Reviews// Lips

Who likes X Factor, eh? Eh? Sure you do! Everyone does! It’s got everything! Drama…..people singing…..um…..Louis Walsh…. At any rate, now you, the lucky gamer, can have an X Factor-like experience in your own home with you as the star!

Your own personal Simon Cowell (the Xbox 360) will even rate you using a variety of interstellar euphemisms (because you’re a star! Get it?!?). It will tell you when you’ve progressed from singing in the bathroom to Sunday Soloist and onwards. The levelling system is almost as condescending as that last paragraph and a half, telling me I’ve gone up for every song I’ve sung, enthusiastically rating my, to be fair, feeble warble as not just a Galaxy but a BIG BANG.

Any of this hyperbole seem familiar? Perhaps about four and a half years ago? Lips is here, on the 360. Yes, it is exactly what it looks like – Singstar. It even has a similar packaging design and please-everyone-once song choices that grow boring inevitably and quickly. 40 songs to start with on the game can then be added to with downloadable content from Live.

Lips: terrible name supported weakly by the legend, 'To sing your song you have to have lips'. It would be quite easy to believe that this was knocked together in about 20 minutes with only a fraction of a moment’s thought.

At first and, indeed second, glance, it would appear to bring very little original to the table bar the fact that the 360 had no Singstar equivalent until now, near on half a decade too late to be relevant.

Two microphones, thankfully, wireless. (I hate to admit it, but I am ashamed of my Rock Band wires tangling around people’s ankles at parties whilst the metaphorical neighbours play on their PS3, sneeringly referring to me as a Luddite, with their 3Gs and their mp3s and other things with 3 in them.)

In a massive oversight, Lips' mics are not compatible with Rock Band. This will lose them a lot of love and a fair few sales as new party game players (PGPs?) won’t be able to build up slowly towards the full price of Rock Band with an in-between game.

Current Rock Band owners won’t be tempted to waste money when they can’t even upgrade instruments. Bad choice. Bad choice.

In an attempt to spice things up a little, each mic has little LEDs that glow prettily in time with the beat and the singing; changing from green to either pink or blue when they are synched with the 360. The mics are shaken to activate star power and also to make tinny extra instrument sounds: maracas, tambourine or decks being scratched for Rhianna’s Umber-ella (-ella-ella).

In the game settings choices can be made about which video to watch during the song: the original music video, a virtual version, or a few different games which add a competitive element.

'Kiss' is one of these. Despite it supposedly being co-op, guiding two characters to kiss with the prowess of your combined singing, has more of an aggressive feel to it than is necessary - and is far too distracting.