Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Laura Burke

SingStar Volume 2 is the second release in the SingStar PS3 series. Volume 2 contains 30 songs ranging from bad boy rapper Eminem’s “Without Me” to the more recently formed American Pop Rock band Paramore’s “CrushCrushCrush”. Throw in the Police, The Mamas & The Papas, and Natasha Beddingfield and you have a pretty large range of music to choose from. We went back to a 75% male to female vocal mix in this edition which made it a little difficult to have my girlfriends over for a SingStar party! Luckily we have the downloadable content to try to customize our tracks. We’ll talk more about that. The guys didn’t want to step up to the mic and serenade us with Bad English love song “When I see you smile” either. Graphics look crisp and clean for all the menus, but there is nothing new for those who have played the previous editions. Just like SingStar, the album cover art graphics scroll to the left and right giving you a sampling of the track so you can figure out if you recognize the song or not. Likewise the SingStore has the same set up as the first edition. Because this version is also for the PS3 it is on BluRay media and presented in beautiful HD widescreen format. Overall there is nothing new in lay out or presentation from the first edition of SingStar on the PS3. Which begs the question why release a volume 2 just 5 months after releasing volume 1? If you are going to launch a second product that soon, why not give us something new in the presentation side of things? We will address this more in the Value section of the review.

For a music title, sound is absolutely crucial. I’m happy to say that the songs in SingStar Volume 2 are not covers, but actually master tracks. This means that you’ll be singing the original song, not some weak knock-off while your friends watch the video. The quality of the songs is top notch for this game just as it has been for the other editions. Ultimately it comes down to the individual taste in the selections provided. I personally felt the selection was a nice mix in this version despite the emphasis on male tracks 8 to 22 (if you count the 2 duets as female tracks). Since your mileage may vary here’s the list of songs so you can figure out if you’re pretty fly for a white guy or miserable.

The Killers - "When You Were Young”	Natasha Bedingfield – "Unwritten”
Young M.C. - "Bust A Move"	Paramore - "CrushCrushCrush”
Tone Loc - "Funky Cold Medina"	Pink - "Just Like A Pill"
Phantom Planet - "California"	Sara Bareilles - "Love Song"
Eminem - "Without Me"	Yael Naim - "New Soul"
Radiohead - "Street Spirit"	Gold Frapp - "Happiness"
Lit - "Miserable"	Elton John & Kiki Dee - "Don't Go breaking My Heart"
Weezer - "Beverly Hills"	The Mama’s and The Papas – “California Dreamin’”
The Cure - "Pictures of You"
The Police - "Don't Stand So Close To Me"
Gavin DeGraw - "In Love With A Girl"
Panic! At The Disco - "Nine In The Afternoon"
Boys Like Girls - "Hero/Heroine"
The Bravery - "Believe"
Rise Against - "Prayer Of The Refugee"
Gnarls Barkley - "Run (I'm A Natural Disaster)"
The Shins - "New Slang"
Bobby Brown - "My Prerogative"
The Proclaimers - "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)"
Aerosmith - "Dude (Looks Like A Lady)"
The Offspring - "Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)"
Bad English - "When I See You Smile"

We've also got a list of the DLC that is available for both SingStar titles listed here.  SingStar Volume 2 has a few sound effects that you’ll hear pretty often after each song, and some are certainly odd, but all in all the sound is phenomenal so I think it deserves top numbers for this section.  We'll talk about the song selection and layout when we talk about the overall value of the game.

For those of you who have played previous Singstar games, absolutely nothing has changed here, so you can just move along – you know what you are getting.  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 single player, in party mode, freestyle, or go to the store.  Once that is decided you’ll use the D-pad to navigate the menu system, tapping the X button to make selections.  The bundle comes with an adapter that plugs in via USB and give you access to two corded mics at a time. Oh wait, did I just say “corded”? That’s right, we STILL don’t have a cordless BluTooth mic! Why NOT? I mean come on, Sony, this is your technology. Let’s have some cordless mics already. You can control the level of your voice over the track so you can hear yourself more clearly over the track. This of course makes you sound way louder than you should over the track. Why cant we pull the guide vocals back into the background or snuff them out completely so I can be Toni Braxton lamenting over her newest boyfriend’s tragic motorcycle death? Is that so much to ask?

