Gaming

Eric bought a Nintendo WiiU and says that it's amazing. He wants to connect his home theater to it, but it only has an HDMI port. Leo says in order for the surround sound to work, something has to decode it and tell it where to send those sounds. Having his TV do it is possible if it supports Surround sound. Leo says getting the undecoded audio from the WiiU into the TV is key. He could try optical out from the TV to the home theater. The best way to do this is by getting an A/V receiver. Let it do all the heavy lifting. Denon or Onkyo make affordable models.

Matt is 13 years old and now that school is out, he wants to get a good laptop for gaming and for school. His dad has given him a budget of under $1,000. Leo says that's a great budget and there's plenty of options. Gaming is challenging for laptops because of heat, performance, etc. There are gaming laptops, but they're often overpriced, heavy, and have poor battery life. Games like Half Life or Team Fortress are pretty demanding, so he'll want to get a laptop with a good graphics processing unit.

Wyatt is a gamer, a huge XBox fan, and he's pretty upset with the new draconian used game policy that the XBox One will have. He believes it'll cause faithful fans like him go to Playstation which has no such restrictions. Leo says it's ridiculous and amounts to Microsoft and game publishers trying to get as much money as possible out of their fans. Microsoft is gambling it won't matter with the majority of those who buy it, and they may be right. Especially when the Playstation 4 is $100 less (of course, it doesn't come with a Kinect-like feature either).

Grant loves to play video games and wants to get a good computer to do it. Leo says that depending on the types of games he plays would decide just how powerful a computer he'll want to get. If he's doing first person shooter games, or games with heavy 3D graphics, then he'll want a laptop with an i7 processor and plenty of RAM.