Lips Review - AnalogHype

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Lips Review

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Written by AnalogHype on Thursday, 18 December 2008 01:01

When I first heard that Lips was being made, I held back my excitement: we’d already gotten karoake fun in the forms of Rock Band and SingStar, and Lips didn’t seem to add anything new to the table. More details emerged about the game, such as the ability to sing along to your own songs and the fact that it’d launch with wireless microphones for the Xbox 360. Immediately that caught my attention and Lips was on my radar.

Fast forward to today, and I wish Lips would have never been conceived. For starters, the setlist isn’t very good. There are some cool songs on there from artists such as Nirvana, Michael Jackson, and more, but overall the setlist on the disc is really lacking. I found myself singing ABC and In Bloom over and over again, and not even wanting to touch the rest. With the wide range of tracks Rock Band and Guitar Hero offers for you to sing along on, it made Lips’ selection seem very poor. Lips does give you the ability to download more content, but the available content is few in numbers and while Microsoft has recently expressed interest in keeping the stream moving, it doesn’t seem as if it’ll last long.

To make up for these shortcomings (in my eyes, anyway), Microsoft has implemented the ability to use your own songs in Lips. You can choose from every music source you normally can via the dashboard: streamed music, music on a flash drive, on a CD, or on the xbox 360 hard drive itself. If you can play it on the dashboard, you can play along with it in Lips. This isn’t very exciting, however, due to the fact that it’s more or less just singing into a Microphone and hearing your voice amplified to a song rather than singing along to a song any other time. You’re scored, but on which terms I have no idea. You can accumulate Lips’ version of star power just wailing into the microphone if you wanted, which really doesn’t add to the drive for me to use this feature.

One thing I did like was the fact that Lips shipped with 2 wireless Microphones made by Microsoft themselves. It was fairly easy to get the microphones connected, and once I did, the glowing lights emitting from them immediately caught my attention. In song, the lights will pulsate to the beat. You can even change the color scheme the microphone will use via the options menu, or elect to turn them off altogether. The microphone is also analogous to movement (sort of like an artificial motion sensor) which is used to deploy your star power (I know it’s not called that in Lips) by simply performing the motion displayed on the screen. This works ok, but you could move the microphone any which way and still activate it just fine.

Before playing each song, you are presented with a number of options that you can toggle. You can choose to display an accompanying music video, which range from a computer-generated visualization to the original music video for which the song was featured in. You can also select wich noise makers you want to use, which is a set of sounds that you can play with during a song to add your own flavor. The sounds vary depending on which style you choose, and they really just feel tacked on. There’s also the ability to play the tambourine or the shaker during a song by shaking the microphone as if it were the aforementioned instruments. The only problem I have with this is the fact that you can’t actually simulate a tambourine like a true tambourine as hitting the mic will produce a thudding sound.

Among the options is the ability to set the timing offset for audio/video. I’m very disappointed because Microsoft didn’t provide a tool to calibrate this automatically, and the calibration is only saved per song, so I can’t fix the lag on an HDTV for all songs in one shot. I’m not going to recalibrate my settings everytime I play a new song. Up to 2 people can sing together to a song, battling head to head on who can sing the best, or cooperatively to create a great duet. The game supports playlists, which is synonymous to the setlist feature new to Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero: World Tour. I would’ve liked to have seen some sort of career mode, but I don’t think I would be able to endure singing all of the songs in this game.

Lips, while great in concept, just seems to have been executed really poorly. The 2 wireless microphones are great, and would be cool if they worked for Rock Band and Guitar Hero (I haven’t tried it out yet). Too bad they’re only compatible with microsoft consoles, but that’s a small nitpick. Maybe over time they’ll prove their worth with more DLC, but even if just for the freestyle mode, this could turn out to be a great party game for you and your friends. Even still Rock Band or Guitar Hero would be a more viable experience to go with in those situations.

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