Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

When the Wii Charge Station was announced a while back, people were very excited about it. The Wii Remotes go through AA batteries at a rate of approximately a pair every 24 hours of gameplay, in my experience. When I got my Wii Charge Station I was generally very pleased with it. However, one of the Wii’s undeniable strengths is in mutliplayer (well, local multiplayer), and for that you need more than the two Wii Remotes that a single Charge Station can support.

The question of what Nyko would do about this was raised, and answered: Nyko was planning to sell the battery packs by themselves, so that no matter how many Wii Remotes you had, you could buy one Charge Station and a battery pack for each Remote, then charge them as needed, two at a time. We didn’t see them for quite a while. Or I didn’t, anyway. When I checked Nyko’s site today, there they are, in an assortment of colors to boot, but when I checked to find a local retailer, the site told me there wasn’t one within 120 miles of my home.

Looking at Amazon, they’ve got them reduced to a neat $6.99 each from a still reasonable $9.99. I recently came upon a third Wii Remote, so I’ll likely pick one up. Don’t see any of the neat color options from Nyko’s site on Amazon though, except in a customer image which seems to have come straight from Nyko’s site. There’s no indication that you can select a color, and I don’t see other color choices appearing as separate items. Amazon says these came out July 1st. It’s a shame I missed it when it really was news.

An easy alternative solution to a color selection would be to offer replacement battery covers by themselves, which they seem to be planning, but the battery covers don’t appear to be designed with their own battery pack in mind, as they don’t have the opening for the contact point needed for charging. The other advantage of this option is it could be a cheaper way to customize the color of the grip on all your remotes.