SINGSTAR ROCKS!

 

Rocks! features a pretty good list of songs, though the 'rock' theme isn't as well represented as it could be.

• Blur – Song 2
  
• Bowling For Soup – 1985
  
• Coldplay – Speed of Sound
  
• Deep Purple – Smoke on the water
  
• Dragon – April Sun in Cuba
  
• End of Fashion – O Yeah
  
• Exponents – Why does love do this to me?
  
• Franz Ferninand – Do you Want to
  
• Gangajang – Sounds of then (this is Australia)
  
• Grinspoon – Hard Act to Follow
  
• Gwen Stefani – What you Waiting For
  
• Hole – Celebrity Skin
  
• INXS – Never Tear Us Apart
  
• Jet – Are you gonna be my girl
  
• Killing Heidi – I Am
  
• Men at Work – Down Under
  
• Nirvana – Come as you are
  
• Powderfinger – I’ve Got You On My Mind
  
• Powderfinger – These Days
  
• Rolling Stones – Paint it, Black
  
• Scorpions – Wind of Change
  
• Screaming Jets – Better
  
• Stereophonics – Dakota
  
• Thin Lizzy – The Boys Are Back in Town
  
• The Church – Unguarded Moment
  
• The Cardigans – My Favourite Game
  
• The Killers – Somebody Told Me
  
• The Offspring – Self Esteem
  
• The Swingers – Counting the Beat
  
• Veronicas – 4 ever

There's no pretense of a career mode or any other obstacle blocking you from any of the songs in SingStar Rocks! As soon as you fire up the game and navigate through its minimal, stylish menus, you can access all 30 songs and start singing them. Mechanically, the game works just like any karaoke machine you've seen in some seedy bar: The lyrics are displayed at the bottom of the screen with an indicator showing which line you're supposed to be singing. Above that, you get a series of horizontal bars that approximate the relative pitch you should sing the current line at, and these are filled in as you sing (with bars appearing above or below the lines to show where you're flat or sharp). Finally, a small performance meter constantly gauges how well you're doing. It's all elementary as karaoke goes, and it won't take even novices long to get a feel for it. As with Karaoke Revolution, SingStar only measures your pitch, so you're free to hum the words or sing an octave lower if you just want the highest score. But what fun is that?

In the single-player mode, you simply pick a full- or short-length version of any song, then sing it and receive a numerical score rating your performance. The point values here seem to be arbitrary, though, so a letter or percentage ranking would have been a more meaningful gauge of how well you've done. Things get a little more interesting on the multiplayer side. The duet mode lets two players sing at the same time to generate a combined score, and this mode is good for easing shyer players into the action. Battle conversely pits you against each other by making you sing different parts of the song.

The real meat (such as it is) of the multiplayer is the pass the mic mode, which lets two teams of up to four people each fight it out through five rapid-fire minigames. Again, these are pretty basic--one of them throws a quick medley of song snippets at you to keep you guessing, while another awards victory to the first player to reach 5,000 points, and a third requires you to keep your performance meter in the "good" region to keep playing. The multiplayer modes add some much-needed variety to the rudimentary core karaoke gameplay, though the minigames are all just minor variations on the same theme, so they're only mildly more interesting than the single-player game.

There's not a lot more to SingStar Rocks! than that. The game does record each of your performances and lets you review them, as well as add some goofy sound filters, after each song. Then you can save your favorite recordings for later mockery. This is a good-looking game for what it is, with its slick-looking menus and interface. When you play each song, you'll get the original music video playing in the background, or at least some relevant concert footage for some of the older songs. The game features EyeToy support, so you can replace the video with an image of yourself and run a bunch of trippy visual effects on it, which is amusing enough if you're into that sort of thing.