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With Rock Band not out on Sony’s next generation console till, well, we don’t actually know yet, budding PS3-owning vocalists still have only one video game series with which to scream the house down, and that’s SingStar. Following its HD debut last November, the Sony London Studio developed game returns, this time called Vol. 2, with 30 new songs, a harmony feature and the ability to access SingStar features remotely with the PSP. Question is, is it worth forking out £20 if you’ve already got the first game?
If you’re not hooked up to the internet through your PS3 then the answer is undoubtedly yes, for nothing more than new tracks. Highlights include Shakespears Sister’s Stay, Paul McCartney & the Frog Chorus’ We all Stand Together and Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now. Oh wait, Don’t Stop Me Know isn’t on the disc, despite it being the song you see unattainably attractive people playing when you boot up the disc. We were disappointed by this. A little.
At the risk of offending millions of music lovers out there, we’ll say that there’s some bog standard songs in there too that will probably be more popular than the highlights we picked out. We’re talking Kaiser Chief’s inane Ruby, The Zuton’s mind-numbing Valerie and pointless emo hopefuls Panic! At the Disco’s But It’s Better If You Do. But that’s just our opinion, which brings us nicely to our central point – Vol. 2’s value will be different for everybody, because everybody likes different music. If you don’t like the track list, your £20 is going on the harmony feature, which works well enough, and being able to access SingStar through your PSP, which also works well enough.
More on both. The harmony duet mode sees both vocalists sing separate lines to a song, sometimes at the same time and with different notes. If both singers are half decent it can actually sound pretty good. If not, well, it’s bag pipes time. The lyrics scroll at the top and bottom of the screen and the pitch meter trots along in the middle. It’s clean, simple and sleek. Harmony duet mode plus Shakespears Sister with a dash of liquor equals what SingStar’s all about.
Less important to us is PSP Remote Play functionality. We’ve always found downloading new songs through SingStore to be compelling when we’ve got the microphone in our hand and close to our gob, not when we’re browsing the web through our PSP in Starbucks. But there you go. We’ll admit accessing My SingStar Online and sharing your best performances with your mates is a pretty cool thing to be able to do, but again, not something we can see ourselves doing in public. We might leave nasty comments on our friends’ efforts with it though. If we’re really bored. And no-one’s looking.
Besides those two major changes, SingStore is now directly accessible in-game, which is more useful than it sounds. Being able to quickly browse songs, add to your cart, buy, set to download then get back singing while you wait for the data to travel down the pipe is a godsend, especially if you’ve got a room full of impatient friends who find silence awkward. There’s a new look which is as Sony as any video game interface could possibly hope to be, and funky background music, which we actually like better than most of the proper songs that come on the disc. And in case you were wondering, there’s an option to pop in the original SingStar Blu-ray disc and sing songs from that instead.
Everything you could do in the first PS3 SingStar you can still do with Vol. 2. You can still film yourself with the PlayStation Eye camera, upload your woeful effort online and share it with your buddies. You can still play solo, battle, duet and the party perfect pass the mic mode. Ergo, everything you can’t do with SingStar you can’t do with SingStar Vol. 2. Like duet with people online (yes we know it’s different in a lot of ways, but you can play online with others with Rock Band and Guitar Hero). But this is SingStar Vol. 2 after all, not SingStar 2, so we’re not going to get in a huff.
Back on track (heh), we’re still faced with a curious decision. We have access to the internet through our PS3, so why should we pay £20 for 30 songs we, if we’re being honest, wouldn’t have bought normally, even at 99p each? We don’t think the PSP Remote Play functionality makes it worth while, but we reckon the harmony duet mode just about swings it. Oh, and the trippy background music. So, get this if you like SingStar Vol.2’s track selection and you’re effortlessly popular. Don’t if you don’t or you’re not. Simple as that.
