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Xbox 360 Slim 320GB Hard Drive
by giantrobot42
I came relatively late to the world of Xbox 360, courtesy of a freebie from a mobile phone contract upgrade. After initially playing a few games and discovering the fun to be had from online gaming, it soon became clear that the 4Gb of memory supplied with the unit wasn't going to be enough.
The hard drive upgrade is the ... obvious solution to storage issues. It was especially easy to install, there is a slot underneath the Xbox which is custom made for it. You just slot the unit in and off you go. It is a bit expensive when compared to the freestanding hard drives you can get for PC's but I paid around £40 for mine which seems reasonable.
The advantages are clear straight away. Firstly, it makes it a lot easier to download and store demos. Also, any in-game storage requirements are well catered for. I've bought a couple of the add-ons for Modern Warfare 3 and some Guitar Hero packs and still have plenty of room left. I don't imagine even the most hardened player is going to run out of room for save games either.
I didn't realise initially that a game can be stored on the hard drive to speed up access. This has proved useful for me in a couple of cases. I have a game called Rage which supports high definition graphics but only if you install the game to your hard drive. It's nice to be able to do this and the game looks great because of it. Also, I have a couple of second-hand titles which have disks that are a bit scratched. Frequently, these would struggle to load but once they were installed on the hard drive, I could run them every time ( you still need the original disk but it clearly doesn't need to read much of it any more).
I haven't downloaded any music or films yet but I can see that I've got plenty of room if I decide to. So I think this is a no-brainer for anyone with a 4Gb Xbox 360.
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Nintendo Wii Motion Plus Accessory
by autumnleaf
The Wii Motion Plus is a little gadget which you can plug into the bottom of your wiimote, where the connector for the nunchuck usually goes, to obtain extra information about the controllers movements to better gauge the orientation of the wii remote. You can still plug the nunchuck into the bottom of the motion plus extension. It ... should be noted that this accessory will only provide extra accuracy for games that actually support the peripheral, so be sure to check your software to see if the motion plus is either required or if it will give extra accuracy.
The wiimote works by using acceleration to measure movement up to a fixed amount (3 gs i think) . It should be noted that gravity is a force acting on the wiimote, so a wiimote that doesn't move will always indicate the direction of gravity, which is how some tilt games like Monkey Ball etc. work. It also means that as you begin to move the wiimote, the wiimote no longer knows the direction of gravity and so it doesn't know which way is down and can therefore no longer accurately reports its orientation.
With the wiimotion plus, not only linear acceleration is recorded, but angular acceleration is also detected. This means, using clever tracking, we can use the rotational information to tell us which way down is, theoretically allowing us to detection the orientation of the wiimote during movements. Unfortunately, this requires the user to calibrate the wiimote to a stationary position first, and the wiimote also suffers from a phenomenan called Yaw Drift, which effectively means that over time, the orientation gets less accurate as it can no longer detect which way is forwards, although pointing the wiimote at the sensor bar should fix this.
Overall, this extension adds some useful information to the wiimote, albeit still flawed, which can offer extra accuracy for games like Zelda, Virtua Tennis and the like. In practice, the extra technology isn't noticed a great deal by the user and I would only be tempted to buy this add-on if you had some games in mind that already wanted to play, I found that I use the extension very little and that it often drifts for me.
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Nintendo Game Boy Player
by Chloboshoka
If you, like me still enjoy playing on the gamecube and have a lot of gameboy games to play, this device is perfect. The Nintendo Gameboy Player offers what Super Gameboy did for Snes: they allow you to play your small gameboy games and play them on the big screen. The gameboy player for gamecube is slotted underneath the gamecube and ... the games are inserted as you would on a regular game. As I have a black gamecube, it looks really discreet and looks as if it's part of the gamecube.
A couple of things that you might not be able to tell on the product picture, but there is a link cable at the front so you can play multiplayer tasks on the games and you also need a disc for it. It doesn't take up any space on your memory cards, so you don't have to worry about those.
For me this product has really affected the way I treated my gamecube. I feel a lot more enthusiastic about the gamecube and I find I've been on it a lot more often. The Gameboy Player should work on all gameboy/gameboy advance/gameboy colour games. I also have a copy of pokemon green, which was exclusive to Japan and that works on it too. I've found that the player has enhanced my enjoyment for playing the retro games because wipes away the problems of playing on the gameboy such as low battery and small screens. Mainly for me it's low battery.
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbfm1sDwgt1r7yaero1_500.jpg - this picture pretty much describes the clear it is, although there is a bit of glare from the light.
As for the controls, the controls are pretty much exported from the gameboy to the gamecube. In my experience, I've found that the gamecube controls are a lot easier than of the handheld consoles, which for me is because of the analog stick and because the buttons are quite close together and designed in a way that it's comfortable to hold.
Nintendo did a good job on this. This is an almost flawless device. I say almost flawless is because not everybody needs it. If you have gameboy games and a gamecube, this would be great to use, but not everybody has both so it might be a question of weather a consumer needs it or wants it. But I've had no problems with it, it's never crashed or glitched out on me. The sound and graphics are great all round. Unless the graphics and sounds on the game are not good, then the product would highlight that, but it does a great job capturing the game on the big screen. It performs really well and I've had this for many years and it's worked like a charm.
As you can tell I really loved this and find it hard to imagine my gamecube without it. It has everything I could ask for and does everything I expect it to do. If you have a gamecube and some gameboy games you still like to play, I think they're worth buying.
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