If it’s one of the songs on the disc, or a song downloaded via Xbox LIVE Marketplace, you’ve got three options: You can sing along with the original music video (and perv over a writhing Rihanna in the rain), or have what’s called a ‘Virtual Music Video’ (a dynamic, iPod dancing silhouette advert-esque video that can be manipulated with mic movement) play instead, or pick from one of three mini-game type challenges. There’s a number of options available with any given song. Sing is where you pick songs to sing, obviously. From the main menu you’ve got a number of options, all scrolled through horizontally. The menu system has awful lounge music but it’s accessible and easy to navigate, as well as very, very white. You can’t fail a song, which means you can simply sit back and enjoy the music if you fancy it, but you’ll get nul points if you do. Still, Lips is unmistakably non-hardcore, the antithesis to Gears of War 2. You start off as a lowly ‘Shower Dreamer’, but soon enough you’ll be climbing the ladder to inevitable stardom. There’s also a ranking system, which every point scored contributes to. You’ll get these for pitch, stability, rhythm, party, technique and performance. The point? There’s medals to go for, awarded after every song. For the mega competitive among you, vibrato and well placed Star Stream will be a must – myself and the missus managed 2.37 million singing Coldplay’s Yellow cooperatively, which is such a good score it’s classified as a Big Bang. You can slur your way to victory, if you can slur in tune. You don’t even need to pronounce the words. You don’t need to sing like an angel to fill the bar with red or blue. The game is actually pretty forgiving, I found. VS is our most played mode, and trying to beat the ‘trouble and strife’s’ end score, dependent on your ability to sing a song’s lyrics on key and in time, was my primary motivation. You don’t want to trigger it just before a period with little singing, since you’ll waste the score bonus period – instead you’ll want to save it for just before you have to belt out more banging lyrics than in an Arctic Monkeys tune. Again, I wasn’t particularly enamoured with the prospect of actually having to do more with my muscles than hold a mic a couple of inches away from my mouth, but then I’m a ‘mourngey git’, apparently, and, admittedly, you’ll have to at least try if you’ve got a competitive streak burning somewhere inside of you, since it increases your high score potential. Strike that pose (or don’t – simply violently jerking the mic is usually enough to convince the game you’re doing what it’s asking you to) and you’ll trigger Star Stream, which gives the tone bars a shot of glitter juice and grants you a short period of bonus star potential. Sing well enough and an image will appear on screen that shows a silhouette of a singer prompting a mic gesture, like holding both hands in the air, for example. She also loves being able to use the wireless mics as if they’re Wii Remotes.
The ball and chain, for example, loves it, bless her, and even made me turn the lights off in the bedroom to make the most of them. This is largely pointless in my view, but that won’t be the opinion of everyone. On top of that, there’s shining LED lights that adorn the bottom end of each microphone that pulse to the rhythm of each song. They have decent weight and as a result don’t feel like a cheap piece of plastic that might snap after a clumsy, alcohol-fuelled fall.
ADD SONGS TO LIPS XBOX 360 MANUAL
No-where in the game or in the game manual is this explained, which led to one hell of a struggle getting the damn things to work in the first place. You’re able to join songs at any point with a simple shake, BUT, in order to get them to work with your console you have to press and hold a small button at the bottom of each microphone and press the sync button on the front of the 360, then wait for the rings to flash as they do when a normal controller syncs. They’re wireless, from this point forward a requirement for all rival products, and that technology is utilised well. Undoubtedly Lips’ microphones are the best on the music game market. Lips isn’t just gunning for SingStar, it’s gunning for the Wii, the DS, and anything else that’s vying for position underneath your Christmas tree.Īnd yet, working out whether Lips is any good forces you to compare it to SingStar (and rope in your better half, preferably brandishing a bottle of wine). It forms part of Microsoft’s three-pronged Christmas 2008 assault on the casual gaming space, sharing responsibility with party title You’re in the Movies and quiz game Scene It? Box Office Smash. It’s a karaoke game with graphics that look remarkably similar to Sony’s effort, but scratch beneath the surface and you realise that Lips is much more than that. At first glance, Lips is Microsoft’s SingStar killer.
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