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Your email address will not be published.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

E3 2011 Preview SummariesE3 2011 Preview Summaries

You might notice that I’ve been pretty silent on E3 2011 previews, despite hustling around the entire time. That is because I’ve been writing almost all of them for Strategy Informer.

So, those of you who are regulars at Gaming Podcast – and judging by hits, there are tons of you – here are excerpts of the previews I’ve written for Strategy Informer for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 titles, plus a link to the full article.

UbiSoft’s Pre-E3 Briefing:

At the briefing, they showed off the following games: Rayman Origins, Driver: San Francisco, Far Cry 3, Brothers In Arms: The Furious Four, The Adventures of Tintin, Ghost Recon: Future Warrior, Trackmania 2, Raving Rabbids: Alive & Kicking, Just Dance 3, Rocksmith, Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012 and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. (Read more…)

Dead Island (PC, PS3, 360):

Getting back to the mood of the game, missions are similarly realistic and grim. Nothing in the game seems artificially tacked on; the flow and the suspension of disbelief are extremely well done. During a mission, sometimes you’ll rescue another survivor and they will have a mission for you to do right there in the middle of your current quest. You can opt to help them, ignore them, or even screw them by driving them off in their vehicle. This is survival, and sometimes, jjust sometimes, you may give in to temptations to make choices that will make you normally wince. It’s a zombie dog eats zombie dog world and in the middle of an apocalypse, sometimes you have to fortify your own safety at the expense of another. (Read more…)

(more…)

PlayStation 3: Not About Quantity, About ProfitabilityPlayStation 3: Not About Quantity, About Profitability

The Xbox 360 price drop rumors flow like water and it’s all but officially been announced at this point. What about PlayStation 3 and their price? No.

Nobuyuki Oneda, the Sony’s chief financial officer said, “our plan is not to reduce the price. Our strategy is not to sell more quantity for PS3 but to concentrate on profitability.” (gamespot) This makes complete sense coming from their chief financial officer, as their motivation is to make money, not lose it.

The question remains, how will they actually make money if they’re no longer in the race for competitive market prices? Considering game licensing must Net them some amount of profit Sony’s idea seems to be the exact opposite of their original PlayStation method: saturate the market and sell them all games.

So far we’ve seen very few “need to have” games for the PlayStation 3 console while Xbox 360 continues to build a substantial library and Wii continues to break sales records for apparently no reason. When a game publisher has to decide on a platform to launch a new game, why would they choose the one that doesn’t care to be competitively priced in the market? The one that doesn’t care about quantity of sales?

Sony intends to reverse the entire razor blade philosophy where one sells a cheap razor and charges users for the blades over and over again. Their take on this concept is to sell really expensive razors and put out small half-quality blades. Is that a good market strategy at this point?