I’ve been playing Lips for the Xbox 360. It’s a Karaoke game that comes bundled with two wireless microphones. The commercials look good, and like a lot of Microsoft ads lately (and that bizarre NXE intro movie that plays when you first update to NXE) are a weird hybrid of American, European, and Asian aesthetic resulting in something that’s slightly surreal feeling. But, I digress.
Here are my first impressions.
Some positives:
- It’s fun!
- The microphones are really nice, and wireless. And soon they’ll work with Rockband via a patch.
- It has more of a range of ways that you can do well (pitch, stability, rhythm, vibrato) unlike a game like Rockband.
Some problems:
- The pitch indicator is unnecessarily hard to scan
- The game slows down with custom videos and two players. Keeping time is probably on the list of things a game like this MUST do, but it fails in this circumstance.
- When someone sends you a challenge, you receive no notification. Instead you have to go to My Lips then select Friends, then look at your list of friends. This is really and truly unacceptable.
- If you win a challenge after one try, and the other person has made both their attempts, you are forced to sing a second time anyway. You can work around this by starting the song, then immediately selecting quit, but it’s not great.
- The microphone handling is buggy, I’ve had microphones drop out in mid song (bot not disconnect, as that would trigger an onscreen message) and then start working again in 30 seconds.
- Only 40 songs come with the game, which would be fine if they had a large variety of downloadable tracks. At this point, the downloadable selection is like a Christmas Music store with a handful of other tunes, approximately 20. Weaksauce.
- The onscreen introduction of the symbology used int he game is nonexistent. It took me a while to figure out what the 6 medals stood for, and that should have been apparent right away. It’s 2009, we shouldn’t have to look in a manual.
- No in-game leaderboards. Huh?
I’ve read in forums that some people had problems figuring out the syncing process for the wireless microphones. The game manual has information in it that conflicts with the wireless microphone mini-manual, and neither one is clear. I didn’t experience a problem, but I can definitely see why some people have.
There’s also a Lips website at lips.xbox.com that promises but as of this writing it’s almost all “coming soon.”
I’m keeping the game, because I hope they release some more downloadable tracks in a reasonable timeframe, but I’m not optimistic based on the rate of release so far. If I were giving it a star rating, I’d rate it 250/400 stars.