Is this pop gold or will these stars leave you crying out for rehab?
Format: PS3 Dev: London Studio Pub: Sony Out: 01/05/09 Players: 1-8
For the fourth edition of PS3’s new collection of SingStar titles, the folks at SCE London Studio are debuting a couple new tricks. Nothing radical – like a smoke-filled stage appearing when you power up your console – but they might help you reduce those unhappy accidents when you’re reaching for refreshments in between power medleys.
First, the music. There’s a handful of modern chart toppers here including Kings of Leon’s ‘Sex On Fire’, will.i.am’s ‘Heartbreaker’, Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’, Kate Nash’s ‘Mouthwash’, Sam Sparro’s ‘Black and Gold’ and Pink’s ‘So What’. But for what has been billed as a collection of modern pop hits actually contains a selection of, admitted bright but, much older classics, as well as some odd choices for a ‘pop edition’. Cyndi Lauper’s ‘True Colours’ and the Feeling’s ‘Rosé’ feel like filler.
There’s a decent amount of Saturday night sass on show here, but if you’re planning on buying this disc purely for brand new pop songs to sing with your party posy then you might want to reconsider. A lot of the tracks are already available on the SingStore, so if you’ve got internet access my advice would be to snag the tracks you want there.
So, how about those new features then? Voice control has been added to menus and gives you the chance to select content by saying the name of a song or artist. Voice control is proficient enough, but it’s still faster and more reliable to use the controller (if you own a previous edition of SingStar then you can download voice control for free in the extras section of the SingStore).
The other big change is in fact new wireless SingStar microphones. With such a party-centric game less wires is obviously a good thing. At the time of writing we don’t have access to the new hardware, but we’ll give you the full skinny on the SingStar wireless mics once we get hold of a pair.
SingStar Pop Edition introduces some interesting new tech, though if you already own a copy of SingStar PS3 there is very little reason to pick this up. For newcomers too, this release isn’t as strong as previous editions.
Aaron Lee
