawl. You could only store your control scheme on a Wiimote, but I think that they could have done so much more. What if you could bring your Subspace Emissary progress with you? Then any stickers you unlocked could be used while playing at a friend's house. And this would probably go over the size limit, but being able to bring over custom stages would be cool too.
 
For comparison's sake the PS1 memory cards were 128 kB split into 15 blocks. So the Wii Remote had LESS than a single block of that to work with.

You really did answer your own question, had it been just a few times bigger maybe something could be done, but even for your more limited examples it would probably be only that one game and would need to be juggled out. Nevermind that its probably a pain to be that efficient so it's easier to ignore it.
 
Yeah, a lot of missed opportunities. All those ideas sound great. Would have been great for any drop in drop out RPG co-op titles, not that I can remember many of those on the Wii.
 
I never played much of Monster Hunter Tri but apparently you could store your profile on a Wiimote which I assume includes all of your gear and items.

I don't remember exactly but I think this is incorrect. It only stored Arena quest results so that you could do 2P splitscreen Arena at a friend's home, and then transfer the rewards to your save once you're back home.
 
IIRC the Wii U Gamepad also has 32MB of Flash storage but I don't know that access is allowed to it or if it's firmware only.
 
eh people brought over wiimotes all the time when i didnt have 4 wiimotes.

i thought it was a thing to store miis. save data would be another thing that co,es to mind but the storage is too small.
 
I don't remember exactly but I think this is incorrect. It only stored Arena quest results so that you could do 2P splitscreen Arena at a friend's home, and then transfer the rewards to your save once you're back home.

Oh really? Well, never mind then. I guess the tiny memory limited developers from doing anything interesting with it.
 
I liked how the speaker on the Wii Remote was used in the first No More Heroes game as a one-way phone call. I know that's not storing any memory but the energy was used for something Wii-specific.
 
It was such a neat idea... if only it had been a bit larger...

They should make a special app on the 3DS to use for this purpose, since you can use SDs and such. It's so handy, for instance, to be able to pluck my Mii from the 3DS onto a friend's Wii U when necessary. I hope that at least SSB4 uses the 3DS version like that in some way.
 
am I the only one that thinks it's kind of funny that the thing being described in this thread is just memory cards?
 
I hope the NFC figures will be a better version of this containing Mii's and stats. SSB4 is perfect as you could store button mapping and custom move sets for characters.

With Nintendo's desire for the figures to be use with multiple games hopefully the figures will contain a solid amount of storage.
 
I liked how the speaker on the Wii Remote was used in the first No More Heroes game as a one-way phone call. I know that's not storing any memory but the energy was used for something Wii-specific.
I had to unmute the speaker for this game lol
 
am I the only one that thinks it's kind of funny that the thing being described in this thread is just memory cards?

Hey, the Wiimote can only hold a small amount of data and not full saved games so actually it's less useful than a memory card...

But I'm not talking about full saved games, it's more like parts of a saved game like a character or a control scheme. I can't think of any PS1/PS2/DC/GC games that let you use data from multiple memory cards at the same time (i.e. using a saved game from card 1 but importing a character from card 2), but they probably do exist. Plus, it's just cool that stuff can be stored in your controller.
 
as simple as the MonHun implementation was, it was still pretty cool that you got to keep rewards gained playing at someone else's house.

Something multi-sign in and cloud-based profiles should be able to do but i haven't seen yet.
 
Imagine if Nintendo kept Rare. They could have used this for a Stop 'n' Swop more like their original conception of how it would work.
 
Hey, the Wiimote can only hold a small amount of data and not full saved games so actually it's less useful than a memory card...

But I'm not talking about full saved games, it's more like parts of a saved game like a character or a control scheme. I can't think of any PS1/PS2/DC/GC games that let you use data from multiple memory cards at the same time (i.e. using a saved game from card 1 but importing a character from card 2), but they probably do exist. Plus, it's just cool that stuff can be stored in your controller.

Animal Crossing is the only one I can think of.
 
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