Mighty Gadget Blog: The latest technology news & reviews in the UK

For those of you that despise the mess of wires and enjoy a bit of retro gaming on the Wii there are a growing number of solutions for you. One of which is the Snakebyte Wii Wireless Retro Controller.

The manufacturer of this controller, SnakeByte, a European peripheral manufacturer that is offering an increasingly large range of peripherals for the NDS, PS3, PSP, Wii and the Xbox 360.

The Wireless Retro Controller is quite simply what it says on the box, a wireless version of the retro controller.

The controller works by inserting a wireless dongle into the Wiimote, and it requires 2 batteries on top of the 2 you already have in the Wiimote. This is one thing I did think that was bad about the controller, just think of the number of batteries you could potentially go through? Though to be fair this is an unavoidable issue.

The controller itself is well built, it feels really solid, I haven’t used any 3rd party retro controllers but I did use a 3rd party Gamecube controller (which I cant remember the name of) and I found the build to be quite poor.

Performance wise the controller met all expectations, it works just as well as the official Nintendo wired version and I had no issues with losing connection. I have not played it enough to test hw long the batteries last but all seems well so far.

The controller currently retails at £29.99 in comparison you can get the Official Nintendo Wii Classic Controller for £14.99.

In conclusion the controller is excellent, and if you hate having wires everywhere then it is a must buy, however if you are not that bothered about wires I am not sure if double the price is worth it. I would however happily pay £5-10 more than the official wired controller.

Along with the Snakebyte controller I also received the Snakebyte Wii Premium Component Cable, again this is what it says on the box. Some of the features of this premium cable include:

- Optimal picture quality with 480p signal

- Anticorrosive gold plated contacts for ideal signal quality

- Metallic cinch connectors with rubberised grips

- Additional stereo audio cinch connectors

- Solid copper wires with multiple shielding

- 2m cable length

My first reaction to the cable was very positive, the build quality is considerably better than that of the cable supplied with the Wii. All the metal connectors are gold plated and noticeably heavy compared to the cheaper Nintendo ones. The cable is also wrapped in a plastic/fabric sheath which decent improvement over the rubberised cover of the normal ones.

I have been told that the component cable is supposed to retail at £14.99 but I can currently only find it available on Amazon for £23.59.

If you are looking at upgrading your cable or want to get the best picture possible out of your Wii then I 110% recommend this.

For those of you that despise the mess of wires and enjoy a bit of retro gaming on the Wii there are a growing number of solutions for you. One of which is the Snakebyte Wii Wireless Retro Controller.

The manufacturer of this controller, SnakeByte, a European peripheral manufacturer that is offering an increasingly large range of peripherals for the NDS, PS3, PSP, Wii and the Xbox 360.

The Wireless Retro Controller is quite simply what it says on the box, a wireless version of the retro controller.

The controller works by inserting a wireless dongle into the Wiimote, and it requires 2 batteries on top of the 2 you already have in the Wiimote. This is one thing I did think that was bad about the controller, just think of the number of batteries you could potentially go through? Though to be fair this is an unavoidable issue.

The controller itself is well built, it feels really solid, I haven’t used any 3rd party retro controllers but I did use a 3rd party Gamecube controller (which I cant remember the name of) and I found the build to be quite poor.

Performance wise the controller met all expectations, it works just as well as the official Nintendo wired version and I had no issues with losing connection. I have not played it enough to test hw long the batteries last but all seems well so far.

The controller currently retails at £29.99 in comparison you can get the Official Nintendo Wii Classic Controller for £14.99.

In conclusion the controller is excellent, and if you hate having wires everywhere then it is a must buy, however if you are not that bothered about wires I am not sure if double the price is worth it. I would however happily pay £5-10 more than the official wired controller.

Along with the Snakebyte controller I also received the Snakebyte Wii Premium Component Cable, again this is what it says on the box. Some of the features of this premium cable include:

- Optimal picture quality with 480p signal

- Anticorrosive gold plated contacts for ideal signal quality

- Metallic cinch connectors with rubberised grips

- Additional stereo audio cinch connectors

- Solid copper wires with multiple shielding

- 2m cable length

My first reaction to the cable was very positive, the build quality is considerably better than that of the cable supplied with the Wii. All the metal connectors are gold plated and noticeably heavy compared to the cheaper Nintendo ones. The cable is also wrapped in a plastic/fabric sheath which decent improvement over the rubberised cover of the normal ones.

I have been told that the component cable is supposed to retail at £14.99 but I can currently only find it available on Amazon for £23.59.

If you are looking at upgrading your cable or want to get the best picture possible out of your Wii then I 110% recommend this.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King has finally been released to thousands of eager fans.

More than 2,000 people waited outside an Oxford Street store on central London to get an advanced copy of the second expansion pack for WOW.

The Wrath of the Lich King includes a bonus continent for high-level players, a plenty of new enemies, extra equipment, spells, and new professions.

The expansion will give players access to a new character, a Death Knight.

The Knight is a plate-wearing tank/DPS hybrid and will be available for players around level 55+. It is meant for end-game use only.

World of Warcraft has is currently the most popular online game (and most likely to stay that way for a while yet!) and has more than 11m registered players.

Jack Thompson has been a thorn in the side of video game companies with his fight against computer violence. While he has caused quite a bit of grief for game companies he has become a bit of a laughing stock in the community.

Thompson was recommended for permanent disbarment this year on charges of abusing the legal system and 27 different counts of misconduct. As well as getting permanently disbarred, Thompson was also forced to pay $43,675.35 in legal fees to the court.

