LIPS

For those who assume that Lips is just Microsoft finally getting around to copying one of Sony’s greatest software successes, you’re only partly right.

The basic game is indeed almost identical to SingStar, in that you score points for following the pitch and rhythm of songs, but Lips does enough new for the genre to make itself distinct. The main difference is Lips’ re-reading of karaoke itself.

While SingStar looked to karaoke and made a videogame out of it, Lips is a purer take, complete with ball bouncing over its song lyrics. It lacks SingStar’s skill levels and never fails bad performances – in fact, simply blowing on the microphone will net thousands of points.

Though this might not sound so inspiring, Lips’ compensation is that it attempts to push the focus of the game away from the TV and into the room you’re playing in by encouraging showmanship (and showing off). Star Stream, its version of Guitar Hero’s Star Power, requires striking a pose for the microphone’s accelerometers to register, and it’s possible to embellish songs with tambourine by shaking the mic. Anyone else with a gamepad, meanwhile, can accompany with handclaps, bongo beats, cowbells and laser blasts.

For all the vagueness of its competitive side, Lips makes for a good party game, a point it plays to with Jukebox mode. Here, it will run through a playlist, quite content to sit in the background, its light-up mics gently pulsing through the spectrum in time to the music, whether anyone chooses to sing along by shaking a mic or not.

It’s a feature supported by the ability to sing to your own MP3s, though, naturally, these aren’t supported by lyrics, and yet are, rather nonsensically, scored. Where Lips breaks down is in the flow of play. While SingStar inflicts no loading times between song selection and singing, Lips does. In fact, it also asks players what game type or video they wish to play the song to, a pertinent question but a distraction that tends to chip away at the immediacy of playing.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the choices were worthwhile, but the minigames are goofy and rather disposable, and the alternative videos are too characterless to compete with the originals. That’s apart from the custom video for Ring Of Fire, which features a cartoon of two giant cobras fighting over an equally huge melting ice cream cone in hell – a small concession, surely, to Inis’ Ouendan-era sensibilities.

These rare moments of oddness do tend to conflict with the identity that the game seems keen to strike elsewhere, though. The signature use of Peter Bjorn and John’s Young Folks on the slick introductory movie, which shows beautiful people demonstrating how Lips makes their partying even more desirable, suggests it’s all about the hip young things. And then the jauntily cheesy default menu music begins and the 40-strong song selection shows itself to encompass Roxette, The Proclaimers and Rihanna (with Andy Williams already available among a currently rather paltry collection of downloadable songs).

It’s a list that’s evidently tuned to cover all the bases (there’s The Cure and Young MC, Johnny Cash and Geri Halliwell, too), but it won’t satisfy many for long. SingStar, on the other hand, knows exactly what it is and has every feature tuned to match. With more longterm appeal than Lips outside parties, it’s the better game. But it’s hard to fault Lips for trying something different, even if it’s just a little.

6/10