GAME GAMEware Wii Sensor Bar

...one over the counter at GAME stores meaning that you'll lose little in terms of valuable playing time.


Design wise, this is slightly different from the original sensor bar with a slightly curved shape to it. This might potentially look a bit messy if you've got a small flat panel with it perched on top, although it fits easily enough to a normal sized TV, even flat screen ones, and looks a fair bit nicer and sturdier than the ...
...Nintendo's offering, although so long as you've got the unit installed somewhere and aren't moving it around it should be relatively safe.


You might have heard tales of people replacing a broken sensor bar with candles, which does work - look for the video on Youtube - as they provide a strong signal in the infra-red, but for less than £10 this is not an expensive purchase; although you might find cheaper Wii sensor bars by shopping ... more

The Wii might have been the best thing to happen to console gaming since, well, at least the Xbox 360, but the need to install the sensor bar rather ties you to a particular television.

It works via two infra-red LEDs which send out signals that are picked up by the Wii-mote which calculates its position via triangulation; accelerometers in the Wii-mote allow it to recalculate its position when out of sight. Since all the complicated electronics are in the Wii-mote and the console, the sensor bar is a relatively simple bit of kit; it is, however, crucial to the operation of the console as a whole. Wii-motes will just about work without it for a while, but will regularly cut-out and drift off-target.

If you're the sort of person with multiple TVs in the household and want to move your Wii around you've got to remove and re-attach the sensor bar and doing this more than a couple of times will wear out the sticky pads on the bottom. As such, getting a second sensor bar might be a good investment. Particularly, seeing as you'll then have a spare about the household for the almost inevitable occasion when you break the cable. This does seem to happen to rather a lot of people, after all.

The flimsy cable that connects it to the back of the console is easily snapped, should you move the console or television without remembering to unplug it, rendering the whole system useless. Not to worry though, as these replacement sensor bars work just as well as the original one, are relatively cheap, and you can buy one over the counter at GAME stores meaning that you'll lose little in terms of valuable playing time.

Design wise, this is slightly different from the original sensor bar with a slightly curved shape to it. This might potentially look a bit messy if you've got a small flat panel with it perched on top, although it fits easily enough to a normal sized TV, even flat screen ones, and looks a fair bit nicer and sturdier than the official product. Alas, the cable isn't much more robust than Nintendo's offering, although so long as you've got the unit installed somewhere and aren't moving it around it should be relatively safe.

You might have heard tales of people replacing a broken sensor bar with candles, which does work - look for the video on Youtube - as they provide a strong signal in the infra-red, but for less than £10 this is not an expensive purchase; although you might find cheaper Wii sensor bars by shopping around, for prices as low as under £2, they're unlikely to be in shops where you can easily buy them on the spot. I'd also recommend avoiding wireless sensor bars as they've got a fearsome reputation for eating batteries.

Some of the specific criteria don't really apply, so I've left them at Average/Satisfactory. 

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