According to Game Politics it would appear that the disbarment has finally been made official.

I am sure this wont stop him from being so vocal about his beliefs though

The Florida Bar documents for disciplinary action can be read here

Well Spore has finally arrived after so many delays and seems to be receiving some mixed responses, though on average they do seem to be positive.

It looks like it could be a love it or hate it sort of game. A lot of gamers are criticising it for being repetitive and shallow. This appears to stem from the fact that the game covers 5 gaming genres over 5 stages. This has led to each section being implemented in a somewhat shallow manor compared to its fully fledged counterparts. However fans are praising it saying it is not a hardcore RTS but a great sandbox game appealing to the masses. Also the game should be viewed a whole rather as 5 individual games.

I have had chance to play it for an hour or so and I personally quite like it. I have found that I hardly game any more as I don’t have time and I just can not be bothered concentrating enough for complex RTS games or games where I actually need to follow the story line. With Spore I can load it up eat a few creature and evolve a little in whatever spare time I can find and just generally kill time.

Unfortunately I do have a serious issue with Spore which I think could massively effect its popularity. EA in their great wisdom have decided to use a modified version of the oh so popular and controversial SecuROM DRM software which will require authentication upon installation and when online access is used, it will also be limited to three installations. Now don’t get me wrong, I am all up for a company having some DRM on their software, after all they have spent millions developing it and I can imagine it is quite annoying when everyone copies it, however limiting the number of installations to 3 is criminal in my opinion. I personally re-install windows at least once a year because all the crap I have on it slows it down, my Girlfriend has a smaller brother and sister and they must of re-installed the Sims 20+ times because the computer can barely last a month before some of the crap they download slows it down.

Once 3 installations have been used the game will become un-playable and EA must be contacted to have the count reset. Now call me a pessimist but this sounds like it will cause no end of headaches. From my experience customer support centres have a tendency to be occupied by people no more intelligent than chimps. I will also bet any money that the customer support phone number will not be free-phone.

So OK what did EA expect to achieve with this copy protection? I am assuming they are trying to stop millions of people downloading the game via BitTorrent. Have they succeeded? Erm no, I read reports of it being available on Wednesday 2 days before the UK release. This included a keygen and crack. So well done EA you did a good job of stopping that.

Personally I think they best method of stopping piracy is to offer more than just single player offline gaming. I realise this is not always possible for games, but if online gaming is available and requires an original copy then I feel that most people are happy to fork out the money. The best example is Call of Duty 4. I think I paid about £30 for it and I have had hours of fun with it, easily making it worth its money.

Anyway even though I think EA are stupid for using this DRM I still bought it and I will still enjoy it!

Scan’s Great White, as shown to the left, has won the coveted Custom PC Dream PC 2008 award, beating competition from HP and Armari. Armari’s machine technically wasn’t fully entered, as the magazine chose not to fully review it since the submitted computer was a prototype not available for mass production.

Custom PC has had a Dream PC competition dating back to 2004. Previous winners include SavRow in 2004 (for a water-cooled machine featuring a single core Athlon64 and GeForce 6800 Ultra, a spec that cost several thousand pounds at the time and would be outgunned by a £500 laptop today), Armari in 2005 and Vadim in 2006. Scan’s back-to-back wins in 2007 and 2008 make the firm the first supplier to win twice.

Scan’s beast is based around the following spec:

• Silverstone TJ07 super tower case, finished with extensive chrome plating and laser-etched Great White logo. Various sections of the case are lit with white LEDs to give it a slightly more upmarket feel.
• nVidia 790i SLI motherboard
• 1kW Corsair PSU
• 3 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1
• Extensive, custom-manufactured water cooling equipment from Aqua Computer and Alphacool
• Core 2 Quad Q9650 - overclocked to 4.4GHz from its stock 3GHz speed
• 2×2Gb Corsair Dominator DDR3
• 3 XTX GTX 280 graphics cards with 1Gb of GDDR3 RAM each, GPU clocked at 670MHz and RAM at 2500MHz
• 64Gb OCZ SSD - 2.5″ device with 143MB/sec read and 93MB/sec write
• Panasonic slot-loading DVD writer
• Panasonic slot-loading Blu Ray writer as well
• X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty sound card
• KillerNIC M1 network interface card with 400Mhz processor
• Vista Ultimate 64bit
• 24″ Zalman 3D monitor

How does it perform? In a word, fast. Custom PC unfortunately don’t provide extensive benchmark results but they claim to have seen it perform their standard video encoding benchmark to within a couple of points of an overclocked Skulltrail rig.

Price? That’s the tricky part. If you want the best, you can’t compromise - and that means paying Scan a total of £11,162.49 inc VAT. Reckon you could build better for less? What would you change? Leave your comments and let us know.

NVIDIA have finally enabled PhysX support via a free GeForce Power Pack download that contains a free full copy of Warmonger, three PhysX-enabled Unreal Tournament 3 maps, demos of Metal Knight Zero and the Nurien UT3-based social networking service, and a couple tech demos.

As you may know Nvidia bought Ageia and the PhysX engine in February 2008 effectively rendering the PhysX add-in card redundant. PhysX is currently the only available solution for physics hardware acceleration.

Download the GeForce Power Pack

There are currently several rumours flying around the net that there could be a large price drop for the Xbox 360.

Rumour has it Microsoft might be planning another rather significant slashing of prices for its console again, with the ‘entry-level’ arcade model suggested to be a bargain basement $199 (£100).

The PS3 seems to be gaining momentum recently so this could help Xbox maintain sales.