Xbox 360 revolution Lips: Could Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2 be rewritten?
Xbox 360 revolution Lips: Guitar Hero World Tour vs. Rock Band 2, how many times has this debate come up? Personally, I give the edge to RB based on the fact that they challenge you on all instruments, not just guitar, and the variety of artists is great. Throw in the fact that I can use all the tracks I’ve downloaded, and you’ve got a winner in my book. Those facts give RB the edge over GHWT. Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed WT it was fun on guitar and some on vocals, but drums were a bit awkward. It’s going to be an adjustment coming off RB. If the career mode were a bit longer I might would have enjoyed it more, but it seemed like a rushed effort by the GH team. I hope on the next edition they will offer a more balenced challenge with all instruments as opposed to just signing big names and making a band game. Another thing that is really bugging me is the exclusivity(sp?) deals. It might be great for business and drive sales one way or another, I feel the players who like this genre suffer because now it’s not a matter of seeing who has the better game, but who has the music you want. Oh, well this could go on all day or all year, but my vote goes to RB on this one. Maybe next year the GH team will put out a more refined product instead on relying on namesake. OK, if you are interested, please read this article titled Guitar Hero challenges Rock Band online
Guitar Hero World Tour with Rock Band 2 be rewritten
Could Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2 be rewritten? To many people, karaoke is a word that conjures up images of scummy little dives in the middle of the CBD - of venues filled with white collar workers warbling out a one-hit wonder or two after work. While to others, images of their bogan uncle breaking out into a drunken rendition of “Khe Shan” at the latest family function is something they can relate to. Face it, whether or not you fancy yourself to be a karaoke wonder, you probably have a story or two like those described. You can thank the ever growing market of casual gaming for that. Since the likes of SingStar and Guitar Hero appeared on our consoles in recent years, the musical party game has become something of a phenomenon. After copping a battering from Sony’s SingStar in the console wars of the previous generation, Microsoft has finally hit back with their own karaoke title, Lips in an effort to entice the casual gamer to the Xbox 360. But while Lips does hit a couple of high notes, it doesn’t quite reach up to the gold standard set by the SingStar franchise - something which even the most recent SingStar titles are struggling to achieve - as its slick package feels more like a home karaoke simulator than an actual game.
Sing Star killer or Sing Star imitator?
Microsoft’s take on the musical party game was developed by Japanese studio iNiS, the makers of the catchy rhythm title Elite Beat Agents, who have crafted a slick interface which is both easy to use and strikingly cool. Not to mention that it has a few nifty functions such as rating songs and creating custom playlists so that you can enjoy a game with your friends without having to sift through the dregs to get to the good tunes.
The other part of the slick Lips package is the inclusion of wireless microphones, something that Sony has been promising PlayStation 3 gamers - a promise that currently remains unfulfilled. The microphone peripherals are well crafted and pretty to boot, retaining a comfortable grip and weight that make it seem more like the real thing than a plastic videogame peripheral. Once you’re in game, the microphones really show off their magic with built in LEDs that strobe and change colour in time to the music. The only downside to these bad boys is that they do not feature rechargeable batteries meaning that you’ll need to keep a fresh set on standby for emergencies. We would have liked to have seen a rechargeable battery built-in so that gamers could connect their mics to the console via USB to charge - which would also allow for players to keep playing the game without any downtime for fiddling with batteries.
Slicker than your average
Guitar Hero World Tour: When you finally take your eyes away from the pretty lights on the microphone and get into the game, you will find that it feels very similar to the singing portions of Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Accompanying the music video is a pitch line which scrolls horizontally across the screen. Players are rewarded points for keeping in time to the music and hitting the correct pitch. If you warble along to the song well enough, an icon appears on screen telling you to perform an action with the microphone. By striking a pose, you will activate Star Stream - think of it as Guitar Hero’s Star Power. Once activated, Star Stream will give you double points for every note that you hit. This is where the mic’s built in motion detector comes into play, although simply shaking the mic rather than doing the exact move can set it off anyway. Players can also move the microphone to become a noise maker, where the act of tapping or shaking the microphone has it acting as a a tambourine or hand clap to accompany the song. Apart from making noise for the hell of it, performing this action helps players boost their Star Stream meter more rapidly than purely singing a tune would.
