What's Hot? Online Gaming

The big news about game consoles now is online gaming -- jacking your Nintendo Gamecube, Microsoft Xbox, or Sony Playstation 2 onto the Internet and playing games with other players around the world in real-time. In order to do this, you need to buy the online networking adapters each of these companies now offers for their systems, which cost around $35-50, and have a high-speed broadband Internet connection such as DSL or cable modem. If you share this connection with your PC or home network, you may need a $40 Ethernet hub to share the broadband service between your PC and your game system. Once your game console is online, you can play games with other players around the world who also have the same setup at their end.