

Sing a note too high, and the colour wildly escapes above the original grey bar. When you sing in time, the bar fills with a colour that represents your voice. As you prepare yourself for each new line of verse, it materialises as a grey bar running left to right that moves up and down indicating variations in note. The fantastic pitch bar, that acts as Karaoke’s infamous bouncing ball and indicates how close you are to the right note, is a fantastic tool. Three difficulty settings allow for everyone from the tone deaf to those more comfortable on a real stage to join in. For anyone on the planet who hasn’t played a version yet, or at least watched nervously as a pack of friends tussle for the microphone, spilling wine and stepping in ashtrays as they go, it really is the ultimate post-pub game. Whatever you think of the way they sound, they are certainly great fun to sing along to, excluding some notable exceptions that can only be a matter of personal taste.įor those who have already learned every syllable of Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby on SingStar Eighties, and for others who can cruise through Star Sailor’s We Built This City facing away from the screen gesticulating to their friends like a rock god, the format here will be utterly familiar. Though Pop Hits’ title suggests a similar feel to SingStar Popworld, the tunes on offer, while no less popular, are a little less brash.Īrtists from the Gorillas through to U2 feature, though they are joined by the more cheesy rhythms of The Sugar Babes, Lemar, Britney Spears and P!nk. Taken in that context, the assortment of songs on offer is well chosen, by a developer who clearly does a fair bit of singing as part of the process of selection. It just so happens that in the comfort of your own home with a microphone in hand and Sony’s fantastic interface to help you out, your tastes can vary wildly, as you’ll love to sing some songs you hate to hear, and visa versa. I’m not a massive fan when I hear it in the real world, but on SingStar? Now that’s different. Take I don’t feel like Dancing by the Scissor Sisters for example, which is one of the most popular and highly praised inclusions on Pop Hits.

However, that old adage was created a long time before karaoke, and doesn’t quite apply to SingStar. You, on the other hand, may feel it’s just noisy rubbish, preferring instead to stretch your vocal chords to Busted’s contribution in the form of the saccharine teeny-punk hit Year 3000. The other factor that makes any judgment of SingStar controversial is the old adage beloved of peddlers of floral sofas ‘there’s no accounting for taste.’ I might genuinely believe metal anthem Ace of Spades by Motorhead is one of the best inclusions yet to the SingStar library. If a new first-person shooter sequel didn’t change anything of the original beyond the levels, it would face a critical mauling, so many may feel SingStar should face the same process if it aspires to being a real game. Yet there is some truth to the view that each new disk doesn’t warrant the same acclaim as the last. Subdividing these disks by rough approximations of musical genres is also a great idea, giving the consumer some way of selecting the kind of night they will have. After numerous wine-addled sessions, singing the same tunes over and over is eventually tiresome, but the urge to sing on never dies. Of course, as updates to the package, new disks of songs are an excellent idea. The reality is that both groups are right.
SINGSTAR POPS UPDATE
They will tell you that the additional disks that have come out are, if you have already invested in the microphones, a brilliant and affordable update that breathes new life into your console every few months. They will berate the fact that the formula of SingStar has stayed mostly unchanged, and point fingers at the selection of tunes on offer.įans of the game will praise the way it has reinvented the console and attracted a whole new fan base to the PlayStation 2.
SINGSTAR POPS PC
There are always two contrary opinions upon the launch of a new addition of SingStar, and the eighth release, Pop Hits, will bring them both to life again.Ĭynics will say that SingStar isn’t even a real game, and another disk of songs deserves even less attention than a basic PC expansion pack.
