With SingStar Rocks! and SingStar Pop both finally out in the US, it’s time to cast our gaze forward to the eventual release of the PS3 iteration; Sony has been hyping the game and its integrated functionality with the SingStore shopping service for quite a while now, and it could indeed be a boon to the fledging online service.
Due this fall from SCEE, SingStar will offer a similar game as the PS2 versions, albeit with huge online additions. Rocks! and Pop both received a mixed critical reception; while the tracklists were relatively good as far as karaoke games go, the actual tracked vocals remained in the mix, really taking away from the feeling that YOU were singing the song. The visual interface definitely wasn’t as tight and well designed as Harmonix’s Karaoke Revolution game, even if it wasn’t so intrusive as to ruin the exprerience. Hopefully these problems will be curbed by the time it hits our PS3s.
The expanded online content we keep mentioning involves a huge library of extra downloadable songs and visual skins, as well the ability to capture your performances on video with the Eye3 camera and share them online (or on the go with your PSP). Eight-player multiplayer is supported too, but we’ll have to see exactly what that entails.
The downloadable song library will no doubt have some stiff competition with EA’s recently announced Rock Band, and hopefully this will mean an up-to-date, well priced selection of content. Sharing performances should be a big hit with the pro-user-creation crowd that Sony is going after with PS Home and LittleBigPlanet – hopefully it’s intuitive to use, and policed in some way against particularly obscene performances.
SingStar will ship with around 30 songs, with Sony shooting for a good-sized batch available for download right at launch. We’re not sure how we feel about putting up paid content right away when most of the 50GB Blu-ray disc will surely go unused, but the SingStore could really give the Playstation Network Platform the kick in the ass that it so sorely needs.