Be number one in the charts!!! (Singstar (PS2))

Member Name: fluidfernando

Product:	Singstar (PS2)
Date:	02/02/05 (443 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Improves confidence, Great party game, Very cheap

Disadvantages: A bit repetitive, Poor solo mode

Before all the whinges start - NO this is not a kareoke game!

I was intrigued about this game when I read a review in a magazine, and I noticed that it was consistently getting high marks in the reviews and was wondering what the fuss was all about. Why is a singing game getting 8+ out of 10? Well hopefully, I will convince you why.

Singstar is a game that you can play solo or more fun - play as multiplayer! It is not really a kareoke game, it is more of a battle to be the best singer.

The idea of the game, is to rack up as many points as you possibly can, by singing in the right key, timing, and pitch. In Singstar there are 30 different songs to choose from:

Liberty X - Just a Little
Ricky Martin - Livin' la Vida Loca
Mis-Teeq - Scandalous
The Darkness - I Believe in a Thing Called Love
Madonna - Like a Virgin
A-ha - Take On Me
Roy Orbison - Pretty Woman
Pink - Get the Party Started
S Club - Don't Stop Movin'
Jamelia - Superstar
Deee-Lite - Groove Is in the Heart
Motorhead - Ace of Spades
Sugababes - Round Round
George Michael - Careless Whisper
Elvis - Suspicious Minds
Avril Lavigne - Complicated
Busted - Crashed the Wedding
Petula Clark - Downtown
Village People - YMCA
Sophie Ellis Bextor - Murder on the Dancefloor
Good Charlotte - Girls and Boys
Daniel Bedingfield - If You're Not the One
Blondie - Heart of Glass
Carl Douglas - Kung Fu Fighting
Dido - Thank You
Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up
Atomic Kitten - Whole Again/Eternal Flame
Westlife - World of Our Own
Blue - One Love

As you can see, there is quite a wide variety or songs suiting a lot of different people - if you are young, old, male, or female. The downside of this though, is that young people for example will not be familiar with the older songs, and vice versa, so unless you are a music buff, chances are you will not have song to about half of these songs before.

Each song comes with its original video (apart from a few older ones) to accompany the song. The lyrics are clearly displayed on the screen, and you will have bars going across the screen - these are pitch bars which you have to hit when you sing. Sing too high and the bar will be higher, sing too low and the bar will be lower. It couldn't be easier to understand, but it can be MUCH harder to do!!!

There are three level modes, easy medium and hard, and the difference between these is that the bar you have to hit when you sing is smaller on the harder levels - and in fact the bar is so small on the hardest level that you have to sing exactly the right note to hit the extremely thin bar.

If you choose to play solo, you will find that it is slightly pointless - because the game is really meant to be a party game. So the maker's have incorporated this by making a Career Mode.

Basically your aim is to go from club singer to superstar by singing in venues and acheiving certain points. These start off easy but get much harder later in the game. You get 6 songs per building, and can only sing each song a maximum of 3 times, but normally you will not need to sing all the songs to progress to the next venue.

The career mode does not really last for very long though, and has a poor ending.

The points go up to (I think) 10,000 - and after every 1,000 you get a different ranking - 9,000+ is superstar for example.

To find the level you are at in singing, you should look for about an average of 7,500 per song to be "good".

But like I mentioned earlier, the game is more suited for party play, and this is shown well. There are several modes you can play with:

Battle: Two singers sing the same song and same lines, the one with the most points at the end of the song wins.

Duet: Two singers sing the same song and same lines again, but the score is an accumulation of the scores of each singer.

Pass the Mic: This is possibly the best feature of the game. This is a 5-song game where you play between 2-8 players, distributed into a blue and a red team. There are different rounds which each winner getting 2 points for a win or 1 for a draw.

Battle: The first and last rounds are a battle which is the same as i described earlier.

Keep it up: On the screen you get a green level bar - and when you sing well it fills up with more green, and when it goes lower it means you are not singing well enough.
In this level you have to keep the bar above halfway (this is quite an easy level)

Another level is similar to battle, but where you sing the same song but not together. One person sings one song, gets the results for it, and the second person has to sing the same song afterwards and try to beat it.

This is quite good because when you sing with someone else (especially if you sing in different octaves - which is ok in the game), it can be off-putting!

The final level is a risk level. This is quite good - you have to choose whether you will play or pass, and you will need to sing a song and get 7,500 or more points in the song to win the point, otherwise the opposition get a point.

The final score determines the winner (obviously :P )

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The feel of the game is quiet minimal, its cartooned in style, giving it a very simple interface and simple to navigate around.

In the party games, you are NOT able to choose the song you sing, which can be very bad because you may not get given a song that you know, and therefore are stuck when you have to sing that song! I guess though it gives the tense edge to the game!!

On each song there is a top 5 leaderboard for each level for you to try and beat.


Overall the game is very fun to play, most notably as a multiplayer game. The game can be played solo - however it is not as affective. And after a while, the songs do become repetitive. A new game (Singstar Party) has now been released - essentially the same but with more songs!

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