All Accessories Feeds

Nintendo Wii Fit Balance Board

1208342530

From the cheesy ads and the mocking YouTube parodies, you could be forgiven for thinking that Nintendo’s Wii Fit and Balance Board would be overly-worthy, not very entertaining, or just plain silly.

But, of course, it’s made by Nintendo, a company which is fast becoming a master of turning mundane of tasks into fun activities (accompanied by vast amounts of profit).

The Wii Fit pack contains the software, the balance board and four AA batteries. Set-up is dead simple: load the Wii Fit disc, sync the board with your Wii (as you do with Wiimotes, switch the board on and you’re good to go).

Body Mass Index

When you first use Wii Fit, it works out your body mass index (BMI) and then suggests what your ideal BMI should be based on your weight and height. This becomes your new target BMI, giving you something to aim for over the course of your Wii Fitting, with various graphs enabling you to follow your progress.

This portion can also be stored as a Wii channel so you can perform daily measurements without constantly having to load the Wii Fit disc.

Wii Fit’s activities are split between Aerobic Exercise, Muscle Conditioning, Yoga Poses and Balance Games. The Balance Board is neatly integrated in that it monitors your stance during yoga, for example, and measures reps during exercises. You could perform most of the training without it, but it wouldn’t be quite as engaging.

But naturally it’s with the games that Wii Fit really shines. Mastering a ski slalom with your feet is way harder than it sounds, and provides a challenge the whole family can enjoy. It also levels the playing field: teen joypad junkies are just as likely to be rubbish as Mum or Dad who’ve never touched a videogame before. (And if the old man’s a keen footballer, he’ll probably have better balance and control than his rotund rug rats.)

Ski jump

The Balance Board is used ingeniously, too. Alongside the obvious balance-related games – steer the ball across the wobbly platform, walk a tightrope – there’s a ski jump game. You have to crouch as the skier starts his descent, then stand up sharply at take-off. By maintaining your balance, you remain airborne for a greater distance. It’s bizarre, you look an idiot doing it, but it’s totally effective and maddeningly addictive.

Ultimately, how much you get out of Wii Fit depends on how much you’re willing to put in. Some people get utterly addicted to Brain Training, for example, while others tire of the repetition after a week or so. And this is supposed to be exercise, remember.

Certainly a family playing Wii Fit together will have more fun competing for a lower BMI rating and higher game scores than the solus player simply going through each workout.

But the short answer is: it works, it’s fun and after building up a real sweat jogging round a virtual park, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t help to make you fitter and slimmer – assuming you don’t celebrate every session with a bar of Cadbury’s finest.

Footnote:

In all honesty, the score is of little real relevance because you either already want Wii Fit – in which case you’ve pre-ordered – or you’ve no real interest. Which is fine, because on launch day there won’t be any stock anyway.

Despite going up against GTA IV, Wii Fit is pretty much already sold out. At the time of writing, of 17 major retailers only four were still taking pre-orders; the rest were out of stock. And analysts expect stock to be in short supply through till 2009. The Nintendo Wii: license to print money.

Matrox TripleHead2Go

tech.co.uk staff — 1204880679

This is, as far as we can discern, an enchanted black box that takes a single VGA cable from your graphics card or laptop, performs witchcraft upon it, and allows you to increase and divide the output to a frankly ridiculous 3,840x1,024 across three 1,280x1,024 monitors.

With the TripleHead2Go you can either utilise more desktop space than you've ever seen, or play a game in what can only be described as 'surround-ovision'. After using it, you should promptly bury it by the light of the moon before it turns into a cat.

The results are pretty impressive, and, heretical ravings aside, it's actually an extremely simple system. The TripleHead2Go does the job of a monitor's video controller, fooling Windows into thinking it is dealing with a single enormo-screen.

Even on a laptop with an average mobile GeForce 6800, the performance was surprisingly stable. Clearly shifting 3D across nearly four million pixels is not as strenuous as we'd been led to believe.

We tested the setup with a variety of titles, from our preview copy of hardcore driving sim GTR2 to office stalwart Quake IV, and most were entirely playable. The game that suffered most was Oblivion, but playing Bethesda's epic is a bit of a compromise on most systems anyway, and with a decent SLI rig everything barrels along nicely.

