Have you ever been in the heat of a raging battle in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, swinging your sword with all your might, going up against one of the monstrous bosses of the game, when suddenly your controller dies on you, but you have no batteries laying around to power it back up. Haven't you ever wished you could simply plug the controller in a port, charge it up, and always have it ready to go, never having to worry about it dying on you again during play? Well, consider yourself Aladdin and Nyko your genie, because they are here to grant your wish.

They keep going, and going, and going…or at least, that is, as long as you don't put them in the Wii's controllers. When Al Gore did his film about An Inconvenient Truth, he should've been looking towards the Wii, what with all those batteries the controllers eat. Luckily for those eco-friendly environmentalists and the gamer on the cheap (or even the everyday frugal one for that matter) comes Nyko's Charge Station.

The idea behind the Charge Station is perfectly simple in that you take your regular old Wii controller, remove the back, take out those batteries, place in Nyko's NiMH battery, put the new Nyko back on it, stick the Wii controller in the docking station, and voila, you've got everything going.

To start things off, you're getting an absolute ton for your buck, as you are not only getting the Charge Station, but you get the backings and battery packs to replace two – count them – two Wii controllers. Now, if you have two Wii controllers, you'll literally never have to worry again about running out of power and/or batteries again while playing your Nintendo system, because if you leave your Charge Station plugged in at all times, you can easily throw one of your controllers on there whenever you are done, and it will charge up so it'll be 100% power every time you get ready to start playing again. If you wanted to, however, you could simply plug in and charge using the Charge Station whenever you want as you don't have to leave it plugged in at all times – batteries for the controllers have a 25 hour play time until they need to be charged again, so it isn't essential you need the Charge Station plugged in all the time.

First up, installation is simple as long as you look at the instructions and follow the graphic (the only issue to begin with is if you didn't look at instructions you might try to put the battery in wrong). However, once you see how the battery goes in, it fits in smoothly but snuggly, and the new Nyko backing covers over that and latches into place firmly. By looking at the new backing, you'll see a few gold connectors, which is where all the charging takes place. To now charge the Wii controller, plug the Charge Station into a wall outlook and then place the Wii controller in one of the docking slots, making sure that an indicator light comes on; if so, sit back, let it charge and get ready to enjoy.

The Charge Station itself is quite nice as well, featuring the same monochromatic white color scheme of the Wii, plus a 6-foot power cable so you shouldn't have a problem finding a place where you can leave your Charge Station to chill when you're too busy gaming. A gray, rubberized underbelly also ceases sliding action on slick surface, as the grit grabs on nicely to the surface it is sitting on. Nyko also nicely implemented a design choice to create little notches on the left and right side of the cradles, so you can drape your hand straps to the side so that they don't interfere with charging and so you don't have to take them off either. Easy to read LED indicator lights (Blue – unit charging, Green – unit fully charged) also round out the package.

Though you're obviously buying the Charge Station so you'll never have to buy batteries again, the gray rubber Nyko backing is also a nice addition, as it not only goes stylishly with the Nintendo Wii white, but it feels extremely comfortable when in hand, and it does provide a little help from those sweaty hand slips as I did indeed notice that the controller didn't want to move around as much in my hand during some frantic Wii Sports play.

Could Nintendo be coming out with a Charge Station of their own at a later time? Possibly, but until then (or even after then) we solidly approve and enjoy the ease of use and the freedom of no longer being a slave to batteries that the Nyko Charge Station provides. Honestly, we can't see it getting much better than this.

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