Heaven Games Reviews Microsoft's Sidewinder Game Voice

The company line:
"Bring the power of voice to your games:
Complete voice solution: multiplayer chat, and voice commands.
Optimized for great game play and sound.
Quickly find and talk to your friends."

Installation.

The CD provides step by step installation instructions that are easy to follow and help to make the process painless. If you're familiar with the the jacks on your sound card it will be a breeze, and even if you aren't, the cables provided are colour coded and bear helpful markings to make sure you get everything plugged in correctly.

Once everything is plugged in, you aren't quite up and running yet. Microsoft Instant Messenger, similar to the world famous ICQ, is the last thing

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plunked onto your hard drive. Why do you need it? Truth be told, you don't really need it. It does have support for the Game Voice that allows you to set up a chat with your friends without having to exchange IPs which is handy. If your gaming chums don't have IM, you can set up chats the old fashioned way, by sending the IP.

Don't fret when you find the manual to be pretty skimpy. It has some troubleshooting information to help your installation run smoothly, and once everything is installed you'll be able to find all the information you need provided in the Game Voice software.

The Software.

The Game Voice software provides tons of great information on the product and how you can customize it to your needs. There are built in profiles for Age of Empires, Age of Kings, the three Starcraft races, Everquest, MechWarrior 3, Unreal Tournament, Quake III and quite a few more. On the official Game Voice website they have quite a few new profiles for download as well for the latest games. These profiles contain preset voice commands that will allow you to hit the command button on your Game Voice and say for example, "Build Mine". Your command will be recognized by the software, and the hotkeys for building a mine will be activated. If you have trouble having your commands recognized, which does happen on occasion with certain words that sound similar or thick accents, it's very easy to adjust the command. For example, I was using the preset voice command of "Home" to select my Town Center, but it

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wasn't being recognized properly. I took about 15 seconds and changed the command so that when I said "TC", my Town Center would then be selected. On the whole though, this is a rare event, and Game Voice doesn't seem to have too much trouble understanding my thick Canadian accent. You can also setup Game Voice to wait for you to issue multiple voice commands, one right after the other if you prefer.

As for the chat software, it is just as simple and straight forward. You can host a chat session, or find a friend's chat session via IP. As mentioned earlier, the Instant Messenger includes support for starting chat sessions without having to exchange IP addresses, which further simplifies things. I uninstalled it without any problems since no one I know uses the program and simply send my IP via ICQ to people I wish to chat with. You have several different choices for compression if you want to sacrifice chat quality for game performance, or vice versa, which is handy for us folks with poor connections. Once people have joined your chat session, you can assign certain people to buttons on the Game

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Voice unit simply by clicking on their name, so that you can quickly select players you want to talk to, or keep from hearing your conversation by toggling the button you assign them to on or off. Of course, you can chat with everyone at once if you wish, or your team members only, or even just one or two people.

Launching your game with friends is also just a click away. From the chat session, the host has the option to launch a game and you're off to the races. The chat session continues to run in the background, allowing you to trash talk and plan your strategies without having to type a word.

If your gaming chums wish to chat with you but haven't got the Game Voice, they can download a free version of the chat technology at GameVoice.com. The program, Game Voice Share, is a limited version of the same software you get with the full product, but without the bells and whistles such as profiles and voice commands. This is a great way to test out part of the software for yourself and see how it works for you.