Guide Rating -

Having been racing my PC for over ten years I've bought and thrown away hundreds of gadgets that were supposed to make my racing experience more realistic and simpler. As a result I've become rather jaded as to what truly constitutes cool gaming technology.

Recently while reading a NASCAR Racing 4 forum I saw people talking about Game Commander 2 from Sontage Interactive. Although a bit suspicious and definitely cautious I was convinced to take advantage of their free trial download and see for myself.

The Claims

Game Commander 2 is voice recognition software that runs in the background while you race (or fly or fight or do anything else with your PC), understands your voice and then types the command for you. It is fully speaker independent, this means that you don't have to train it to understand your voice and that it will work equally well for you as it will for other people in your household.

Game Commander 2 also claims to be incredibly simple to use and to make efficient use of your PC resources so as to not affect your gaming.

Does It Work?

Let me begin at the beginning. I'm well known for not reading the directions and just diving right in so with GC2 I just loaded the software, downloaded the free NASCAR Racing 4 command file from their website, put on the headset and ran the game. They claim simplicity so I went out of my way to not read the directions.

And it worked! I was thoroughly impressed with how easy it was to get this software up and running.

The voice recognition is quite remarkable, five years ago I used a product that required you to train it with your voice. That product recognized a command and was accurate about 75-80% of the time. GC2 works correctly on the first try more like 95% of the time, again, very impressive. Just to test it out I put the headset on my wife and had her say the commands for me and still GC2 never missed a single command without me making a single configuration change. Cool!

As for the speed of the software my PC is a PIII 600 with 128MB of RAM which runs NASCAR 4 ok. With GC2 running I saw no difference in the game except for the very first command. The very first time I use a GC2 command I see about a half-second stutter and then everything works smoothly after that. As a result I make sure that I use GC2 before I even leave the pits during practice so that I don't get any surprises later on during the race. During racing recognition is rock-solid consistent and doesn't affect the race at all.

Real World Example

So you've slugged through the review this far and you're still wondering why you should invest your $29.95 ($39.95 with microphone)? Have you ever been racing and took your eyes off of the track to make changes for the next pit stop and wrecked? Have you ever been racing online and wrecked while trying to reach the ALT-F keys to announce that you were pitting? Game Commander 2 solves those problems.

Lets say that I'm racing online in a 100 lap race at Michigan and it's getting towards the halfway point and the critical pit stop. I say "Wedge" "Less" "Less" to take some wedge out of the car and then "Tires" "Next" "More" to put some air in the right front. Then I say "Pit Board" to check how many laps are left so that I hit my pit window correctly and finally "Pit Now" to broadcast the autochat message to the rest of the racers that says "NASCARGuide Is Pitting This Lap."

I did all that in heavy traffic without fumbling for keys on the keyboard or taking my eyes off of the screen.

Thumbs Up

GC2 works with any Windows 9x software, in fact, I use it almost constantly while I'm using my PC. While using a flight simulator I use it for "Maps" and all of the radio communications, while golfing I use it to pop up the hole overview, and on and on. But it's not only useful for gaming, while reading email I can say "Reply" "Delete" or "New Message", while surfing the web I use it for "Back" and "Home." It saves me a lot of carpal tunnel pain during my day. :)

Overall I am thoroughly impressed with Game Commander 2 and I find it invaluable when I'm racing my PC either on or off-line. The product just plain does what it says it does every time and without adversely affecting other things. Game Commander 2 is a real gem, inexpensive, useful and very easy to use.