Pros: Can be used as a remote or a gun

Cons : Can’t use it with a Wii Remote Charger

I’ve always liked the idea of having a walking stick that turns into a sword, but the closest I’ve come so far is Nyko’s Wand Action Pak, a Wii remote that turns into a pistol.

What It Is: A Remote That Can Talk to a Gun Shell

The Action Pak consists of Nyko’s version of the Wii remote, which they call the Nyko Wand, and a pistol shell into which the remote can be inserted. The interesting thing about the gun shell is that it communicates with the remote electronically. Generally speaking, gun shells have a mechanism that will simply shove the remote’s B button when you press the trigger. Nyko’s shell instead simple signals the remote that the B button has been pressed. This method also allows Nyko to map the A button to a hammer at the back of the gun. The shell is very small and light; it’s mainly just a handle and a trigger, with the remote itself becoming the gun’s barrel. This means all the buttons of the remote are uncovered and within reach. You can plug a nunchuk into the bottom of the shell. The bottom is shaped so that Nyko receivers like Nyko’s wireless nunchuk adapter can be attached. You can’t connect the MotionPlus to it, but so far there aren’t any shooting games that use the MotionPlus anyway. The shell is unusual in that it is essentially a battery cover. You take off the Wii remote’s battery cover and then shove the remote into the shell. This sets the remote very firmly into the shell, but on the other hand means you can’t use rechargers with the remote. Also, if you are disorganized like me there’s a reasonable chance you could lose the original battery cover, at which point you would no longer be able to use the remote without the gun shell.

Summary: A Simple Remote with Something Extra

Nyko’s Action Pak has a clean, simple design. It is light and works well, although the small, light quality also makes it feel more like a cap gun than a pistol. And when you don’t want to shoot anything, you can transform it from a dangerous weapon of destruction back into a harmless game remote.

When I was a boy, I would sometimes pretend to drive a race car by moving my hands in front of me as though I were steering an invisible wheel while making a “vroom vroom” noise. It was an activity I thought I had put behind me until I started playing racing games on the Wii. Once again I held my hands in the air, this time holding a remote control, and moved them as though I was driving. At least the racing games make the “vroom vroom” sound for me.

Wheels to Create a More Convincing Driving Experience

Nintendo’s Wii Wheel made the action a little more realistic by giving the player a wheel-shaped shell for the remote, but DreamGear has gone one step further, creating a shell with its own base that allows you to use the Wii remote very much like a conventional video game console steering wheel accessory.

DreamGear’s wheel base has suction cups on the bottom so you can firmly place it on a coffee table. I don’t have a coffee table in front of my couch, I have a fuzzy dice ottoman, but fortunately the weight of the base caused it to sink into the foam rubber of my ottoman and keep it in place while I steered. Later though when I played on a glass-top table the wheel did not stay in place, proof that suction cup technology has not changed since I was a child and my suction cup arrows refused to stick to the wall.

The wheel can be turned to the left or the right like a regular steering wheel and can also be tilted forward or back in order to take into account some of the odd things one can do with wheels in a Wii racing game.

A Wheel with More Stability but Less Mobility

Racing games on the Wii are not bound by the normal limits of steering wheels, so DreamGear’s wheel is useless when playing a game like Speed Racer that asks you to move the remote in every possible direction. But for games with more basic controls schemes like Mario Kart Wii and Excite Truck the wheel will do most of the things you need (although in Excite Truck using the wheel means you can’t do a stunt that requires wiggling the remote back and forth). (It is possible to separate the wheel from the base for games like Speed Racer.)

The main thing DreamGear’s wheel gives the player is increased stability. After running several tracks of Excite Truck with the wheel, I pulled the remote out of the wheel shell and used it by itself. Suddenly my truck, which I’d been guiding forward smoothly, was weaving from side to side like the driver was drunk.

Whether you need that stability is another question. I thought the added control would make me win every race in Mario Kart Wii, yet I found I did about the same or even slightly worse than with the simple Nintendo Wii Wheel shell. Since these games are designed and tested by people who are holding a wheel in mid-air, perhaps stability is something these games are not designed to demand.

