Ok. I was talking with one of my programmer friends about the Wii and Wii speak. I HATE not being able to talk to my friends during Mario kart or Smash Bros..... so my friend said that it would be plausible to implement the Wii Speak function into the HOME menu. You know, how you can pull it up and access the Wii remote settings and your Wii messages. By being able to run the Wii Speak in the backround of ANY game would solve A LOT of problems I would think.... What do you all think?

That would be sweet. Don't think it will happen, but still sweet.

It's not possible to implement in older games, even through the Home menu, and it seems impractical to do this way for future games rather than doing it directly through the game so you don't have to pause to talk.

I hate to say this but Nintendo said that they will not allow any previous games to use Wii Speak function. Worse yet, only two games has been announced so far, one has already been released (Animal Crossing: City Folk) and another one is fixing to be released (The Conduit). So I ask you Nintendo, when are you going to announce another Wii Speak-capable game?

If you look at my article about what I expect from the next Wii Console. I put that exact feature in there. You'd use a Social channel to speak to friends online and then jump into a game.

Go have a look

http://www.nintendolife.com/forums/wii/what_does_nintendo_nee...

It's impossible with older games actually. The home function on the Wii works different compared to other consoles. On 360 and PS3, the menu comes from the console itself. On the Wii, the menu actually comes from the disk (even though it doesn't look that way), so updating the Wii's home menu won't change the home menu's from older games.

Probably E3. That's what it's for, after all.

It is technically possible, but a massive nightmare. Ever firmware upgrade is essentially a new copy of firmware; the Wii doesn't really have an operating system that does all the heavy lifting so if they did a change like that they'd need to update every previous firmware version and then debug it to ensure that games that work with the older firmware revs will still function. Really not worth it to Nintendo so it's down to the game code to implement it or not. You might think that the WiiSpeak Channel could run in the background, but as indicated above, the Wii works more like an old Windows PC where only one program is running at a time using all resources, so that's not possible either.

Nintendo would have to do a pretty serious change to the design of the Wii to make that happen. Could be that an incremental update will incorporate multi-tasking and a sensor bar with built-in WiiSpeak that would provide some of this functionality.

Let's hope they at least try and do something... We deserve it!