Hasta La Gadget!

Someone at Target pulled the trigger a little too early, and through a mishap or insert-conspiracy-theory-here, two Xbox One systems have shipped out more than two weeks before the console’s scheduled launch date. One had a brief stint on Ebay, where the owner tried to hock it for a few grand, while the other has […]

Back when the Nintendo Wii was the hot console to have, I stood in line for an hour to buy one. Once I got it home, the controls were cool for about two days and then I went back to playing my PS3. The only game I ever played on the Nintendo Wii with regularity was Wii Sports. Nintendo has announced that it’s bringing those five sports from the original Wii Sports title to the Nintendo Wii U.

The individual sports game will be part of Wii Sports Club for Nintendo Wii U owners. Oddly, Nintendo isn’t offering all five of the original sports (bowling, tennis, baseball, boxing, and golf) at the same time. Right now, the only two available are tennis and bowling. Those also happen to be two of my least favorite; I really liked the golf game. If you remember, Wii Sports bowling was one of the top culprits in people throwing their remotes into their TV screens – that and tennis – before Nintendo started including a wrist strap with the Wii-mote.

The games have been updated with HD graphics, enhanced controls, and multiplayer online capability. Nintendo Wii U owners can download Wii Sports Club from the eStore and get a free 24 hour pass to try tennis and bowling for themselves. If you need an extra day to decide if you want to purchase, you can spend $1.99 for another 24 hours. Once you decide you want by the games and play them all you want each one will cost $9.99.

The once great console maker Atari has been reduced to a mere pixel of itself these days. While Sony and Microsoft are gearing up for a new console war, Atari is left catering to old school gamers with keychain consoles. Adam of SheekGeek made a display that matches both the figurative and literal size of Atari’s game system. It’s so small that you can barely see what’s on screen.

Yep, that’s the display, which is a module from an old Sony Handycam, next to a U.S. postage stamp. It’s so small that Adam has to use a macro lens on his camera so he can demonstrate it on video.

Now that’s what I call a counterintuitive Retina Display. Head to SheekGeek for the full details of his hack.

[via Hack A Day]

Typically, unboxing and teardown videos don’t come out until after a new gadget hits the market, but Sony decided to beat third parties to the punch by letting their own engineer take apart the shiny new PS4 console.

The guys at WIRED scored an exclusive video with Sony Engineering Director Yasuhiro Ootori, who carefully unboxed the new console, then proceeded to tear it down – not only showing off its ease of repair, but all of the major components inside.

While it’s basically a super slimline x86 PC, the PS4 is one of the most efficiently designed systems I’ve seen. It’s amazing that they managed to keep the power supply unit built in, especially when the Xbox One has such a massive power brick.

Ootori also elaborates on the system’s high-bandwidth GDDR5 memory, and its specialized secondary processor which allows network operations to continue in the background while the system is in standby mode. The system also has a massive heatsink with copper pipes, along with a quiet running centrifugal fan to keep things nice and cool.

Check out the video below for all of the juicy details:

While I’m sure that iFixit will do a much more in-depth teardown after the PS4 is released, it’s cool to see Sony sharing so much too.

[via WIRED]

Earlier this year we saw the awesome oversized N64 pillow made by Donna Marie Evans. Donna was bombarded by requests for the pillow, but last month a customer asked her to make a controller pillow from an earlier Nintendo console. The result is this very huggable SNES controller pillow.

Donna said that this pillow was harder to make than the N64 one, partly because of the Super Nintendo phrase. She had to embroider it by hand because she doesn’t have a cutting edge embroidery machine. Contact her on deviantART if you want your own SNES pillow.