Microsoft Sidewinder Game Voice

Benefits include voice command and control within games. Game Voice comes with a speech recognition engine that allows you to simply speak a command like "grenades" or "flaps down" within a game instead of hunting for the keyboard shortcut. Use one of the prebuilt profiles or create your own. You can also find and connect to your friends easily. Based on instant messaging technology, Game Voice's connection management software lets users quickly and easily find and connect to their friends. It also shows users when their friends are online. And you can talk to your PC. Game Voice includes a quality voice-cancellation mic for optimal speech recognition.

BUT....

Microsoft no longer supports this product, so if you have a problem, you're stuck with a Google search for a fix. Thing is -people are starting to have problems that pop up when upgrades and bug fixes are no longer addressed. The big issue right now is the chat software's incompatiblity with Direct X 9.0 - the latest version of Microsoft's own multimedia APIs that are needed to use the software.

My system worked beautifully until I downloaded the latest DX, then I was permanently [stuck] since I was unable to restore my system to pre-DX9.0 (and its next to impossible to downgrade to 8.0).

I've since thrown the 'puck' in the yard sale bin and use the headset with Yahoo Messenger to chat with friends. Still lets me play games and chat with friends, but the puck's voice game controls are nonexistent. On the flip side, the sound quality of the headphones is impressive - same with the mic. I use the headset to listen to tunes while I work, flip down the mic to chat when I get a vox chat invite from buds - seamless. Tic for tac.

Bottomline: buy it and don't upgrade to Direct X 9.0, upgrade to Direct X 9.0 and don't use the puck, or pick up a cheap PC headset somewhere. Either way, you'll probably pay about the same price, and the included Plantronics headset does sound really, really good (great mic quality too), so just buy the damn thing already and risk it.


A cool idea, but makes sure your buddies have one too.   January 10, 2003
B. Gilmore
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

Got this for Christmas and was pretty excited. The product installs easily and works as advertised for the most part but has some quirks. First of all, you need a real sound card to plug into. Forget it if you are using audio built into to your motherboard. Secondly, when using the GameVoice it defaults to a setting where it masks your voice. You have to dig around the options to change it. Also, sometimes I experienced a lag or echo when talking which made conversations difficult to understand.

Finally, the GameVoice only really pays off when you are playing with 3 or more people that also have it. I play mostly with one other person at at time and we ended up using speakerphone while we gamed over DSL. The Game Voice would probably be worth buying if most of your game buddies had one as well.