Something disheartening I've seen lately was Wii Speak microphones in the clearance section of Wal-Mart's electronic department.

You expect to see old peripherals or add-ons here since the lifespan of the system was expiring. But not current system peripherals like this only released last year. All with the urgent red tag for selling.

It's one of the frustrating things about Nintendo is how they make so many gadgets but sometimes, many times fail to support them.

Taking voice chat & making it more than just a simple headset showed Nintendo's forward thinking on the subject.
A community mic. Smart idea. Goes right along with the inclusive togetherness approach Nintendo took with the console.

But they've sort of abandoned it. Not highlighted as a wanted feature. No use of this peripheral in terms of gameplay. Somebody can make a videogame version of 'Telephone" in the game mechanic & cause all sorts of fun.

Super Scope 6, the SNES' Zapper so to speak, had a 6-in-1 game pack but after that who substantially used that peripheral in games? The SNES Mouse from the legendary Mario Paint. Used heavily for that game definitely but where else?

According to Wikipedia, so far only 6 games use Wii Speak: Animal Crossing: City Folk (Let's Go To The City for PAL cats), Endless Ocean 2 (just released in Japan in September & nowhere else yet), NHL 2K10 (only for North America), The Conduit (no Japan release), The Grinder (which ain't even out yet—try 2010— & is still looking for a publisher), & Uno on WiiWare (also not out but finally will make good use of this feature).

Basically right now Wii Speak is the Animal Crossing mic.

I find it useful to leave messages like an answering machine to a friend's Wii through the Wii Speak Channel but I don't know anyone who has a mic of their own so I can't use the chat feature (Wii Speak Channel should have a better integration inside games to meet up for play).

It's a letdown because it's a nice peripheral that can really be useful as a bonus as well as a needed feature for gameplay & game design.
There's loads of things people can do with this system & make it zing.

What are your thoughts about Nintendo & Wii Speak?

John Lucas

My thoughts about the peripheral? It's useless if no game that came out with it is interesting or at least bundled with it. I would have probably used it for The Conduit, but I already stopped playing that game...

It reminds me of the GBA to GCN connectivity. It looked interesting but only so few games supported it. Then again, you needed lots of GBA if you wanted to play games like Crystal Chronicles properly. Luckily, the games that support WiiSpeak are playable even without the little gadget!

But you said they're selling the peripheral for cheap now? I might as well go get one before they run out of stock!

That's the problem with Nintendo not standardizing stuff, at least for their own published titles. It's a double-edged sword, in that it doesn't force games to have features that they really don't need (like some games on 360 with Achievements), but mostly it hurts

Though to be fair, only 1 Nintendo-published game between now and then has had proper online multiplayer, yet lacked Wii Speak, and that was Excitebots, a game they sent out to die. Endless Ocean 2 has it, and they haven't published any online multiplayer games otherwise in the interim (S&P2 has WFC, but only for leaderboards)

That has always been the problem. I rmemeber making a thread about the same subjext last year. Nintendo doesn't support their peripherals. Ever.

Wii Motion+ came out this year and we are not going to see another WM+ game from them in a very long time, possibly Zelda in 2011. But WM+ support will be endangered by their newest peripheral Wii Vitality. It's an endless circle, they release a peripheral and simply move on to the next one, leaving behind thousands of opportunities and pissed customers who find their investment was in vain.

I agree with this criticism for any peripheral (zapper, even M+ and the Wii Wheel to a degree), but in the case of Wii Speak I think it's different. The people crying out for Wii voice chat were the core Wii gamers, the guys who post on forums and might even buy games out of support. Look at the IGN poll on Wii Speak support in Modern Warfare Reflex. Even on a self selecting poll on an enthusiast site they couldn't get a majority.

Wii Speak was basically just Nintendo's response to the core demanding a microphone, but there was never really much demand for one in the first place.

Like you said: it's nothing new. Unfortunately, Nintendo couldn't care less about their own peripherals. Hardly any Nintendo game makes use of the Wii Zapper, Balance Board, Wii Wheel, Wii Speak or Motion Plus.

It's dumbfounding, but that's Nintendo for ya. They make awesome games though!

It's an issue of design philosophy. How many games has Nintendo published that *could* make use of these things, but didn't? For Wii Speak, there's only Excitebots, for everything else, there isn't much that they even could have used them for something, let alone should have.

That's the problem though. Nintendo needs to step up on their online.

Nintendo supports Wii Speak?

I just thought it was for Animal Crossing.

Problem is Nintendo didn't push it correctly. Any online game should have supported it after its release. However, based on Conduit's failings in trying to use it, I wonder if it just has inherent issues.

Guess we'll see with some of the next Wii online games that finally utilize it. I know, so far its been a $15 waste of time in my house.