How to Play WII Light Gun Games on the PC

The Wii was a great console and more importantly, because of the motion input controllers, it had a lot of rail type shooters ported over as well as a fair few originals. 

The only problem was that the Wiimote just wasn’t as good as playing with a real light gun and you needed cross hairs to play properly because you couldn’t do line of sight aiming.

Fortunately, it’s possible to play these games with an emulator on your PC and use a more traditional light gun.

This article will look at a few of my favourite Wii Gun Games as well as the step by step instructions on how to play them with a real light gun on your PC.

The best Light Gun games for the Wii

So, I have another article looking at more of the light gun games for the WII but these are my top 3 of all time and my priority for getting working.

Also, they cover most of the bases of controls for rail shooters on the WII so if we stel through the setup for each as well as the default set up then.

The top 3 wii light gun games are:

• Ghost Squad
• House of the Dead 2 and 3 Returns
• House of the Dead Overkill

Let me know in the comments if you have others that you like better.

How to set up your emulator for WII Gun games.

We will be using the Dolphin emulator. Just click the download button on the home page to get the latest stable build: https://dolphin-emu.org/

Install it and run the application once it is finished. I’m not going to go into that as they have guides on their site and it really is just clicking the next button a few times.

Once it opens, you will be faced with a blank screen with a few buttons.

You can add your games directory or just open games individually each time.

You will have to find your games yourself. Just type the game name and wii rom into google and you should be able to find plenty of sources.

The key thing that you need to do is configure your input.

Click on the controller button

You will be presented with a window with lots of options.

All you need to do is to set all of the game cube controllers to “None”  and Wii Remote 1 to emulated Wii Mote. Then click configure on Wii Remote 1.

There isn’t really a reason to set the Game cube controllers to none other than it sometimes causes conflicts. I would get your light gun set up and working first then you can play about with adding them in if you need them.

Next you can start setting up your light gun controls.

The Device at the top should be your light gun.

The buttons can be anything that you want to use but one thing to note is that the aimtrack button press seems to be picked up as the mouse device so you may need to set them on the mouse input device to have them detected. It depends on how you have configured your aimtrak. Try just clicking into the box next to each button and then clicking the relevant button on your light gun.

That should work, but if it doesn’t work in game then set them as your mouse device as I detail below for the motion controls.

Also, remember that onscreen triggers are different to off screen trigger so make sure you are aiming at the screen when you set your trigger.

Next, you need to set your motion controls so that moving your light gun moves the on screen crosshairs (or send the target coordinates correctly at least)

Make sure that your light gun is selected in the device at the top left.

Then in the Point section, right click in the Up box.

 That will bring up a Configure input screen

.

On that screen, you need to tell it to look for input from the mouse (not the light gun even though that is what we will be using)

Select your mouse then click clear at the bottom to remove and previous settings.

In the scroll box, scroll down to Cursor Y-. Click it and press the select button. 

Close that window and do the same for each direction (the Y +, X- and X+ will already be set if you want to know which direction each is so you just change it to the same direction but on the mouse device)

You might also want to set a button to emulate a shake event as that is required in House of the Dead Overkill:

Finally, you will want to hide the mouse cursor. The games all have an in-game crosshair which you can choose to hide or show in game but regardless you don’t want the pointer to show.

Go to Config then click in Interface and at the bottom is the option to hide the cursor.

Once you have done that, you should be good to go.

Load up your favorite game and have fun.