A strange feeling indeed when we finally got our hands on the SingStar blister pack earlier this week. Initially a PS3 launch title, then pretty much guaranteed for Summer 07, it’s been a full year’s wait for Sony’s first PS3 karaoke game, and ironically it’ll probably be the last too, such is the downloadble content future proofing built into it. Playing SingStar is a delight – right from booting the game the whole package screams quality; the menu loads quickly (after a few casual-friendly tips on how to use the Sixaxis) and from there on in even your mum could work out the gorgeous (and customisable) user interface.
It’s tricky to describe in words how smoothly everything works – navigating through the various layers of the menu structure recalls aspects of fl0w and the way that everything just seems to be exactly how and where you’d expect it to be: videos and photos are presented at the end of each song ready to be saved, there’s no load times at all and there’re always tooltips at the foot of the screen. We’re taking demerits for not picking up the signal if the controller isn’t assigned to port one, but aside from that SingStar is the poster boy for perfect human-computer-interaction.
If you’re not familiar with how SingStar works, it’s much like the karaoke down the pub on a Thursday night – the music video plays in the background and the lyrics appear at the bottom, but the selling point here is that the game also displays the pitch of the vocals in the centre of the screen which is then overlaid with your pitch as you sing along. The closer you are to the correct pitch for each bar or two, the more points you’ll score. It’s simple, accurate and this year won’t let you get away with humming.
Split up into single player, two player and party modes, SingStar offers a massive array of options whether you just want to practise alone or you’ve got a horde of mates around. Whichever choice you make, the game offers both short and long versions (most of the time) for each song across three difficulty levels – the harder the difficulty the closer you need to be in terms of pitch to score points. Each track is peppered with ‘golden notes’ which are normally the sections recorded via the PlayStation Eye (or Eye Toy) and are worth more points, but the camera takes 10 pictures regardless.
So, should you tire of the 30 songs included on the disk, the SingStore is just a click away and is fully integrated with the game itself, with full previews of the videos before you buy and at 99 pence each offer real value for money. The only niggle we have here is that once you’ve filled your cart with the required music you’ll be thrown into the usual grey PSN Store payment screen to manage your wallet. From there though all songs download in the background, and incredibly quickly, and you can get right back on with singing whilst they do.
We’ve covered most of what SingStar does in our 5 Days Of SingStar features (see the links below) but it’s worth mentioning that the game does ship with one or two little flaws: the fading out of vocals is a cool feature but we can’t understand why there aren’t individual volume controls for the microphones themselves in the game, and whilst we understand why the pop videos aren’t exactly high definition some of them really do look blocky and quite grainy. It’s not YouTube-bad, sure, but a couple of the downloads really weren’t quite up to scratch.
So, this marks the start of the PS3’s entry into the casual gamer market, and we can’t think for a minute why this won’t be a roaring success. True, it doesn’t do much more than the PS2 versions of the series did, and the price of the new console might still be putting people off, but grab a few mates around and it’ll only take one blast of Macy Gray to convince them to splash out on what we think will quickly become Sony’s killer app in Europe.