SingStar (PS3)

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Remember back when mixing karaoke and videogames together was enough to rank as truly revolutionary all by itself? It may seem hard to believe now, but it was just five years ago that Konami's Karaoke Revolution proved that a game could be successful just by scrolling some song lyrics and measuring how well the players were singing the notes behind them. Sony's SingStar series reinforced this proof, gussying up the basic concept of Karaoke Revolution with music videos and a wide mix of songs spread out over a dozen European expansion discs since its initial 2004 release.

Of course, the rhythm game genre hasn't remained static since then. Games like Rock Band and the upcoming Guitar Hero 4 have enhanced that basic, karaoke-based gameplay with drumming and guitar playing, providing a relatively varied four-player party experience in the process. Suddenly, a game that merely lets one or two players sing along with their favorite songs seems more tired than inspired. Suddenly, the SingStar series and its karaoke game ilk are on the brink of obsolescence.

Thus the scene is set for the PlayStation 3 version of SingStar, Sony's last-ditch effort to save the series, and indeed the entire genre, from becoming a minor footnote in the history of the rhythm game. The game largely succeeds in this mission, not by revolutionizing the karaoke gameplay itself, but by expanding it into a new frontier of online features that will hopefully give some legs to the ailing concept.

It's a shame that basic gameplay remains unchanged, because the core of the SingStar series could definitely use a revolution of its own. Instead, this latest version continues the awful interface conventions that have plagued the previous PlayStation 2 editions. Unlike Karaoke Revolution, which scrolls notes and lyrics in one long, continuous right-to-left stream, the on-screen lyrics and note bars in SingStar are chopped up into distinct screens that are thrown up in front of the player just before they need to be sung. Each new screen can have an entirely different rhythm and pitch range than the one that came before it, a fact that forces the player's eyes to jump around the screen to keep up. Even worse, the lyrics themselves appear on the very bottom of the screen, far from the notes that they go with, making it nearly impossible to keep track of both at the same time. The result is an interface that seems designed to thwart players that don't have intimate prior knowledge of the song they're singing.

Beyond the interface, the game is pretty accurate at detecting which notes you're singing. Unfortunately, it seems to have a little trouble detecting exactly when you're singing them in relation to the music -- there's a small but persistent delay between the start of a sung note and the appearance of that note on the screen. The game has a built-in tool that tries to automatically correct for this delay, but it didn't have much effect in my tests. Still, this delay ends up being a relatively minor annoyance, only really noticeable on the faster songs. Much more annoying is the "rap scoring" mode for songs like Outkast's "Hey Ya", which assigns a score to spoken lyrics that has no relation to the actual performance, as far as I can tell.

SingStar's lineup of 30 songs on the disc provides a decent, if pop-heavy, mix to start things off, but these initial songs are really only the tip of the iceberg this time around. The real motherload of song selection is in the online SingStore, which has hundreds of downloadable tracks (and their accompanying music videos) available for $1.49 each. After all these years, it's extremely freeing to be able to build a karaoke library based on your personal tastes rather than the forced bundling of disc-based distribution.