It's ironic that the person with possibly the least amount of vocal talent in the world is doing our co-op review for the karaoke game Lips from Microsoft, but that's exactly what has played out. If you are dapper enough you may even find the videos of this vocalexposition floating around YouTube - do yourself a favor and don't look them up. It's one of those things you can never un-hear. The army is actually looking into licensing my singing voice as a tactical weapon to use against enemy soldiers. Now that that's all out of the way, lets talk about Lips.
While singing games have been on Sony's Playstation 2 and 3 in the form of SingStar, the only singing to be had on the Xbox 360 was in the form of Karaoke Revolution and Rock Band 2. Lips is the full on karaoke game experience, complete with music store and for the first time ever, the ability to import your own songs. While the latter is true, you won't be greeted by any words on the screen to assist in your vocal performance. The game instead detects pitch and through the magic of binary functions scores you approrpiately. A nice addition to the import feature is that every song imported allows you to submit a "vote" to Microsoft to have it officially added to the game. Nice! Finally the Lips hardware includes fancy wireless microphones that have LED lights that change color as well as pulse and dance to the music. These black and white mics also contain an accelerometer making them motion sensitive - can you say cowbell?
Every song in Lips comes complete with the original music video as well a few alternate versions. The words appear on the screen along with a pitch bar that looks eerily similar toSingStar . Every now and again you'll see a little icon pop up that shows a move to do with the microphone. Moves like tilting your head back with the mic in the air, shaking it up and down, or throwing your amrs in the air like you just don't care will all activate star power. During this mode the more star notes you hit, the better your score becomes.
But here's the odd thing about score, there's no online leader boards - so really score doesn't matter. There's a MyLips section which allows you to challenge friends as well as a local high score list per song, but other than that it's pretty limited.
Every song in Lips can be played in co-op mode. For some songs this works extremely well because they have two parts. For instance I can be Jay-Z and you can beRihanna on Umbrella. (Ella ella ella) For others it simply alternates singing between players, with the chorus usually having both players murdering the melody together. Above and beyond that you won't find much else in the cooperative aspect, though I'm not really sure what else you could ask for.
Lips is a great party game, but it lacks quite a bit in the meat in the library. With only 40 songs out of the box and only a few dozen available for download you, the official offerings are a bit weak. The import functionality is great, but I can't help but feel like something is missing when singing those songs. Still there's a lot of fun to be had here and with an ever growing library of songs it's sure to last a while, just be sure to stock up on ear plugs.
Thankfully, this isn't me. Unfortunately...I'm worse.