Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Laura Burke

SingStar for the PS3 is the 1st North American release for the PS3 platform. The game was released in Europe some time ago to fairly positive reviews.  There have been multiple editions released in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Spain, and North America, including 80's, 90's, Pop, Rock, and more.  SingStar has always contained an odd mixture of songs, with each game containing around 30 songs ranging from Amy Winehouse to the Rolling Stones.  Roughly one in every five songs is a female artist - strange for a title that is clearly aimed at the female demographic.  Did this affect gameplay in the Playstation 2 versions of the game?  Certainly.  SingStar for the PS3 blows this problem completely out of the water with a brand new feature though - the ability to buy more songs.  I've gotten to spend a few weekends with a Mojito in one hand and a SingStar mic in the other.  Let's see if the SingStar PS3 debut is American Idol or if it falls to StarSearch levels...

What is there to complain about when you have the original music videos and artists backing you up?  Surprisingly, the videos themselves!  It is certainly cool to see the videos to a lot of these songs but it can be extremely distracting. I found myself tending to watch the video instead of my queue to start the verse, at least for the first couple times I sang a new song.  That said, I did get to see the videos for a great many songs that I missed when those songs were being played on VH1. (Anyone else remember when MTV played music?  Wasn't MTV2 supposed to have music at some point too?  I digress...)

The song selector is a collection of album covers, (albums are what we use to call CD’s for those of you born after 1990) giving you the artist name as well as the name of the song. You can scroll to the left and right providing a sampling of the track so you can figure out if you'd like to purchase it or not.

Because each game is accompanied by videos, it is important that they look sharp.  The game is obviously on Blu-Ray, so all of the songs on the disc run in HD at 1080p.  The song videos that you can download are a mixture of Standard Definition (SD) and High Definition (HD), but the PS3 does a good job of upsampling the few tracks that don't have an HD component.  Obviously this is a change as all of the previous titles were presented in 4:3 ratio and in low-resolution 480i.  The videos come out crisp, clean, and for the first time, widescreen. 

One area that isn't quite HD is the EyeToy output.  You can use the EyeToy to pull video of you making a fool of yourself for all to see.  Taping up to 20 seconds of a song, you can upload these videos up to a YouTube-like interface that we'll talk about later.  The EyeToy isn't a widescreen HD camera, so expect to see a bit of grainy picture for your videos, as well as those uploaded by others.

For a music title, sound is absolutely crucial.  I’m happy to say that the songs in SingStar are not covers, but entirely composed of master tracks.  Clearly having Sony as a record label backing a game made by Sony has a positive effect in this event.  Obviously the inclusion of master tracks means that you’ll be singing the original song, not some weak knock-off.  While it may sound a bit off when you play the song back in the included playback mode, the quality of the songs is top notch for this game just as it has been for the other editions. Like many music titles, your enjoyment ultimately comes down to whether you enjoy the selections provided. I think that out of these 30 songs that were included on the disc, there were only 5 that I would have chosen to omit. Since your mileage may vary, here’s the list of included songs - you can judge whether it is a “Loser” or if it's “Epic”.  

Artist and Song Title

Amy Winehouse	"Back To Black"
Beck	"Loser"
Blind Melon	"No Rain"
Coldplay	"Clocks"
Corinne Bailey Rae	"Put Your Records On"
Dave Matthews Band	"Crash Into Me"
David Bowie	"Let's Dance"
Faith No More	"Epic"
Franz Ferdinand	"Do You Want To?"
Jane's Addiction	"Been Caught Stealing"
New Found Glory	"My Friends Over You"
Pixies	"Here Comes Your Man"
The Ramones	"I Wanna Be Sedated"
The Rolling Stones	"Sympathy For The Devil"
The Smashing Pumpkins	"Today"
Warrant	"Cherry Pie"

The sensitivity of the mic system is very developed so it will pick up the slightest dip in your voice or staccato in your words. Obviously this is more important at the higher difficulty levels than the lower ones. 

SingStar has a few sound effects that you’ll hear pretty often after each song. If you receive a Tone Deaf ranking you are met with booing and a note of discord accompanied by the freshly-added lovely phonograph icon. If you get the Amateur (use to be Wannabe) ranking (roughly 2000 pts) there’s a rewinding sound and a cassette tape icon. (this is what music use to be played on before we had CD’s!) So far my favorite is the Hopeful ranking where you get a icon of a rocking horse that sounds like a donkey! If you achieve the coveted SuperStar ranking you are met with an angelic ‘Laaaaaa” in a ‘thou hast descendith upon the Earth from the Heavens’ sound and a lovely crown. If you decide a minute or a second into the song that you don’t like it, you will be hearing the booing and discord a lot since you won't have any points to bolster your ranking.