Xbox 360 revolution Lips: As well as the standard game mode, Lips also contains three mini games in an effort to freshen up the gameplay. The ‘Kiss’ mini game features a cutesy 2D rendered scene with two people running towards each other, where the objective is to time the movement of the microphone just right so they will smack lips. ‘Vocal Fighters’ is is like two divas trying to share the one stage - impossible. The aim here is to sing better than your opponent so that their stage light will dim and they will ultimately be forced off the stage. ‘Time Bomb’ is the most fun of the included mini games, it features a large bomb with a lit fuse. The objective here is to sing well enough to fill up a glass of water, once the glass is filled you can shake the microphone to put out the lit fuse and keep your turn from ending.
Sometimes the lyrics don’t lie….
While these modes do provide some diversity into the title, they cannot make up for the game’s biggest flaw - there just really isn’t any incentive to sing well. Yes, you are scored on how well you belt out a tune, but at the end of the day, there is nothing for you to do with the points once you’ve earned them. Unlike SingStar, you can’t fail a song, and as you accumulate points there are no unlockable songs or difficulty levels for you to spend them on. Essentially your points score means nothing more than bragging rights with your friends, which is ultimately disappointing when games like Rock Band have shown that music game can include a quality single-player experience to coincide with the ultimate fun of party play.
The game’s track list consists of forty tracks (all of which are master tracks performed by original artists) which cover an eclectic range of artists and genres. While the sentiment is right, the problem with this approach is that it tries to appeal to too many people, and ultimately the collection of recent one-hit wonders and ho-hum oldies doesn’t really appeal to anybody. The game lacks that cheesy anthem or classic hit that gets people screaming out lyrics at the top of their lungs. What is even more disappointing is that several of the title’s decent tracks have been directly pilfered from the SingStar back catalogue.
Similarly, another disappointing feature of the title is something that was originally touted as one of its strong suits - the ability to upload your own music from an external device, such as your iPod, PC, or even your own existing 360 playlist. In theory this feature alone could be enough to knock SingStar off its perch, but thanks to two glaring issues, this is nothing more than a convoluted mess. Firstly, thanks to intellectual property issues, you cannot view the lyrics to any of the songs that you have loaded into the game via your own music devices. This makes for some boring and uninspired play as you’ll find yourself racking up points, but not actually knowing how you are being scored. Although, this isn’t much of an issue if you are one of the unlucky people that has an incompatible mp3 player, meaning that unless you happen to own a last-generation Zune or iPod, there is a slim chance of you even being able to upload your favourite tracks into the game anyway.
The final big failure of Lips is that there is no real online mode to speak of. The game’s lacklustre community function allows you to post up your best scores, but it doesn’t provide any functionality to use the Xbox camera to record your songs and upload silly videos ala the PlayStation 3 iteration of SingStar, nor does it allow for you to test out your vocal chords amongst other players in the Lips community.
Ultimately, there are many good features to be found in Lips, but the sloppy execution of other facets of the game means that Lips hasn’t really brought anything new to the karaoke table to give gamers an incentive to go out an purchase the game. IF all you are looking for is an Xbox 360 clone of SingStar, then there are plenty of fun moments to be had with Lips. But for those of you looking for the solid single-player focus of titles such as Guitar Hero then you will be sorely disappointed.
The Score
Lips sets out to take the karaoke genre by storm, but ultimately doesn’t hit the high notes thanks to a lacklustre single-player affair, lack of online options and a meagre track list. 6½
Fair review i suppose, i’ve had the game for a few weeks now and am enjoying it. Can’t get enough of singing John Farnham - You’re the voice Benno
Who the **** cares about single player? I didn’t even know there was a single player. My friends and I rock out to our own songs, probably haven’t sung much of the ones that are on the game, I love this game and I’m pretty sure it loves me… Just quietly. kheven
I generally love the review, and think it was very well written.
The only thing i’d disagree with is the point about the ‘can’t fail’ part of the gameplay. In my experience, this was a very good thing when using Lips at a party. If people have had a bit to drink, they don’t know the song 100%, and they just want to have fun, then it makes sense not fail people out of a song.
But otherwise, yes I agree with everything else that’s been said. The game is good enough for karaoke fans that don’t have Singstar, but my god there are a lot of annoying bugs with this game. Most of all being the lack of a Audio/Video configuration tool for those who might need it. A quick look at the Official Lips forums shows a number of people begging for it.
The only way you can play against some-one ‘online’ is to send a ‘Challenge Request’, which basically means you’ve got two chances, in your own time to get the hightest score. Then the other person, in their own time, makes their two attempts. Whoever has the best score at the end wins. The problems with this are:
- There’s no-way to actually sing with or against someone live, which kind of defeats the purpose of having an online mode in the first place
- There is no notification whenever the status of a challenge changes (ie. someone sends you a challenge, someone makes their attempts at a challenge you sent, etc) outside of the game itself. Which means you have to go in to Lips on a regular basis just to see if something has changed.
