The new untapped market of singing Karaoke on your console seems to be a tempting market for many videogame companies.  Could the cool wireless microphones, 40 song track list and funny gestures make Lips a title to watch out for as the next big Karaoke console title?  Find out when the head honcho of Gametactics Justin Lee reviews Lips for the Xbox 360.

Being one of the few non tone deaf gamers in our staff, I was happy to review Lips for the Xbox 360.  Aside from playing First Person Shooters, there is nothing wrong with having a bunch of friends over singing Karaoke on your videogame console.  Microsoft hired the Japanese development company iNiS, (who also developed Gitaroo Man, Elite Beat Angels and Won’t You Also Listen to Classical Music on Your DS) to create this new Karaoke franchise Lips on the Xbox 360.  Lips for the Xbox 360 comes with two wireless microphones that require AA batteries which are nicely included in the “death to open clear plastic packaging”.  Right out of the box the game has 40 songs to sing to.  The wireless microphones are very well built and have cool glowing LED lights that glow and dim to the beat while you sing, you can turn off the LED’s if you want to save battery life but it doesn’t seem to drain that much more with the lights on.  We sang over 2 hours straight and the batteries still are not dead yet.

The first thing you will start to notice is if you are alone, you can’t really sing the songs properly, every odd verse or so shows the 2nd player lyrics; even if the 2nd player microphone is not turned on.  While this might seem not to be a big deal, but how often have you had some friends gathered around the tv to sing some karaoke and only one person wishes to sing a song.  It is quite silly in fact because the person only sings half the song with these huge silent gaps in between of no one singing because it is player 2.  I guess you can play with the noise makers by taping your mic to the beat that increases your meter to activate a type of “star power multiplier” to increase your score.

The micophones have motion sensors in them almost like a Wii remote, gestures will appear next to the lyrics and you must mimic the picture in order to get a bonus for the next few verses you have to sing.  This is quite funny to watch people try to find the right moment to do this gesture without actually pulling the mic away from their mouth while they are singing.  There is also no way to turn off this feature, so just ignore it if you don’t want to do it.

Lips has a neat feature of  importing your unprotected mp3’s on your mp3 player, inserted audio cd’s or network connected Windows Vista, MCE or Windows XP computer with Windows Media Player 11.  The Zune is also supported if you subscribe to the music store.  However there are no lyrics on the screen so you will have to know the words by heart.

Buying songs is quick and easy but cost a little more than say a competing game SingStar.  In Canada; SingStar songs cost $1.50 plus taxes; most Lips songs cost around 160 points, which is about $2.24 plus tax.

There are many genres of music in Lips.  The track list bounces around from current top 40 songs to songs from before the day there were music videos (a “virtual music video” plays with dancing silhouettes instead).    You can find Duran Duran – Hungry Like The Wolf, Johnny Cash – Ring of Fire, Leona Lewis – Bleeding Love, Maroon 5 – Makes me Wonder, Sara Bareilles – Love Song, The Fray Over My Head (Cable Car) and much more.  Some songs are also on various PlayStation Sing Star games and Karaoke Revolution by Konami, but if you don’t own a Playstation 3 or Karaoke Revolution…this song selection is pretty good.

Lips features some other modes besides straight Karaoke.  Vocal Fighters is a versus Karaoke fight where both players sing the same song and the winner is declared with the best score. Kiss is co-op mode where two players must sing as closely as possible note wise to bring two lovers on the screen closer to each other.  Once the two lovers on the screen are close enough, just tip the microphone to make them kiss.  Time Bomb is a mode is quite simple, sing well and the fuse will get put out by water and the bomb will not go off…sing poorly and the fuse lights up again and heads toward the bomb.

There aren’t any multiplayer online features other than challenging a friend who also owns Lips to beat your score, but you don’t hear anything since it isn’t “live” over the internet.
 
You can set the music video singer volume, delay of your voice, versus or co-op settings for all forty songs individually.  Yes, you read that correctly…every time you enter a song you’ll need to set the options at least once.  Change an option such as versus to co-op (duet) and the game remembers it till you change it again.  Lips being a cool party game where you can just crank out the tunes and sing…you have to muddle with the menu for each song because it remembers the last setting you had it on.  There are no global options for the delay, singer volume and versus/co-op.  So if you already don’t want the songs as Versus (default when you first buy the game), you’ll have to go into 40 songs to set the option BEFORE your Karaoke party.

All in all, a good first attempt at a Karaoke game by iNiS and Microsoft with a nice big track list and one of the better set of microphones out there in the console market.  There are some minor issues such as lack of options for turning on or off certain features (gestures!) and too much configuration when it comes to individual songs (global option for co-op please?).  Lack of a true single player mode will be annoying if you like to sing solo or some of your friends prefer to do that.

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