It's not that we didn't like the old one in theory. It's great if you're an exhibitor or someone just going there to check out the games. But if you're going there to actually do coverage on stuff? That was a nightmare. Pushing through tens of thousands of sweaty nerds and wading through long-ass lines just to see what you needed to see was not our idea of fun. This new E3, with the small meetings and more one-on-one time with execs really allowed us to do better coverage.

What do you think?

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[Kotaku]

Instead of using the default Microsoft wireless controller scheme, which Microsoft's still being stingy about, Nyko's gone and made their own. It requires an adapter box (included), and a wired controller (it can be a regular controller or even a wired Guitar Hero guitar) to be plugged in while in use. The good news is that all the functions, including whammy and tilt star power actually works.

Nyko's still not sure on the price or whether they want to bring it to market at all, since the official controller will be wireless and won't have the limitation of requiring a wired standard controller.

Other accessories are the PlayStation 3 controller Nyko controller [photo], which has 6-directional motion sensing, and even a removable battery pack for external charging. It also charges via miniUSB, like the original SIXAXIS.

Then there's the Nyko Cooler for the Wii [photo], that attaches to the back of your Wii in order to add another fan for cooling. It's a passthrough design, like the Xbox 360's intercooler, which means it's going to be sucking some power away from the Wii. We saw how well this worked with the Xbox 360 (it bricked some), so this may or may not be a good idea. Hard to say now.

A more useful product, we think, is their classic controller attachment grip [photo]. This hooks to the classic controller and gives you a nice DualShock/SIXAXIS-like grip on each hand. It also has a place to attach your Wiimote on the back, and a cord wrapper so you can get that out of the way.

For the PS3, there's the IR remote and adapter [photo], which we talked about before, that allows you to either use this remote or universal remotes—most of which are IR and not Bluetooth—to control your Blu-ray and DVD movie playback.

Lastly, there are the Nintendo DS travel cases [photo], which comes with the case, car power adapter, two styluses, and what looks like a belt clip.

But the best part is, of course, the chip holder. Nyko told us that they were going to re-evaluate the design and increase the size (making it deeper and wider) to accommodate more chips. The amount in there is enough for one person, but as a party tray it's fairly under-stocked. But the idea is great.

There are LCD scoreboards (so you can keep track of which one of the four of you is winning), Wiimote holders, a drawer for Nunchucks, a fan (like the bowling alley) for sweaty gamers, four freezable soda cup holders (with built-in gels to maintain coldness), and a chip and dip holder for, obviously, chips and dip. We didn't eat any of their chips, because they were presumably sitting out all day getting poked at by sweaty journalists.

The soda holders were nice and solid, and has the gels on the inside so it keeps your soda cold for a while longer outside the fridge. The tray holds two Nunchucks, which is usually enough for most four-player games. The LCD scoreboard works by manually adding or subtracting a point depending on whoever won a game (works for every game, obviously). The fan's definitely a great touch for everyone who's throwing the Wiimote thanks to sweaty palm syndrome.

The current version's still just a prototype, but they plan to release a final version in the next couple months. [Wii Party Station]

They claim that since Neo Geo's Wii Virtual Console games are up to 330MB, there's not a whole lot of space on the console's current storage system to hold it. Therefore, Nintendo is going to release a hard-drive add-on.

Seems reasonable to us, but until there's some solid info to back this up with, we're going to call this a big fat rumor. – Jason Chen

Wii hard drive on the way? [Computer and Video Games via Kotaku]