Nyko Wireless Sensor Bar - A must-have for the Wii

The Nyko Wireless Sensor Bar is a great accessory for the Wii for gamers who play on large screen TV's. No more wires to hinder the placement of the sensor, plus it gives you additional range as compared to the wired sensor bar that comes with the Wii.

What are the features of the bar and the differences between this bar and the wired sensor bar that comes with the Wii?

Wireless - This sensor bar is wireless, no more wires to worry about. It runs on 4 AA batteries which come with the bar. Four fully charged AA batteries should give you up to 30 hours of gameplay.

Size - This sensor bar is bigger than the one that comes with the Wii, it's taller, wider and a little deeper. My approximate measurements are - a little over 10 inches wide, a little under 1 inch tall and a little over 1 inch deep. While it is larger, it's not too large to sit in front of your TV on your TV stand.

Range - This wireless sensor bar will work up to 25 feet away as compared to the wired sensor bar that comes with the Wii that only works for up to about 10 feet away. This will allow you to sit further away from the TV and play, which is great for gamers with large screen TV's. We usually sit about 10 feet away and sometimes had problems with the bar that came with the Wii, ever since we started using the wireless bar, we haven't had any problems except when the batteries were low.

Bigger/Better Rubber Feet - While the sensor bar that came with the Wii had those little rubber feet on the bottom, we still found that if we bumped the bar, it would slide on the stand and we would have to reposition it. The wireless sensor bar has larger rubber feet and they seem to do a better job to keep it from moving if it gets bumped. For most people this probably won't be a big deal, but anyone with kids will understand why I mention it.

On/Off Button and Blue LED Light - A must have for anything that runs on batteries, in my opinion. The on/off button is on the top right of the bar, just push it to turn it on and the blue LED light will come on. To to turn it off you have to push and hold the button until the blue LED light goes off. I'm assuming this is so you don't accidentally turn it off by bumping the button. Another interesting feature, not sure if it was planned, but as the batteries wear down, the blue LED light will dim, so if the light starts getting dim you know that you don't have a lot of battery power left and it's time to think about changing the batteries before it interferes with gameplay.

Timer - This sensor bar has a one and two hour timer, found on the bottom of the bar. To help save power, they added this timer that you can set, since it can be easy to forget to turn the bar off. You can set it for one or two hours, once the time is up, you will hear the bar start to beep, to warn you about the timer. If you're not done playing, you can easily turn the timer to off and it won't interfere with anything, but if you don't, the timer will power the bar down to help save batteries. Honestly, we don't use the timer that often because we never know how long we will be playing, but we have used it a few times when we've let the kids play and they needed to quit by a certain time.

Conclusion

I definitely recommend the Nyko Wireless Sensor Bar to anyone with a Wii. It definitely lives up to it's claims of about 30 hours of gameplay per set of batteries and we haven't had any problems with it. I do suggest you make sure you have extra batteries on hand, which you should anyways because of the Wiimotes, because if you don't have them on hand, it's hassle to have to switch over to the wired bar when you're in the middle of playing a game. That happened to us once, since then we've made sure we've had plenty of AA batteries sitting around.

Since getting the wireless bar, we can now sit on the couch and play games instead of having to pull up a chair in front of the TV when we used the wired bar. Our couch sits about 10 feet away from our 32 inch flat screen and we haven't had any problems with the responsiveness, when we tried to sit on the couch and play with the wired bar, we had problems with it not always responding correctly, which caused lots of frustration. Thankfully, this bar fixed that problem and now our only frustrations are with the games, although my 9 year old still tries to blame the Wiimote not responding when he doesn't do well on something, but he's done this on all game systems (even with wired controllers), it's always something or someone else's fault when he doesn't do well, never his.

If you have a Wii and haven't picked this up yet, I definitely recommend you do, you won't have to sit right up to the TV anymore and it's not a bad deal for less than $20.