First look (not talk) at Wii Speak

By Joe Fourhman | December 6, 2008

I grabbed the Wii Speak Channel today, and since I figure a lot of people either A) Are not picking up the Animal Crossing City Folk Bundle or B) Think $30 is too much for a USB microphone accessory, I thought I’d give everyone the nickel tour. Although the documentation is vague and confusing, and I don’t know anybody else who has it so I can’t fully test the whole chatting thing. But in short, it does what you figured it would do – voice chat, albeit voice chat stuck inside one particular application – and it does a couple cutesy Nintendo things that maybe you didn’t expect.

First up: the install. The Wii Speak Channel takes up 51 blocks. I’m down to my last 100 blocks by this point (with plenty of VC stuff punted to SD cards), so every download is a nailbiter. But getting the download in the first place is non-intuitive. Because WSC is limited to those who own a Wii Speak Microphone, it’s not just a simple Shop Channel download on the Channels page. There’s not even a blurb about it there. You instead must go to the Settings & Features button on the main Shop Channel menu. There’s a new option in there (assuming your Shop Channel is up to date)… the ability to redeem a promotional code. Tap in your code and you’re on your way.

I can’t be too upset about this rigmarole; Nintendo does include instructions in the Wii Speak code coupon that came in the box, plus they have a notice on the Top News list as you enter the Shop Channel. But still, it seems like it should have been a bit easier.

Once you’re in, there’s a few gentle tutorial screens to click through, mostly warning you about correct placement of the microphone. Don’t put it by your speakers! If your TV is mono, set your Wii to mono! Your WiFi traffic may screw up the sound quality! And turn off your 5.1, for god’s sake!

Then you’re put into your very first chat room, with a generic happy smiley face avatar that you will immediately turn into your Miis. You can assign up to six Miis to be visible. You see sound waves as you talk. There is a temporary voice changer option that gives you about fifteen seconds to be annoying.

Since the microphone picks up the entire room, it has no way to distinguish which Mii should be talking. So everyone’s Mii lips move in unison.

Does anybody else think that Nintendo should have had a microphone built into the Wii Remote design from day one (like the DS)? Sure would’ve made all these dozen karaoke games nicer.

Anyway, if you hate the multi-mumbling Miis, you can click on any one of them and Talk Big.

I thought this was cool… you can share photos to people in your chat room. You can select photos using an interface very similar to the Photo Channel, to browse and display pics from the Wii Message Board or an SD card. So go ahead and share naughty pictures with each other!

For some reason, you can manage your friend list almost entirely from within the Wii Speak Channel. You can add new friend codes, and your friend code is readily available. Here you can see the people on the tail end of my friend list who are grayed out because they have never friended me. AHEM.

Going back a level from the chat room is the lobby. Here’s where something funky is going on. This is where you’ll hang until you see that your friends have shown up, then you click on their bubbles to create chat rooms.

But look at this help screen… what could Nintendo possibly mean by “Other users”? As in, people who are not my twice-approved Wii Friends?

There is no way you’d be able to outright talk to these people, nefarious internet degenerates all of them, so is Nintendo letting you see “other users” just to see them? Or is there some way to potentially friend people from this lobby screen? After all, your Friend Code is one click away, third button down on the right.

As I was testing the channel, I saw no such “other users,” so maybe it’s a red herring borne of perpetual Nintendo fanboy hope. Maybe that’s what happens when a friend’s connection drops, or when you’ve friended somebody but they haven’t friended you back. AHEM AGAIN.

But here’s the feature that will see the most abuse, the Send an Audio Message bit.

You can record 10 seconds of audio, attach a picture and the usual Mii head, and then simultaneously send it out to up to ten Wii Friends. If you don’t have Wii Speak, you’ll probably start to hate people who do really quickly. Expect a huge pile of pointless MERRY CHRISTMAS DURRRRR messages in a couple weeks.

Like I said, I don’t have any friends with a Wii Speak, so I can’t discuss the actual chatting quality. The recorded message sounded ok. Not crystal clear, but understandable.

More importantly, I saw nothing about the promised feature to let friends download a listen-only version of the Wii Speak Channel. Wasn’t that a pretty major talking point a few weeks ago?