SingStar Dance and SingStar Guitar

In the spirit of all the recent ‘Black Friday’ deals seen on the likes of Amazon and Apple’s App Store, Ready Up would like to spoil you, dear reader, with two reviews for the price of none! Huzzah!

Released a few weeks ago, SingStar Dance and SingStar Guitar are, as you’d imagine, the latest entries in Sony’s long-running SingStar series, one of the forerunners of the games industry’s on-going efforts to target the casual market. Ever since its first outing in 2004, the SingStar games have always been pleasingly simple party games, allowing one or two players to sing along to their favourite songs, usually accompanied by its music video, with the game judging each player’s performance based on timing, sustain and pitch and awarding a corresponding score at the end of the song.

So, what do SingStar Guitar and SingStar Dance bring to a franchise that has seen nearly 30 instalments in the space of six years? Not a great deal unfortunately.

Now, as anyone who has read my Ready Up bio will know, when I’m not writing for Ready Up I make games for Relentless Software, a company with a focus on social gaming who have always had a close relationship with Sony, meaning that this double review of two social games published by Sony has put me in a rather awkward position; SingStar Dance and SingStar Guitar really didn’t do it for me.

Starting either game up triggers a slickly produced intro movie that sets the mood and the tone – to kick back and have fun. Navigating the menus with a control pad is fairly straight forward so long as all you want to do is sing, and once at the song-picking stage the menus also support a degree of voice control; say the name of the act whose song you want to sing and the scrolling menu will zip along to them accordingly.

As with all SingStar games, the scoring mechanic works brilliantly, allowing people of all abilities to compete on a fairly level playing field even when playing on different difficulty levels or between players with quite varied vocal ranges (such as me and my girlfriend). In both titles, singing players are able to play competitively or co-operatively as a duet, although co-op players are still scored separately for those who still want to measure their performance.

So far, so SingStar. If it ain’t broke… don’t add unnecessary extras.

With SingStar Guitar, in addition to the one or two singers, one or two guitar wielding players can also participate, with on-screen note charts instantly familiar to anyone who has played Guitar Hero or Rock Band – which is handy since you’ll need a guitar from either of those games to join in. As with the singing players, difficulty for the guitar players is split between Easy, Medium and Hard, meaning that Expert-level players of Guitar Hero or Rock Band will need to look elsewhere to test their skills.

Playing guitar with SingStar is ultimately a lacklustre experience, in a way that is hard to put a finger on but really highlights just how polished Harmonix and Neversoft’s superior offerings have always been. The key thing here is that it doesn’t feel like you’re playing the song, with notes sometimes feeling like they bear little to no relevance to the song you’re accompanying.

Unfortunately, SingStar Dance’s raison d’être is an altogether more painful experience. Requiring an awful lot of faffing around to get into a song, what with calibration and camera repositioning, one or two dancing players are tasked with following the Just Dance-esque on-screen video of a professional dancer as best they can with absolutely no indication of what moves are coming next. While this makes for a hilarious first few goes at the game, especially when viewing back the post-song video of your (or your friends’) performance, the choice to not give the player any idea of what to expect is the deal-breaker for me, ensuring that any attempts to play along are reduced to baffled flailing and sees the novelty wear off within five minutes. The only way to get better at any song is to learn the full dance routine by heart, which isn’t very fun and is completely at odds with the jump-in nature of such casual / social titles. Imagine if, even on its easiest level, you had to learn how to play a song in Guitar Hero by heart before you could get better at playing it, without the on-screen note chart, and you’ll see how arduous SingStar Dance could become.

Another point worth noting is that the PS3 itself makes things a bit tricky; to get the most out of SingStar you’ll want to have a PlayStation Eye camera plugged in to a USB socket, the dongle for the wireless SingStar mics in the other (for the life of me I couldn’t get my wired PS2 SingStar mics to work with either game). This becomes a pain with SingStar Guitar since guitar peripherals also require a plugged in USB dongle, and synching Dual Shock and/or Move controllers also requires a USB socket. With only two USB sockets on most PS3s, this can all become quite bothersome and very counter-intuitive to SingStar’s original aims of simple fun.

Speaking from first-hand experience, it’s not easy making games that everyone can pick up and enjoy, that can please those who only want to dip their toe in while allowing and rewarding players who want to commit more time and effort to learning and perfecting a game’s intricacies. That being said, SingStar Dance and SingStar Guitar are decent enough entries to the franchise, but those looking for a decent guitar or dance game will be better served elsewhere.