Peripheral vision

Also, some games are more suited to an increased field of view than others - GTR2 was hugely enhanced by the added peripheral awareness, whereas Quake IV left us feeling nauseous.

If you've completely lost your grip on reality, you can even use a laptop's existing panel as a fourth screen using XP's multiple monitor support, so you can play your super-widescreen game and have your MSN contacts and icons visible as well.

The only drawbacks are a lack of DVI and the financial one - few of us can afford two extra monitors, plus the cost of the unit itself.

With the included Surround Game Utility (which edits the config files of popular games so that they support the greater resolution) it's clearly aimed primarily at leisure rather than business use, but only the most ambitious flight sim fanatics will be able to justify the total outlay. Mike Channell

Matrox's TripleHead2Go

tech.co.uk staff — 1204468035

The continuing price plummet of 19-inch LCD screens means that many models are now available for little more than £100 - around a third of the price that they were a year or so ago. To compensate for this price crash, it's a good idea to buy three screens instead of one, and the TripleHead2Go is the reason why.

Just as we were starting to think that the legendary Canadian graphics company, Matrox, had disappeared off the mainstream map, it's back with a genuinely innovative and exciting device, which takes the video output of almost any graphics card and splits it three ways to feed three separate monitors. But rather than just giving you the same display three times over, it actually spreads your Windows desktop across all three screens, to envelop you in wraparound, surround-vision.

Smaller than a man's hand, the remarkably compact main unit contains a DC input for the separate power supply, a D-Sub video input, and three D-Sub outputs for feeding your three screens. Sadly, the TripleHead2Go isn't digital DVI compatible but we suspect the reason for this lies in the '2Go' part of its moniker.

This is because, with its small form factor and light weight, the Matrox is perfect for feeding from a laptop (most of which don't have a DVI output anyway) and, in our tests, we got great results running three screens as well as being able to view the laptop's own screen simultaneously. Besides, the 3,840x1,024 resolution enabled by the Matrox TripleHead2Go would require non-standard Dual-Link DVI, which is only featured on the most expensive graphics cards.

The device makes use of the DDC (Display Data Channel) to tell Windows graphics cards that a 3,840x1,024 display resolution is available. This stretches analog video to the limit, but the Matrox delivered very high quality results in our tests, with practically imperceptible video noise levels even when displaying very high frequency test charts.

The Matrox is hot property in the gaming world, but it offers equally big advantages on the business front. While we wouldn't recommend splitting a single window across three screens, no matter how thin your LCD bezels are, it's great being able to run different applications on each screen without having to switch between windowed applications. The TripleHead2Go really does give you the bigger picture. Matthew Richards

Philips amBX Premium kit

tech.co.uk staff — 1195689600

What, exactly, is immersion? And do we really want it? If you're playing Theme Park, for example, would the smell of cheap frankfurters and the feel of water splashed in your face create a more compelling experience, or does it misunderstand completely what gaming is about?

Philips hasn't quite gone as far as that, but with amBX it could. Essentially, this is a simple XML- like scripting language that can be used to add environmental effects into games. Compatible peripherals - so far only available from Philips, but it's a licensable platform - will then generate those effects around in the player's room.

In the premium kit you get everything currently available, barring a set of rear satellite lamps. So that's a 'wall washer' for painting light behind your monitor, a powerful 2.1 speaker system with LED arrays built into the top of the two small variable speed fans and a wrist rumbler strip for your keyboard.

The idea stems from Philips' involvement with LED lighting. This is the future - it's environmentally friendly and can produce 14 million colours from an RGB array. As a result, the lights are definitely the strongest aspect of this kit. They change colour to reflect on-screen action even in games which aren't programmed to support amBX, and the effect is far from unpleasant - although if you're staring too hard at the screen you may not even notice it.

Where they really come into their own is when they're used counter-intuitively to the principles of naturalistic immersion: when the lightings strobes to signal an alert in Defcon or when they count down from red to green in TOCA 3. It's moments like these that show off what fun devs can have with it.

