I recently finished playing Super Paper Mario (for probably the sixth time), and I did so across my Steam Deck and my PC with an Xbox controller. Since this is a Wii game that depended on Wii Remote motion features, making it work on the common gamepad is non-trivial. Specifically, these need workarounds:

• Pointing at the screen for Tippi’s tattle, the minigames Forget Me Not and Mansion Patrol, and some items like Ghost Shroom
• Horizontal remote shaking for Stylish moves, recovering from sleeping or being frozen, a thing in the Chapter 3 boss fight, and some items like Fire Burst
• Vertical remote shaking for some items like Mighty Tonic
• Tilting for the Tilt Island minigame, and some items like Long-Last Shake
• Swinging for the minigame Hammer Whacker

Thankfully, it’s much easier today to play most of the game with a standard controller by using a hack to add Classic Controller compatibility. This was done by GBAtemp user Vague Rant. The post with Gecko codes and button binding is available here.

Unfortunately, as of March 2025, this hack does not cover motion-related features. The pointer is implemented as a button toggle and uses the joysticks, but items and minigames that require shaking, tilting, and swinging, still require the use of a real Wii Remote. Through an emulator, however, it’s possible to bind these actions to buttons and joystick.

In my case, I decided to bind ZL to horizontal shake (Z axis), ZR to vertical shake (Y axis), and right stick to tilting. Tilt binds should be “rotated”; that is, forward tilting should actually be pushing the right stick left, and left tilting is pushing down. (I don’t know if the “Sideways Wii Remote” affects tilt binds.) Horizontal shake works well to fill meters, but seems not perfectly reliable for Stylish moves.

On the Classic Controller pairing, make sure to remove the binds for the L and R buttons (which confusingly will be bound to the Xbox controller’s ZL/ZR buttons), so it doesn’t conflict with the shake motion binds. L and R refers to the triggers on the right side of the window, not ZL and ZR non-analog buttons, nor the Xbox controller’s L and R non-analog buttons.

As for swinging, it only seems to be used for the Hammer Whacker minigame as far as I know. I decided to bind forward swing to the Xbox controller’s R button. Even though it overlaps with the Classic Controller’s ZR button, the swing action shouldn’t affect anything else. In my testing, the swing action works pretty reliably for the minigame, never missing any shots.

While it’s possible to instead bind motion features to the gyroscope of a compatible controller (such as the Steam Deck or PlayStation controllers), I decided to go for a motion-less setup for compatibility with Xbox controllers.

Make sure to save the controller layout and have it automatically load. That is, put in the GameINI:

[Controls]
WiimoteProfile1 = YourLayoutName