To Buy or Not to Buy

As a reviewer, I should now tell my readers whether or not to buy DreamGear’s wheel, but I find myself on the fence. If you play racing games so much that your muscles begin to ache from holding the controller in mid-air I would say buy it. If you’re hoping it will improve your driving I would say, it might or it might not. If you just want a racing experience that feels a little bit closer to steering a car than the childhood practice of holding an invisible steering wheel and saying “vroom vroom,” DreamGear’s wheel might be just what you’re looking for

We all remember how cool it was the first time we tried the Wii. It was so incredible to be able to wield a virtual sword or a tennis racket just by waving around the Wii remote. It was neat to be able to use the remote like a computer mouse to select objects. It was something new and exciting. But we also remember that moment of disappointment and frustration when we realized the Wii was not quite what we expected. The remote was finicky, often misreading our movements. We would struggle with it, moving it faster or slower, angling it this way or that, trying to find the magic spot that would make it do what it was supposed to do. The problem was that the remote had a fairly limited ability to broadcast where it was in space. And so Nintendo has created the MotionPlus, an attachable add-on for the Wii remote that gives the Wii more information on the remote’s movements.
The Basics: What It Does

I don’t understand the technology, but apparently the MotionPlus contains a gyroscope that sends out rotational information, and this combined with the Wii remote’s accelerometer (which indicates direction and speed) tells the console almost exactly what the remote is doing.

The results can be seen most clearly in Wii Sports Resort, a mini-game collection which Nintendo designed specifically to show off the capabilities of the MotionPlus. Resort can tell the exact angle of a virtual ping pong paddle and can use the remote to accurately aim an arrow from a virtual bow. This means the small, somewhat random movements that will work in other Wii games aren’t good enough; the need to move realistically has finally forced me to use the remote’s wrist strap, because I need to move forcefully to get the same force out of my avatar.

A few non-Nintendo games are also MotionPlus compatible. The most notable is Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10. Because you can play that game with or without the MotionPlus it allows for a direct comparison of the two, and the difference is striking. With the MotionPlus, the game registers every small movement, sees exactly how far you move your virtual club and takes into account the exact angle of that club.
Some Reservations
Accuracy doesn’t necessarily make games more fun, since swinging your remote to hit the ball was already fun, but it does something just as important: it makes the game less frustrating. You no longer feel that you are battling the remote for supremacy over your game. Unfortunately you will still have to battle with the remote for games that aren’t MotionPlus enabled, like the games that have been coming out since the Wii’s release. Tenchu: Shadow Assassins’ refusal to recognize a forward thrust will never change, because the game was made before the advent of this new technology. And at least for now, it seems likely that most games will make no use of the MotionPlus, since there are plenty of Wii owners who don’t have one. There is also no guarantee that the MotionPlus will actually make much difference; Grand Slam Tennis played just as well for me without it. My biggest complaint about the MotionPlus is it cannot be used with some third-party add-ons. Wireless nunchuks, for example, communicate with the remote via a device that plugs into the nunchuk port. The MotionPlus plugs into that port as well. While the device has a port of its own into which you can plug the nunchuk, that port is positioned differently than on the remote, which makes it incompatible with some devices. It might be possible to plug some dongles into the MotionPlus anyway if not for these weird, seemingly extraneous plastic knobs on its bottom.
Conclusion: Yes, You Really Do Need This

But these are quibbles. At its best, the MotionPlus can be seen as the thing that completes the Wii revolution, allowing players the level of control they erroneously expected from the beginning.

Why wasn’t this technology in place when the Wii launched? According to Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, the technology simply wasn’t in place at the time to create a reasonably sized, reasonably priced gyroscope-equipped remote.

The MotionPlus does what it’s supposed to do, which leads to the question of, what now? Only a handful of upcoming MotionPlus-capable games have been announced, including Red Steel 2 and the next Legend of Zelda game, but brisk sales of Wii Sports Resort are filling homes with the MotionPlus, so publishers are likely to start adding support for it to more and more games. At first, much of this support will probably be minimal, offering useless features dropped in simply to allow publishers to put “MotionPlus” on their game’s covers, but within a year there should be some interesting uses for the new technology.

