Again, I wasn’t particularly enamoured with the prospect of actually having to do more with my muscles than hold a mic a couple of inches away from my mouth, but then I’m a ‘mourngey git’, apparently, and, admittedly, you’ll have to at least try if you’ve got a competitive streak burning somewhere inside of you, since it increases your high score potential. Strike that pose (or don’t – simply violently jerking the mic is usually enough to convince the game you’re doing what it’s asking you to) and you’ll trigger Star Stream, which gives the tone bars a shot of glitter juice and grants you a short period of bonus star potential. Sing well enough and an image will appear on screen that shows a silhouette of a singer prompting a mic gesture, like holding both hands in the air, for example. She also loves being able to use the wireless mics as if they’re Wii Remotes.

The ball and chain, for example, loves it, bless her, and even made me turn the lights off in the bedroom to make the most of them. This is largely pointless in my view, but that won’t be the opinion of everyone. On top of that, there’s shining LED lights that adorn the bottom end of each microphone that pulse to the rhythm of each song. They have decent weight and as a result don’t feel like a cheap piece of plastic that might snap after a clumsy, alcohol-fuelled fall. No-where in the game or in the game manual is this explained, which led to one hell of a struggle getting the damn things to work in the first place. You’re able to join songs at any point with a simple shake, BUT, in order to get them to work with your console you have to press and hold a small button at the bottom of each microphone and press the sync button on the front of the 360, then wait for the rings to flash as they do when a normal controller syncs. They’re wireless, from this point forward a requirement for all rival products, and that technology is utilised well. Undoubtedly Lips’ microphones are the best on the music game market. Lips isn’t just gunning for SingStar, it’s gunning for the Wii, the DS, and anything else that’s vying for position underneath your Christmas tree.Īnd yet, working out whether Lips is any good forces you to compare it to SingStar (and rope in your better half, preferably brandishing a bottle of wine). It forms part of Microsoft’s three-pronged Christmas 2008 assault on the casual gaming space, sharing responsibility with party title You’re in the Movies and quiz game Scene It? Box Office Smash. It’s a karaoke game with graphics that look remarkably similar to Sony’s effort, but scratch beneath the surface and you realise that Lips is much more than that. At first glance, Lips is Microsoft’s SingStar killer.

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