Wii Speak – Speaker Phone

Nintendo’s press coverage is on the move, currently they’ve demonstrated Wii Speak which will allow voice chat on your Nintendo Wii console. Although the Xbox 360 has had voice chat since its day one release, Nintendo is bringing it in a new unique way: community chat.

Basically, the device which will go on top of the Wii sensor bar will allow everyone in the room to talk to everyone in the room on another Wii. Where you need a headset on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 this will give the entire room a chance to chat along.

Having a speaker phone style behavior is neat, but what about when everyone is asleep and you want to play a network game with a buddy? Will the device pickup a whisper across the room? Perhaps a speaker attachment will be announced later, but for now… you’re going to be conference calling with everyone in the game room.

(Thanks, Kotaku)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Post

Episode 464: EA’s Star Wars Battlefront II plansEpisode 464: EA’s Star Wars Battlefront II plans

Since the podcast recording last Wednesday had audio issues and the news was, frankly, boring, the crew decided to record a new 464th episode on Easter Sunday, after some more interesting stuff was announced near the end of the week. That, and Scott expresses his enthusiasm for Thimbleweed Park, the spiritual successor to Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle, using a SCUMM-like interface.

This week’s news items include:

  • Diving into Project Scorpio’s backwards compatibility, 4K, VR, and 1080p support
  • Nintendo discontinues the NES Classic Edition
  • It looks like Star Wars: Battlefront II will ditch the Season Pass

All that and some Listener Feedback.

Episode 664: GTA6 LeakedEpisode 664: GTA6 Leaked

This episode was going to focus on the Toyko Game Show, but a massive leak of Grand Theft Auto 6 trumped all conversation.

Meanwhile, TJ’s mic still makes him sound like he’s in the bathroom.

The news includes:

  • Huge GTA 6 leak includes gameplay footage of robbery, Vice City locations, and two playable characters
  • Tokyo Game Show 2022 announcements

Let us know what you think.

Sony’s Software Development Beta ProjectsSony’s Software Development Beta Projects

It seems we’ve seen a lot of great concepts from Sony for their PlayStation 3 product line but very little has managed to hit the software virtual shelves. We’ve heard of Sony’s Afrika for the PS3 back at E3 in 2006 and we’re looking at it for 2008’s holiday lineup.

We’ve heard about Sony Home for years as well, but that’s now in some type of beta. It was supposed to be an open beta but that didn’t seem to work out and now it’s closed beta only. Recently they pushed out a firmware update that bricked PlayStation 3 consoles or at least screwed up many of them in varying levels.

Are they just really bad at software development and road map predictions? As a hardware development company they’ve put out some hardcore products, stone cold stable in terms of design and efficiency from the Walk Man to the PS3. Their products are practical in design, for the most part, fairly pretty, stable and function as designed. Yet they come up short on software time and time again.

One of the contributors at 2old2play had some things to say about Sony’s development efforts:

“Having worked at Sony as a Creative Designer two years ago, it doesn’t surprise me that they have still yet to release Home. While there, I was working on their Station Launcher application which was supposed to be released in late 2006. However, the Launcher app is still only in Beta to this day.” (2old2play.com)

In many ways their the anti-Microsoft in their approach and commitments. While Microsoft ships hardware that has what must be a 60% failure rate Sony ships hardware which works fairly well. On the flip side, Microsoft publishes a large quantity of software for all their products and has done very well in the business. Nobody can say it’s 100% perfect but it tends to get better with age or, at least, grow on you.

(more…)