Some other general lack of polish issues:
- There’s no way to sort the main list of songs so that you can have ‘external usb device songs’ seperated from ‘Lips CD based’ songs
- There no way of seeing the high score when browsing the main list of songs, nor is there any notificaiton of you beating your high score when the song is finished.
- The song import feature is buggy. It won’t see all the songs on my iPod because I have more than 5,000 on there. Sometimes when i’ve selected a song, and it’s trying to play a preview from it, the ‘Saving’ text will appear at the bottom of the screen and not go away.
- There’s no bulk import, and delete feature when importing songs.
- Where are the online leaderboards?
- Despite what this reviewer, and a number of other reviewers think, I personally don’t like the general look and feel of the interface. I think this problem stems from the fact that Microsoft have opted the have the game developed by a Japanese developer, when the game features 100% U.S. or British or Australian artists. I don’t think a Japanese software company could design an interface that appeals to this games taget audience like the British development company that make Singstar can.
- I’ve not seen any postings at all on the offical forums from either someone at Microsoft, or iNiS. This is a massive problem when you look at the great support the community staff at Harmonix give on the official Rock Band forums.
Hopefully most of these problems will be fixed up in a sequel. lennex15
11 hours agoLips + Alcohol + Khe Sanh = win renegadesx
Lips + Alcohol + Khe Sanh = win
I was hoping the age of downloadable content and patches could have prevented the need for a sequel. But thats also a hope I had for Rock Band.
The only thing i’d disagree with is the point about the ‘can’t fail’ part of the gameplay. In my experience, this was a very good thing when using Lips at a party. If people have had a bit to drink, they don’t know the song 100%, and they just want to have fun, then it makes sense not fail people out of a song.
If they officially marked the game “karaoke software” that would be a legit remark however this is a video game. This “cant fail” thing would be acceptable if they had a “practice” mode as an option that could be used but it seems they made a mistake similar to Wii Music (abiet not as many of them)
No unlockable songs is an epic fail as well, back in the day points were nothing but bragging rights but these days thats what achievement points and trophy’s are for.
These decisions seem right for a “game” marketed more towards drunken partys then the teenagers that racked up lots of the Singstar numbers so they can just get the disc out, sing along and have all the tracks there, an older casual market.
As far as the tracklist goes, I personally think an initial tracklist is not as big a deal as it used to be provided the game has good online support. However I must admit disc and online track listings made me choose Rock Band over GHWT.
If it was marketed towards being “karaoke software” it would deserve a higher score, but as a music game ala Singstar & Rock Band I would call that a fair score… tough but fair.
Its a shame that Microsoft will not see why this will rack up sales as big as Singstar, they will chalk it down to “brand name” however its just not geared towards the right audience… “the singstar crowd”¦lt;br /> I understand that Lips is meant to be a clone of Singstar but it was unfair to base a review comparing it to Singstar all the way through. Truth be told, they did succeed in making a Singstar clone with some great customization options for individual songs and the ability for mics and controllers to become adlib instruments. The little things like being able to jon in a song anytime or the ability to play the full song after you have already started it in short mode are subtle nuances that made me fall in love with Lips.
Although I do completely agree that uploading your own songs was a pointless addition since the game cannot recognize vocals and music to score you.
As for this being a “non-game”. I disagree. Just because you can’t fail a song doesn’t mean its not a game. The “game” portion of these “karaoke-games” is to keep in pitch by matching with the onscreen bars. Then you are scored accordingly.
In the end, all that matters is people actually enjoying the karaoke experience and having a ton of fun. This game was pretty much unplayable for me in 2 player (which is obviosuly what it’s about) due to lags/slowdown/bugs etc. I was very dissapointed and can’t believe how it got through testing. Mullet87
Lips is mentioned 9 times in the review, while SingStar is mentioned 11 times.
What was this review on again?
Interesting. I set up SingStar on the PS3 and Lips on the X360 side by side over Christmas and my family - huge karaoke fans - all preferred Lips.
The only thing they didn’t like was the variety, but that was a little unfair given that I had all four PS3 SingStars plus some DLC while Lips just had Lips.
Microsoft Xbox 360 revolution Lips: Guitar Hero World Tour vs. Rock Band 2, how many times has this debate come up? Could Guitar Hero World Tour with Rock Band 2 be rewritten? I like both games, they seem about the same and are lots of fun. Star a band, cock the world!
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