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It may not be much different than the golden key pattern of Pac Man so touted in the ’80s, but it does take away some of the challenge to improve as a singer. You can wordlessly hum the tune accurately and score big points, so long as you spend enough time memorizing the patterns. It doesn’t take too long to figure out the “cheat” and realize that you can “sing” a song in a flat monotone, without regard to key, and do better than the person singing dynamically next to you, because, again, this technology can’t measure style or purity. Even less engaging is the fact that the quality of the singing doesn’t have to improve to score better, thus negating skills development as a goal - all that matters is accuracy. Your song choices are fixed, they are always available, and the only aim is score higher and higher points while figuring out the nuances of each song. And despite the pattern established by the aforementioned Guitar Hero, there are no unlockables. From a gaming sense, it’s almost a dead-end in terms of conventional lures. This is SingStar‘s failure as a game, but also its strength as an activity. It’s a game that demands a partner, and ideally a group, to fully enjoy - yes, one that is willing to suffer bad singing, and yes, preferably one that drinks alcohol - because it’s a game almost entirely devoid of goals. Never once in the month I have been on-and-off playing it have I been tempted to pick up the mic and practice on my own. While a lot of recent talk has been devoted to notions of “casual gaming”, SingStar operates on the extreme end of the spectrum. SingStar is possibly the ultimate iteration of “party game”. Though, to qualify, it’s a limited type of fun by gamer conventions. So why did it take me so long to put SingStar down and commit my thoughts on the game to words, choosing instead to stay up far later than intended as I tried to figure out just what the game wants in its measure of rap ability?
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style), but it will make you question that sense of competence and the confidence in your abilities so hard-won by performing live in front of friends and strangers. To put it bluntly, not only will SingStar punish the karaoke singer for every deviation from the original (i.e. While faithful duplication is somewhat encouraged, the really good singers understand that karaoke is an expression of a song as you would sing it. Contrast this to live karaoke, where the heart and soul of the experience is personal interpretation of a familiar song. In practice, this means that the game tells you exactly how the song goes, and if you don’t measure up, you fail. While the game eschews all of the button manipulation that is the baseline standard of console games - even the superficially similar Guitar Hero/Rock Band cousins - to measure and evaluate the voice electronically SingStar by necessity can only test your pitch and frequency and match it to an exacting pre-ordained arrangement. In fact, for people who - despite harboring no grand illusions of American Idol stardom - are generally considered good karaoke singers, SingStar can be maddeningly frustrating.įor starters, SingStar is structured as a game, and game play requires precision. It took all of about 15 minutes to realize that SingStar is not karaoke on a console. My wife and I being self-confessed devotees of that oft-maligned but internationally treasured Asian export, I couldn’t pass up the chance to port those late bar nights to the convenience of my living room and engage in a little competitive caterwauling. When PopMatters offered me the chance to review the latest iteration, I jumped at it. On the surface, SingStar seems like it would be the karaoke-lover’s dream game: a microphone, a song list, and familiar follow-the-highlighted-words set up, all there on your home console.