Reviewed: March 14, 2002
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Manufacturer
MadCatz

Type: Memory Card
System: Xbox

Rating: 8.0

Features

  • Officially licensed for Xbox
  • Lifetime Warranty

    • It’s kind of strange sitting here writing a review for a memory card. It’s basically a piece of plastic with some memory inside that stores 8mb of game data from your Xbox. Even harder is how do you rate something like this? It either works or it doesn’t. There is no perceivable “quality” or features that I typical rate in a regular hardware or software review.

    To make things even harder is the fact that the Xbox ships with an 8 or 10 gigabyte hard drive rendering any memory card redundant unless you like to take your settings, characters, and save games on the road. I’ve had my Xbox since launch day and chose not to buy a memory card at the time. In fact, if MadCatz hadn’t sent me their new 8mb Memory Card to review I still probably wouldn’t have one.

    So how do you market a product that is virtually unnecessary? Well, first of all you make it look cool by molding it in a variety of transparent neon colors and putting a ribbed textured grip on the end so you can plug and unplug it easily. Then you tack on the MadCatz Lifetime Warranty and no-data-loss guarantee, and finally you preload the card with a bunch of saves for popular games; hopefully some of which you already own.

    In the case of this particular card, there were saves for Madden 2002 that featured 30 trading cards, and a save game for 4x4 Evolution 2 that lets you start the game with over a million dollars.

    The memory unit also comes with a cool plastic case that is just big enough to fit the card and snaps tight to protect your investment. There is also a decent supply of labels you can use to list the games on your card.

    So while many of you may never need a memory card for your Xbox, when the time does come that you want to take your unlocked DOA3 characters or your collection of cars from Project Gotham Racing to a friends house, you don’t have to lug your entire Xbox to their house. The MadCatz 8mb Memory Card is all you need, and at $29.99 it’s $5 cheaper than Microsoft’s counterpart and looks a lot cooler.