SingStar Rocks!

SingStar Rocks! Review

SingStar Rocks! is the fifth game in Sony's karaoke series, which monitors your singing via two microphones and scores you on your pitch and timing. The game's popularity spans a wide variety of audiences, and anyone who has regular parties has found that a pair of SingStar mics makes a perfect catalyst. The trouble is that despite four previous versions that included 120 songs each, the SingStar series has tended to focus primarily on popular music. Whilst SingStar '80s catered to the series' twentysomething fans, SingStar Rocks! contains a track listing that should appeal to a broader audience, more so than any other game in the series to date. It's just too bad that there's zero in the way of feature improvements to be had.

For those of you who've never heard of SingStar before, it's a karaoke game that rates your singing prowess. Using two microphones and a USB adapter, the game analyses your pitch and timing as you sing along to one of 30 music videos from various artists. Your performance is shown on screen via coloured bars that let you know if your pitch is too high or low, and the level of sensitivity depends on your chosen difficulty level. If you manage to consistently match the original song, your score will be multiplied, and you can attain bonus points by hitting specific notes.

It's this competitive element that makes SingStar more than just a karaoke game, and it does a very good job of recognising those who can actually sing, whilst helping the tone-deaf idiots among us to gradually improve. There are a couple of limitations with this technology, however. Firstly, the game rewards you for doing impressions of the original artist, and even those with strong vocal ability will have to adapt their style to match the recording. Secondly, the game doesn't recognise individual words, so it's possible to hum along in the right tone and earn massive points. In a two-player game, this means that someone putting in an extravagant performance is likely to score less than someone who quietly concentrates on nailing the pitch while murmuring along.

These are both criticisms of the scoring system, though, but as any Japanese businessman will tell you, karaoke comes into its own once a group of rowdy friends (and perhaps a bit of alcohol) is involved. SingStar Rocks! may well be more than just a simple karaoke game, but it's still essentially party entertainment. The selection of music--all originals--combined with a slick front end and an interface that takes about 10 seconds to grasp make for a party starter like nothing else. Watch out for the people who refuse to get involved at the beginning, as they'll be the ones you have to kick off the PlayStation 2 at 3 a.m.

SingStar Rocks! has a better good-to-bad song ratio than most other entries in the series. Blur's "Song 2", Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" and The Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black" standout as pure sing-along gold, and some of the more recent tracks also hold up well. Razorlight's "Somewhere Else" is set to be a post-pub classic, while Maximo Park's "Apply Some Pressure" shifts gears so many times that it leaves you physically exhausted.

In fact, when you browse the tune selection for the first time, the number of high-octane classics overshadows the sneaky inclusion of several weaker songs and ballads. But after you've lived the rock-and-roll excesses of The Scorpions and Thin Lizzy, the comedown to Coldplay, Keane, and KT Tunstall is worse than going cold turkey. Songs like "Everybody's Changing," and "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" wouldn't have a place on any self-respecting rock album, so why do they here? You can just imagine the battle between the designers and the marketing department. "Yeah, you can have The Undertones and Nirvana, but only in return for Gwen Stefani and Keane."

It's a shame that Sony is happy to update SingStar with new tracks without bothering to introduce any new features. SingStar Rocks! has an extremely limited number of modes, especially in single-player where the only objective is to beat high scores. Multiplayer offers more modes--Pass the Mic offers two teams of four the opportunity to battle each other, while two players can have a battle or a duet. On the other hand, if you don't want to compete, you can freestyle over any of the songs and use an EyeToy camera if you want to watch yourself instead of the music videos.

In fact, rather than add features, it seems like Sony is removing them instead. The first game in the series contained a single-player career mode where you went to clubs to entertain the crowds. Later, SingStar PopWorld had a rap mode, and while that's not suitable here, we'd have liked a rockin'-out mode or something similar. At least the medley songs, where several choruses of similar tracks are lined up together, have made a reappearance.

If you already own the peripheral mics and you like rock music, then SingStar Rocks! is a worthwhile budget purchase, but apart from the genre shift, Rocks! doesn't have much to offer in the way of new content. It's annoying to see that feature upgrades are now being postponed until SingStar moves to the PlayStation 3, where you will be able to choose individual songs to download over broadband. You may end up paying more for SingStar on a song-for-song basis, but at least you'll be able to create rocking playlists that don't include KT Tunstall.