SingStar

The king of karaokes!

Posted 4 years ago By - Jay Acevedo

I was patiently waiting for this new version of SingStar for the Playstation 3. After playing with the last two SingStar games on the PS2 and Karaoke Revolution American Idol (love you Paula), I was wondering what Sony London could bring to the table this time. All I can say, it’s that SingStar doesn’t disappoint but elevates the genre to a whole new level. Grab your mics and sing along! SingStar is here!

Like in the previous PS2 versions, SingStar comes once again bundled with two microphones – one red and one blue. Once you popped the disc in, you’ll be able to choose if you want to sing alone, battle an in-house friend, duet, or face off in an up to eight-person “Pass The Mic” battle. From there, you’ll be asked to pick one song from the 30 songs on the disc or from the tracks you’ve downloaded (more on that later) and you’ll be ready to spit some fire. Just follow the horizontal grey bars and sing the corresponding lyrics displayed at the bottom of the screen. Then the game will recognize your pitch, tone and rhythm and will give you a score depending on how well (or bad in my case) you performed. When the performance is over, you’ll be able to listen to an audio playback of yourself and if you have a PlayStation Eye (or Xbox Live Vision….yes it works!) you can watch yourself singing to your song.

Nothing new here, but it gets more interesting…

Once you’re done with your performance, you’ll be able to save the video clip, the audio file and any of the snapshots the camera has taken to your hard drive and watch them in your Media Gallery. From that hard drive gallery, which can hold 60 videos, 100 pictures, and 60 audio playbacks, you’ll have the possibility to upload your content to your online profile called My SingStar.

 

My SingStar, which acts as your online identity over the Playstation Network, hosts a profile that’s all about you. You can post an avatar along with your favorite band, favorite song among others little infos. The game will showcase your best score on each difficulty and also create a comment section for your profile that’s similar to Facebook’s wall. People can write a note about your stats or videos, and you can reply to their messages. In the same profile, you will find the Online Gallery. There you can upload five of your 25-second videos, 100 of your screens, and five of your audio playbacks. You can remove one of the clips and upload another anytime you want. And when you attach a piece of content to your profile, it automatically gets posted in the SingStar Community Gallery. Here, you can go in and check out all of the images, videos, and audio other people have posted. You’ll be able to score the performance out of five stars to contribute to the average the piece is getting, similar to YouTube. If the content scores well enough, it’ll make it into the Hot Picks of the Week, and if it continues to dominate, it can make it into the Hall of Fame. Yes, there’s a SingStar Hall of Fame…

SingStar’s use of the PlayStation Network friend system is lovely. Your profile has a section that showcases your SingStar friend roster. If you have a player on your PSN friend list and they create a SingStar profile, they’re automatically added to your profile list. Let’s say you’re fooling around in the Hall of Fame and come across my Toxic performance video (I’m joking of course…). You like my performance and decide that you want to become my friend. All you have to do is press the Start button and select "Friends List." You’ll be presented with the same friends list you get from the Cross Media Bar. You’ll select the friend request option, plug in my username, send your request and wait for my response!

The online aspect of SingStar doesn’t stop there. As I mentioned earlier, you are now able to download tracks from the PSN to expand your SingStar experience. 200 songs are currently available on the Store and Sony is planning on releasing more. The tracks (which come with their music videos) that are currently available are a mix between new stuff as well as tracks that appeared in PS2 versions of the franchise.

Question: How much these songs cost?

Answer: $1.49

It’s a pretty good price knowing that Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore sells subpar cover songs for $1.49 without a music video and Rock Band sells songs for $1.99. So yes, the pricing is very good! And trust me…you will buy new songs. You’ll get tired of Britney and Pussycat “Dulls” pretty quick.

Finally, SingStar features, for the first time, the ability to remove vocals. The songs will feature the original music artist, and be adapted from a single track master as with previous versions. SingStar will then attempt to digitally remove the vocals from the track. The game will also allow users to fade out the vocal track once it detects the user singing, and return it if the user stops. Very cool stuff indeed!

Is SingStar perfect? No. Don’t get me wrong, this SingStar version is easily the best of the series but it has a few issues worth noticing. First, there is no online multiplayer. Nothing. Nada. Since the beginning of the franchise, Sony has always promoted SingStar as a casual, multiplayer party game, and it appears that they won’t change it, not even for the “next-gen war”. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, really. But I would’ve loved been able to take someone online and show them who’s the real King of Crunk!

Unlike Rock Band and Karaoke Revolution, SingStar doesn’t let you see your vocals before it’s time to sing. If you’ve never heard the song before, you could’ve always seen the words and their intended pitch coming so you can try to find that range. That isn’t an option in SingStar. You don’t see your pitch until you’re trying to fill in the bars, and if you’ve never heard that song before, it’s bad juju for you. Personally, I don’t really care and most of the fans of the series won’t care either. SingStar is meant to be a party game. Still, I think it’s important to let the reader know.

While the whole game is presented in a shiny HD environment, the qualities of your video recording sessions and most of the music videos aren’t great. Of course, this is only something you’d be worried about if you were watching music videos rather than singing your heart out.

My final issue: the fact that it has only 30 songs. Knowing that Karaoke Revolution and Rock Band have more, I could’ve thought Sony would give us more songs since the game is hold on a Blu-Ray disc... But, like Karaoke Revolution and Rock Band, the money-making is on the DLC. Remember though, there’s 200 songs waiting for you. Now that’s something “the others” can’t top.

Conclusion

Sony has delivered the best SingStar experience ever and they send a clear message to its competitors. This is the way karaoke games should be done. Yes the game isn’t perfect, but it’s not about perfection. It’s about delivering a quality product that it’s worth every penny and will last you forever! SingStar is, in my opinion, the best karaoke game in the market. ‘nuff said!

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