They can also be programmed to flash when you have a new IM, for example, and if you're using Media Player switch to a discotheque mode. These things are all good uses of amBX which we can see a future for - although not at the current price.

It's impossible though to be enthusiastic about the more inventive peripherals. The tiny fans are so loud as to be distracting even before the blast of air hits your face, and the wrist rumbler doesn't really work since one hand is away with the mouse most of the time.

So don't rush out to buy this first wave of amBX kits, but don't write off the levels of creativity it's possible to achieve with it. Games don't really need anything to reinforce the fourth wall and fake 'real' experiences, but amBX peripherals that do something new and interesting - if used in the right way - could be quite cool. One day.

Microsoft XBox 360 HD DVD Drive

tech.co.uk staff — 1189033200

This was the first 'proper' HD DVD player to go on sale in the UK late last year, and Microsoft's £130 deck is still the entry point into hi-def movies for many gamers.

You will need to own an Xbox 360, but the combined cost of a 360 premium pack and this drive is a piffling £410. That's far cheaper than any Blu-ray player, including the PlayStation 3. This could be something of a steal.

The drive comes supplied with an Xbox 360 universal media remote and all necessary cabling to attach it to the Xbox 360. And it's a cinch to get it up and running. A disc goes into your Xbox 360, updating the firmware, and then you connect the drive to the console's rear USB port. If that port is already taken up with something else (most likely the official Xbox Wi-Fi adapter), the HD DVD drive itself has two extra USB ports that work as if they were on the Xbox 360.

There's no direct connection from the drive to your TV or projector: everything goes through the 360's component video or VGA cable (depending on which you use). Lacking HDMI support, its audio outputs are also limited to digital optical and analogue stereo.

Sounding out

Sadly, there's just Dolby Digital 5.1 and no way to get Dolby TrueHD or DTS HD lossless 7.1-channel surround working - something that is unlikely to impress home cinema buffs. There's no guarantee of these formats ever being supported, but an Xbox 360 Elite should arrive in the UK soon, complete with HDMI, 120GB of memory and gloss black styling.

The real buzz about HD DVD's picture quality proves justified using this drive. King Kong on HD DVD outputting at a resolution of 1080i on a large 1920 x 1080 screen looks spectacular, although no Full HD 1080p pictures are possible with this drive.

The fight between Kong and the trio of T-Rex's is spectacular, with every strand of the huge primate's fur crisp and visible and no sign of digital noise or macro blocking. If you skip to the sequence at the end of the film you also get some eye-poppingly detailed views of 1930's New York: a fine example of what HD DVD can do.

We also watched Batman Begins, Mission: Impossible III, Superman Returns, The Last Samurai and The Bourne Supremacy, and happily, the quality remains high, although not quite up to Kong's standards.

As well as impressing with pictures, the drive is also a breeze to use: it's the quickest next-gen disc player we've yet seen.

Unfortunately, the 360 makes about as much noise as a projector, which won't go unnoticed in a small room. If you already have an Xbox 360 and a 42in or bigger screen, it's a must-buy, but true home cinema aficionados won't appreciate the limited audio, fan noise and the weird look.

Microsoft Wireless Gaming Receiver

tech.co.uk staff — 1176591600

I've been a steadfast denier of the virtues of wireless peripherals for, ooh, ages. However, it's got to the point where, at home, my gaming chair has speakers taped to the backrest and I have no less than eight wires (and yes, before you start, I counted them) trailing from my PC to my sweating gaming hands and head. Time for a change methinks, before the missus dumps me for being more machine than man now.

The MS Wireless Receiver works as a hub for all those lovely cross-compatible Xbox 360 peripherals on Windows. It works with up to four wireless pads, wireless headsets and even the new wireless MS steering wheel.

Setup wasn't without some headaches (visits to the website for drivers as the ones on the bundled disc didn't work...) which is kind of unforgivable for this product - I thought the whole point of Xbox kit on Windows was compatibilty and ease of use? However, once it's up and running it's flawless. Combined with an under-telly media centre PC you can game from the sofa and still maintain your PC gamer credentials.

There are other wireless peripherals out there but the key thing about the receiver is, it lets you use all the sexy Xbox kit through one hub, saving valuable USB ports.