Now, enough teasing, lets talk about the playback mode. This feature is one of the best new additions I've seen in a while, having played quite a few music titles - let me explain. There is a little SFX menu you can access after the usual play/pause, rewind and fast forward options. In this menu you can add some finishing touches to your One Hit Wonder. Reverb, warble, and increase/decrease octave options allow you to tweak your sound from baby-tone to chest-deep bass. Me? I like adding them all and getting this odd sort of half Orca killer whale and half trilling ghost sort of noise. You can adjust them through out the song playback so no need to settle on one at the onset - play with them all till you find your power animal. (Slide.) Be ready for the cats in your neighborhood to come running and the dogs to start howling though, the results are high comedy. All in all the sound is phenomenal so I think it deserves top numbers for this section.

For those of you who have played previous Singstar games, there have been a couple additions that should make you happy.  For those of you who have not, you’ll be happy to know that the controls are fairly simple.  First you’ll decide if you plan to play SingStar, go to My Media Gallery, or go Online. Yes I said ONLINE! If you decide to play you'll get 6 more options: Battle, Sing Solo, Duet, Practice, Pass the Mic, or Options. There are a great deal of additional options here including Parental Controls and the ability to change your background wallpaper. Once you decide to play you’ll use the D-pad to navigate the menu system, tapping the X button to make selections.  Honestly, there are only two things that are counter-intuitive: the fact that you have to back out to the main menu to change the difficulty level, and that you have to use the same difficulty level for everyone in your party.  This is a problem when you play with two teams of four people as it is likely that somebody will be the ringer and want to play on Medium or Hard while everyone else hums along on easy. There is one feature that I'd like to see in this series - something similar to the Face-Off mode in Guitar Hero II, or the band modes from Rock Band.  This would allow players to select a difficulty that more matches their skill level.

The bundle system comes with an adapter that plugs in via USB and give you access to two mics at a time. If you have a friend with the game have them bring over their mic set so you can play with 2 players. You have up to 4 USB slots so you can play with up to 7 more friends at once making for a great group battle.

You can control the level of your voice over the track and they seemed to have corrected the previous incarnations problem with feedback here and it is easier to hear yourself over the track. Playback mode also allows you to turn your vocals up or down to where you want to hear yourself. Honestly, the interface is so simple that there is only one real complaint - the download system.  Unfortunately it is a big one.

Obviously, SingStar acting as the platform to download new songs of your choice is a major part of the appeal of this title.  Similar to Rock Band or Guitar Hero, players can preview the song before they choose to buy it, but there ends the similarity! SingStar has a teal bar at the bottom left of your screen that serves as your download meter.  Unfortunately there is almost zero data beyond this moving teal bar to tell you how long you have to wait before your song will appear.  While I can approximate that I'm 50% done with my download when the teal bar reaches the half-way point, there is no data rate or time countdown that I could find, meaning it is missing or so counter-intuitive as to remain hidden.

If it were just the download bar, I could deal with it, but there is a reason why it is a big deal - slow download speeds. We have a 12mbps connection in our office, and we've never had problems downloading anything from Live, PSN, or the Wii channels. To test the SingStar store I downloaded a 77MB song expecting a wait of less than 2 minutes. Amazingly, this download took over 10 minutes! Well, what about queuing up multiple songs? I did 2 songs totaling 125MB and it took 30 minutes for the first song (76mb) and 20 minutes for the 2nd one (49MB) to complete the process! 50 Minutes for 2 songs because I queued them at the same time? Ouch! I suggest you download them one at a time and take the 10 or 12 minute lump for each song and just prep for your party Saturday night on Monday. As a redeeming quality, when you go online to buy the song, you don’t have to postpone your game just because you are downloading - you can continue to play whatever mode you wish, other than the song you are downloading currently. Given the length of time it takes to download a song, this is fairly crucial. You can go online and purchase a bunch of songs and come back and download them later, which is what I did. Once you turn off the game you lose your download connection but you don't lose your purchases, meaning you won't accidentally purchase your song more than once. There is a section in the SingStore that shows you an option for Purchase History if you are unsure of which items you've purchased, as well as a status indicator of what titles are downloaded, queued, or in the progress of being downloaded. 

One of the biggest things tauted by Krazy Ken during his PS3 presentations is the power of Blu-Ray and the fantastic BlueTooth controller.  With that said, explain to me why I have cords coming out of my microphones?  Sadly, this version doesn't use the technology meaning that if a new version of the microphones are released, you'll get to buy them again.  Boooo!  While Sony can work on the download speeds of their SingStar store, nothing is going to make the lack of BlueTooth use any better.

