Posts with tag sound-blaster

The World of Warcraft Tap Chat, or The Gaming Peripheral Formerly Known As Voice Tap, is now available. Essentially, it's a hotkey for your foot -- or some other appendage other than your fingers. Designed primarily as a push-to-talk button to pair with the Sound Blaster World of Warcraft headset to allow players to devote their hands to the game, this USB device can just as easily be assigned a macro or as a hotkey. This means players can actually assign the Tap Chat to an ability like Hammer of Justice, to add a realistic feeling of crushing your opponents underfoot.

Players willing to spring $29.99 for the edge of one additional button -- notably a non-hand-activated one -- can head over to the Creative or Blizzard online stores, where the World of Warcraft Tap Chat is exclusively available. Although sold out at the Blizzard store as of this writing (barely a week after it was made available), players who manage to get their hands (or foot) on the product also get exclusive World of Warcraft logo lenses that can be used to customize their matching World of Warcraft headset.

Creative unveiled an official licensed World of Warcraft gaming headset back in last year's BlizzCon, and we even got a quick look at the product prototypes when they stopped by the annual WoW.com reader meet-up as well as when they invited us to their booth to check it out. Readers also got a chance to win a pair when we ran contests all throughout the last quarter of 2009. if you've been slathering over one of these fancy peripherals but never lucked out in one of our contests, you might be pleased to learn that the Sound Blaster World of Warcraft headsets are finally available for pre-order from Amazon starting today, February 1.

The headsets we previewed back in August were mere prototypes, and the finished product looks far more refined. The headsets follow the same design principle as the Steelseries WoW mouse, with a faux metallic finish and etched runes. The headsets also have interchangeable 'headset lenses' which feature either the Alliance or Horde logo to show your allegiance. Creative also says that they'll be releasing additional lenses in the future, the first set of which will feature the ten classes of the game. As with the official World of Warcraft mouse, the headsets also have a dazzling 16 million programmable color illumination options.

The fully customizable headset comes in wireless or wired versions, with THX TruStudio PC technology for a more immersive gaming experience. The wireless version reportedly carries up to 9 hours of battery charge as well as a standard, detachable USB connector that can also be used to charge it. The headset microphone is detachable to allow the use of the headphone for communication or merely for listening. The World of Warcraft headset can also be configured to match different character profiles, accessible through what appears to be an in-game menu. The Sound Blaster World of Warcraft wireless headset retails for $159.99 while the tethered version is available for $119.99. Creative is also offering a complementary accessory called VoiceTap which allows players to program their push-to-talk key or even a macro to it instead of to their keyboard or mouse, allowing full hands-free communication.

Creative Labs posted a teaser flash video on their Sound Blaster site today; though to what they're announcing or counting down is currently unknown, we can definitely see that it's WoW-related, given the Horde crest in the center of the screen, and the Lament of the Highborne playing in the background.

Now, normally this wouldn't be very interesting, but when brightness and contrast are adjusted on the image's background, two distinct maps appear. The first is what is clearly Azshara on the left side of the image, and the second is the peninsula of Gilneas on the right side.

So why is this interesting? Well, those are the starting zones that the leaked Cataclysm information states are for the new races coming with the expansion.

It seems that the zones are in the spotlight a bit too much for it to be a coincidence. It very well could be an announcement meant to be timed with BlizzCon, or it could just be that the maps typically surround the Maelstrom and thus their positioning makes sense with the swirling Maelstrom graphic in the center.

We'll see what Creative has to say when the teaser ticks down some more!