Lips Review

This is the only other other song we haven't tried

As with all games of this type, your purchase will be heavily influenced by the songs on the disc (check out the full track list here). It's impossible to please everyone, of course. In fact, it's probably impossible to please anyone, given how personal music tastes are. Microsoft has clearly tried to provide as varied a track list as possible, with an incredibly eclectic line-up. The musical trail takes in everything from Alicia Keys' No One to Editors' An End Has A Start, via Roxette's Listen To Your Heart and Stand By Me by Ben E. King. If you're going to buy Lips you're probably going to buy extra songs. Microsoft hasn't revealed pricing for these yet, or what's going to be available (Aha's Take On Me will be a free day one download), so it's impossible to judge at this point, or compare with Sony's SingStore.

Lips' greatest achievement, met with no small amount of cynicism by the gaming press following the game's announcement during Microsoft's E3 2008 press conference, is the ability to plug your portable music player into the 360 via USB and have Lips simply make your DRM-free songs work. The idea, in theory, was that Lips' track list has the potential to be anything you want it to be, and for free. It doesn't quite work like that. We had a peculiar experience here. At home, on my Xbox 360 Elite, neither my 2GB iPod Nano or the better half's shorter, fatter, better iPod Nano worked with it, with the songs displaying but not playing. On the office 360 Elite, however, my iPod worked fine with the game, with the songs playing as expected, without on-screen information like lyrics, or the officially licensed music video. This bizarre turn of events has us all stumped.

When it works, essentially Lips is just playing a DRM-free track from a USB connected device, with pretty pictures layered on top. You might think, well, that's all it was ever going to do. It's not magic. Fair enough, that's what I thought. But check this out. When you first import a song from a portable device, the game asks you an interesting question:

Have we mentioned we haven't tried this song?

"You're about to use a song from your own music library. Do you want to send data about this song along with an ID associated with your Gamertag to Microsoft? By doing so you'll cast a vote for the creation of additional content such as videos and lyrics for your favourite songs. Providing this information will also let us notify you when new content for songs in your collection is available."

So clearly Microsoft is looking at providing officially licensed music videos and lyrics for the most popular imported songs, which, I reckon, would be magic. As my better half quipped when we first tried to sing a song from her iPod: "I wish the words would come up." When it comes down to it, how many songs do you know the words to off by heart? For me it's not that many.

Where SingStar wins though is in its ability to save small videos, captured with the PlayStation Eye, and upload them for the community or your friends to see, and listen back to your performance once you're done, even adding voice effects - Lips doesn't have anything like this, which is both a surprise and a disappointment. SingStar also has the added benefit of having a monstrous back catalogue from which you're guaranteed to find an officially licensed track that's up your street, although we reckon it's a bit unfair to criticise Lips for this since SingStar has years of music licensing under its belt.

None of this prevents us from recommending Lips to Xbox 360 owners. It's the only game of its type on the 360, it's got brilliant microphones and it at least tries to allow you to expand the potential track-list to infinity. If you like karaoke, and you have friends or family that like karaoke, it's a damn sight better in-law entertainment option than charades this Christmas, and for that we should be eternally grateful. Now... can I beat Morten Harket's Take On Me score?