SingStar is much better this time around in terms of gameplay, but I still want to be able to hear how I sound with the track without the artist. I want to BE the artist, which is the point of a Karaoke game in my opinion. (that and not having to deal with drunken idiots at some smoky bar - I would rather deal with the drunken idiots at home and be able to throw them out if I want!) In previous renditions of the game I was able to rack up a 9000+ score and the game would praise me highly.  The funny part is that I was simply humming along with the song and not singing at all.  As a testament to the increased processing power of the PlayStation 3, this title seems to process the voice signal significantly better, meaning that you'll have to actually pay attention and try to hit the notes requested.  In fact, the Hard mode is a little harder, and the Easy mode is a little less forgiving than in previous titles.  

The majority of the songs are great, and a few of my favorites are represented, but I would have liked to see more of a mix to make it more unisex. Let’s face it, most guys don’t get together for the sole purpose of singing rock songs with each other, no matter how bitchin’ the songs are! Instead they’d get together to play some Rock Band and play the instruments, leaving the singing part out.  On the other hand, women get together in droves to sing Karaoke, so including some more cool chick songs in the initial line up would probably help this maintain the party game stature. Since you can download another 239 tracks at this point, you'll have more songs that you can add to tailor the game more to your style.

As someone who owns the other SingStar games you will be very happy to know that most of the songs from previous games are available in this version, and equally unhappy to know that you have to pay to get those songs again to play them here.  You can always throw them into the PS3 and use the backwards compatability (if you have a PS3 with that option), but you'll have to buy them again to re-sing and save them for a jury of your International peers. There really should be a way for us to be able to say “Hey, I already own this, transfer these songs to my new list” instead of having to buy it individually again! 

On an odd note, you can sing the same song the same way on each level of difficulty and only roughly 400-600 points will divide your scores on each level of difficulty. Also, can I just ask what is with with the DA DA DA DA    DA DA DA DA DA     DA DA DA Da DA    DA DA DA DA DA DA DA’s for the opening lyrics to The Final Countdown? The synthesizer does the DA DA DA’s, not the singer so why the hell am I DA DA DA DA’ing? The brings me to the other problem that I've run into in every SingStar title - you are not allowed to deviate in any way from the way the original singer sang their song.  As someone who sings more than than just in the shower or at one of those drunken Karaoke outings, I am used to making a song my own and adding a roll or sustain somewhere.  In all of the SingStar titles you lose points when you move off of the pitch line in any way.  While I don't expect the game to grade my version of the song, I do expect it to be accurate when I sing it poorly. The game still awards points if you sing off-key and flat, as long as you hit the note pitch correctly.

Remember we mentioned the Online menus? My SingStar Online has a profile you can create which shows your best scores for each difficulty level. You can go into your profile and it will tell you the song that what songs are your highest score. Even better than that you can upload an audio track of you singing your favorite tracks for others to hear, grade, and comment on.  Crazy enough, the upload only took 18 seconds! Operating similar to MySpace and YouTube, you can use the EyeToy you can also record a 20 second clip to post alongside of your SingStar profile. We'll get into this later, but let me tell you that this is comedy gold! The things I have seen so far have kept my sides hurting for hours laughing at some peoples antics. 

The game retails at $49.99 if you already own the mic bundle. If you are a SingStar virgin then the bundle with two microphones will set you back $59.99. It’s a little pricy for a SingStar game, but even more so when you factor in an additional $1.50 for each downloaded song. But you aren’t buying the game to listen to some cool music, you are buying it to put yourself in the artist's shoes. Does this game do that? I don’t believe it does this as successfully as it could. You can hum the words in tune to get the score up, and you are singing on top of the artist, which does not sound good for anyone - not even the artist themselves. There is no career mode or any engaging single player mode to keep you working toward a goal; it’s just a singing party game. I'm rather surprised that there is no functionality to at least unlock a few tracks by doing well with earlier songs. Party mode does give you a competition feel, but only if you have 2 or more people that know the song equally, and are on the same ability level.  Where are the online battles?  Where is the single player mode?  It is a valiant start, but it seems that it could have done even better with a few more features.  That said, the lack of ability to transfer songs that you already own is inexcusable. 

SingStar continues in the same vein as the previous titles, good and bad. The online mode is a huge improvement to this title but download times have to be addressed. If you are a fan of the previous titles you will also like SingStar, but be aware that this outing isn't going to revolutinize your playing experience.

Gaming Trend Score

86

1. Graphics: 95
2. Audio: 100
3. Controls: 75
4. Gameplay: 90
5. Value/Replay: 65
6. OVERALL:86