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. This can be especially annoying for serious singers who know that you can’t always keep a sustained note flat (or sans vibrato) it sounds horrible. If you properly insert a vibrato into a note (or maybe the song has a vibrato on a note) it will knock you out of the scoring area and your overall score will be less than stellar when playing on Hard. Medium doesn’t seem to care however. There is a large discrepancy between the scoring on Medium and Hard, and it seems to be a bit off on note placement at times. I also found that on some of the songs where there is a harmony and a melody being sung the note it wants is somewhere in the middle. Not exactly accurate. You can turn off the scoring and just sing the song which I find is better for mixed parties. Have fun making fun of each other.

It’s good that you can access help for anything you might want to know about where to go to do whatever because you will need it when trying to figure out how to upload a video or audio track to the gallery for all of your adoring fans to critique and rip apart. I have to say that responding to someone’s request to make her my friend was probably the 2nd most frustrating part of the game. This part of the control system is just not intuitive at all. How about a tab IN the game that says “Friends” instead of making me exit the game? Some of the online names are very odd also so without a reply button in the game you might have to back out and re-enter a few times to make sure that you are sending a message to the right person. After all, how many people out there will have a name starting with X? Oh, apparently there’s 2733! Hmmmm...

Since I already got on my soap box about the note registry so I won’t rehash that again but I will say this:  When I sing an E flat (aka D#) it’s an E flat and it matches the piano tone. When I see a line on the screen I don’t know what it is till I hear it, if I happen to know the song and know it’s an A and I sing an A it registers as a bad note.  If I sing an A flat or sharp however it registers a perfect note for top scoring. This is a bit misleading not to mention exceedingly frustrating. I hate to keep saying it but Rock Band seemed to get that part right, why cant we? Ok, the SingStore allows you to buy additional songs to fill out your super star margarita night with all your favorite songs. It’s a little weak on the US content; again it was made by the London studio so the vast majority of the songs are going to be UK hits. Nothing wrong with that however, if you plan to get more US buy in you might want to add some more US popular artists. Again, I implore you to attempt to add some really good female artists like Heart, Evanescence, Lacuna Coil, Flyleaf, ect.

One of the best things about this game is the online community. You can sift through 300K plus names and view their video uploads or listen to their best tracks. The problem is that the majority of these people haven’t even filled out their profiles so you have to sit at your TV for what could be hours before finding someone who has uploaded something amusing to hear/see. I picked a random screen to search for some audio/video gold and in 4 pages (48 profiles) I found 1 audio file-and it was restricted to friends viewing only! What would be really handy here is some sort of icon on the name tile to tell me that this person has an audio, video, or both on their profile. This would keep me from getting discouraged when looking through all those players’ profiles for entertainment. Luckily there is a leader board which shows you some highlighted profiles. Some are highlighted because of the number of views their video has received. You can sift through these in the Community Gallery. Some are so funny I couldn’t stop laughing. You will surely find many reasons to visit the online community.

The game retails at $39.99 if you already own the mic bundle, this is a $10 difference from Vol 1 which was priced at $49.99. If you are a SingStar virgin then the bundle will set you back about $59.99 like Volume 1. There were no improvements to the interface; there is still no BluRay wireless mics. Keep in mind that SingStar is made by Sony’s London studios so SingStar for the PS3 was released in December of 2007 in the UK when we got it in May 08 in the States.  SingStar Vol. 2 was released in the UK a month after we got Volume 1 here so they had to wait a little bit before sending it to the US.

My biggest gripe about this is that the songs from SingStar Vol. 1 are not in the store for me to purchase, again, and I haven’t found a way to transfer them from Volume 1 either. So I have to stop my game and change disks to get a song off Volume 1. Harmonix, the makers of the Rock Band series, managed to figure out a way to carry over the music from their first release to their second edition so we know its possible. Now luckily since we paid for the other downloaded songs and they are saved on our hard drives they are accessible in Vol. 2.

SingStar Volume 2 continues in the same vein as the previous titles, good and bad. While the game doesn’t make any huge improvements over its predecessor, it also doesn’t make any new mistakes. If you are a fan of the previous titles you will also like SingStar Volume 2. 

Gaming Trend Score

81

1. Graphics: 85
2. Audio: 95
3. Controls: 85
4. Gameplay: 75
5. Value/Replay: 70
6. OVERALL:81