So, should you buy the MotionPlus? That depends on what you think of the current MotionPlus games. If you like sports mini-games then Wii Sports Resort is well worth buying, and if you’re a golf fan you’ll want the latest Tiger Woods game bundled with the MotionPlus. If neither of these appeals to you, then there is no need to rush out and get a MotionPlus. But it is something you will need sooner or later, because it is the future of the Wii.

DreamGear’s Twin Star Sabers, a pair of Wii remote add-ons that turn your remote into a light saber, fulfill the first basic necessity of gifts for kids: they look cool when you open them up.

Quality: Is This Supposed to Come Off?

I also would have destroyed it in about five minutes, because in spite of my advanced age and mellow habits, the thing started falling apart almost immediately

The handle into which you insert the remote has a hinged back that locks into place with two plastic locks. One of those locks snapped off after I’d removed and reinserted the Wii five or six times. The other lock is still in place, but it looks like a little more use would take care of it too.

The Styrofoam blade is already beginning to fray a little. To be fair, a more durable plastic blade would probably also hurt more if you hit someone with it, so I can give DreamGear a pass on that, but the deteriorating handle is an unmitigated disaster. I wasn’t trying to stress test the saber, like Consumer Reports would, but I still managed to destroy it.

The saber also makes sounds when you wave it around, but you have to swing it pretty hard to get those sounds, even though you generally need very little movement to play a Wii game. The sounds are also quiet and tiny.

Conclusion: Just Imagine How Fast A Kid Could Destroy This Thing.

With the Wii, players can make believe that their remote is a baseball bat or a tennis racquet, but ultimately what they have in their hand is still just a short electronic gizmo. And so, to help with players suspend their disbelief, game accessory makers have created facsimiles of sports equipment to attach to your Wii. I tried out a couple of these “sports packs” recently, starting out with the NERF Sports Pack.

The Sports Pack consists of a soft tennis racquet, baseball bat and golf club. These are not full-sized; instead you have perhaps the top third of a baseball bat, the bottom third of a golf club and a half-sized (if that) tennis racquet, all made of soft rubber. The Wii remote inserts into a handle that can attach to any of the three. While in real sports you would be holding a cylinder, with the Sports Pack you’re actually hold a partial cylinder with a Wii stuck into it, which is less comfortable.

There is little practical use for these items, but they do make you feel a bit more like you're really playing a sport. Trying them all with Wii Sports, the game that comes with the Wii and that is the main reason sports packs exist, I found the baseball bat was the most fun. Its heft, though slight, gives more momentum to your swing, and makes you feel more like you’re swinging a real bat. The main annoyance is you have to take the remote out of the handle when it’s time to pitch.

The golf club had less of that momentum effect, but it did encourage me to hold my hands properly; I’ve had problems in the past twisting my shoulder when swinging the remote in two-handed golf swing; somehow using the faux golf club helped.

Tennis is a whole other story. For some reason, when I was using the racquet, Wii Sports would not recognize my swing, and the ball would just fly past. I tried various grips, and sometimes I would manage to get my virtual player to swing, but it was very spotty.

While I couldn’t usually return tennis balls, I could serve, but my serve was terrible. In Wii Sports, I can, using just the remote, blast my serve past the other player almost every time. With the racquet attached, the ball barely made it over the net.

This is really an issue with Wii Sports more than with the NERF racquet. When I played New Play Control! Mario Power Tennis, I had no trouble getting the game to recognize my swings. But I did discover another issue. I have a small apartment, and when I stand in front the couch I’m only about 3 and a half feet away from my TV. This is fine, except in the heat of the game I would tend to lean forward in a tennis posture from which I could hit my TV. Fortunately, that soft rubber was no match for my TV, which survived several whaps, but it was quite annoying.

Conclusion: Well Made if You Like Sports Packs.

The Nerf Sports Pack is attractive and solidly built and does generally add a little something to sports games, as long as you’re not playing Wii Sports tennis game. The only real flaw in the design is the button used to unlock the handle from the various sports items; it’s hard to push in, and I would expect young children to find it impossible to switch from one sport to another on their own. But over all, if you want a sports pack, this is a pretty solid one.