Gadgetory

("A Thousand Miles" by Vanessa Carlton) ♪ Making my way downtown walking fast ♪ ♪ Faces pass and I'm home bound. ♪ ♪ Do do do do do do do ♪ ♪ And I need you ♪ ♪ And I miss you ♪ - What the (beep)? - Yes that's right, your eyes do not deceive you. This is an official microphone for the Nintendo Switch. You can tell it's official, it's got their little brand right here. Now you might be wondering why it looks a little bizarre. That's actually cause this is an attachable cover that HORI makes for it so that when you sing you can cover your mouth like this, so you can sing as loud as you want or you just don't like people seeing your mouth while you're singing. The point is, this exists. Now you might be wondering I don't remember there being any karaoke games on the Switch. How did I miss this? When did it come out? Well it's cause this actually isn't available in the US. We had to import this. You can get them in Japan or in Europe as well. And as far as we can tell the only game that actually uses it in Europe is Let's Sing 2018. A karaoke game that is not available in the US, where you can sing some fun duets with your friends. ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Caught in a bad romance ♪ Now to be honest we picked this up originally just cause we thought the cover looked absolutely ridiculous and it would make a great Instagram post. ♪ If I could just see you ♪ After picking it up and kinda messing with it a little bit, I really started thing more and more about voice commands have been used in gaming. Now yes, microphones are used a lot primarily so people can do things like chat during multi-player games, (banging and keyboard hitting floor) but there's a lot of games out there that actually had more interesting experiments of how to integrate microphones into game play. It's actually very fitting the microphone we grabbed is for Nintendo because they're one of the companies with the longest history of really messing with the idea of voice commands in games. Going as far back as the not original NES, the Famicom. The original Famicom had a microphone built directly into the player two controller which some games would make use of. One of the most popular examples being the original Legend of Zelda where there were monsters that you could scare away by screaming into this microphone. (yelling in foreign language) And the reason why this particular example is pretty popular is because the US version of Legend of Zelda still makes reference to this in lines but there's no way for you to actually do it because the original Nintendo did not have that microphone feature. And this is not something that Nintendo only experimented with during their early years with gaming. This is an idea they've come back to multiple times. In fact, they did a lot of experimenting with it during the mid 2000's with the GameCube and DS. For the GameCube we had a lot of games that messed with the idea of using it as the main form of interaction. whether that's Hey You, Pikachu or that was the main goal or offering it as an alternate control style in other games like Mario Party 6 and 7. - [Narrator] Pikachu responds to your voice. Call him gently out of the forest. - On the DS the idea wasn't so much as making it the only form of control but instead offering weird little ways to mess with the game by adding just an extra option. Whether that's blowing into the microphone to interact with the environment around you or using voice commands to call out specific items. Something that was used a lot in the earlier Phoenix Wright games. Now Nintendo is not the only company that has messed with these ideas. One that I think has actually had a really interesting history and has tried to do some more interesting, weird things with it is Konami. Going all the way back to the NES they actually created a peripheral which would use voice commands and your head to control the game exclusively which is this beautiful piece of tech right here. The LaserScope. The idea was you could play something like say Duck Hunt instead of having to hold a controller in your hand like a loser, you could have this on your head and just scream fire while shooting at ducks by aiming with this visor right here. It did not go well. - I retire this in glory. - And this isn't the last time they messed with the idea either. Years later on the PS2 and I think in 2003, they made a game called Lifeline. What was interesting about this is that voice commands were meant to be the only way you controlled the game. You did not use a regular controller at all. Instead the entire concept is that in the game, you're an operator giving commands to a character that you have to guide through a space station. Once again tech wasn't fully developed quite enough yet, and so there was a lot of problems with this and didn't control as cleanly a people would've liked but it's a really interesting idea that I kinda think is starting to get time to start experimenting with again. Now to be clear, I'm not saying that every single game needs to have some kind of voice interaction. Let's not forget what happened with the Connect. But I think it's really worth investigating the idea of having games that are built on the idea specifically of using voice as a form of interaction. And Nintendo right now with how experimental their being with the Switch and their history of just trying new ideas, I think it's kinda time to try again.