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."

Summary and closing thoughts...

I really don't know of a better way to chat with your fellow gamers than with the Game Voice. Talking to my friend who lives thousands of kilometers away was almost as good as talking to him on the phone, it is uncanny. If you're looking for a way to holler at the enemy, plan strategies, or just chat with your friends, this is the way to go.

Having said that, I think you'd better have 128 MB of RAM. Although I'm sure if you have 64MB, which is the requirement, you can run Game Voice no problem, but how about Unreal Tournament or a 3 on 3 game of Age of Kings in addition to the Game Voice? That is likely to get a bit much for a system with that little RAM. I had no troubles running a big game of AoK and chatting, but thankfully I've got 128 MB and plenty of space on my hard drive for "Virtual Memory", so everything went smoothly for me. If your system is already struggling to run UT, Quake III, or what have you, adding the Game Voice could result in a performance hit on your games as it does use around 20MB of RAM itself. (give or take a few megabytes depending on what you have the software doing)

Now, here's where things get interesting. The profiled commands that come with your Game Voice are probably not going to be very useful to you. Often a single hotkey or perhaps two is what they have set up, which will actually slow you down. Why hit a button, then say a command when you can hit a key on the keyboard or mouse and get the same result much faster? It's only by creating your own custom commands to actvite multiple hotkeys that you will see any real benefit to using the voice commands.

All in all, I think Microsoft got this product half right. The chat is excellent, the commands often are not used to their full potential due to poor profiles, eventhough the voice recognitionsoftware is decent. If you aren't concerned about cost and want to chat with your friends, Game Voice is the way to go, no question. If you're buying it and planning on using the voice commands in your game, be prepared to do some work on your own custom commands before it becomes at all useful.

Related Links

The official website: http://www.gamevoice.com/
Game Voice forums, a place to find help and users to chat or play with: Game Voice Forums
Sidewinder's official website: http://www.microsoft.com/sidewinder/

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