Lips

[Acert93]

Sounds interesting. It will be interesting to see games like this get an "social" bent, ala American Idol, and allow social networks to do their own contests with peer review and such. The whole YouTubish mentality

 

[Arwin]

The wife and kid saw the video for this yesterday. I need to add this to my 2H gaming purchases list...

You have a PS3 right? Have you tried Singstar already? Or is the 360 the 'living room' machine?

Anyway, will be interesting to see more details on Lips regarding the lyrics bit and such.

 

[Arwin]

Well that's fair. Singstar and Buzz are huge IPs in Europe, but much to Phil Harrison's chagrin, only very recent introductions in the U.S.

Is Lips going to have webcam integration and online features like the 'competition' currently has?

If they pull it off with MP3s, that'll be great. Though apparently you have to play the music off a Zune or iPod, which we don't use, but I'm sure you can just use a memory stick as well - and it has to be DRM-less music, but that's no big issue at all these days, even for official store songs MP3 versions are available these days.

I don't think we'll ever see harmony singing as was recently introduced for 'the competition' though, but that's more than understandable. If this title is any good, it may be the first one to move the 360 to the living room. It's made by InIs after all, of Elite Beat Agents fame. But for now it's wait and see. As said, in our home the title has some fierce competition and that has been around for 5 years or so, maybe longer, and is very polished.

 

[mister slim]

I have to keep them separated lest they try and kill each other, but yes I have a PS3, but no I have not tried SingStar. I am really interested in the "...your own music..." aspect of Lips and I really want to see how they pull off the lyrics of my music. While I have a slim hope my salsa/merengue (Oye Como Va and a random Ricky Martin song does not a Latin music collection make) collections will ever get included I would love to be able to play my old school hip-hop.

While I think analyzing a song for the lead singers pitch might be feasible this generation, there's no way someone will be correctly quantifying cadence and enunciation.

 

[sevanig]

I like to see what the singstar team does in reaction to lips...

 

[Arwin]

I like to see what the singstar team does in reaction to lips...

This thread is not about that game ... I'm trying very hard not to discuss that title too much myself. However, we'll find out at Leipzig. Apparently there's a lot of stuff coming.

 

[thambos]

I just saw in a LIPS vid that the microphone has motion sensitivity too. Could Newton be built into LIPS?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

No.

 

[expletive]

Confirmed November, song list at the link:

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/10/22/lips-coming-to-xbox-360-this-november-song-list-revealed/

Seems like a good list for a karaoke game.

 

[AlNom]

Somehow... full price for a game like this seems not the way to go... A mainstream price ala Banjo Threeie would be more attractive methinks, or maybe I'm just missing something

 

[AzBat]

Comes with _2_ wireless motion-senstive microphones.

Tommy McClain

 

[RobertR1]

I hope the microphones can be used for Rockband2/GH:WT.

 

[AzBat]

Here are the details on the mics...

• The wireless microphone will bind with the Xbox 360, no dongle required.
• It's unclear if it will work with other music games. When asked about Rock Band or Guitar Hero World Tour, Keiichi Yano told us, "That's a great idea. We would love to do that." Alas, it's up to those third-party devs to implement support for this peripheral.
• A second player can shake the microphone to instantly "jump in" to the song, no menus needed.
• They use 2 AA batteries, just like the Xbox 360 controller. Yanno said that, despite the motion-sensitivity and the lights, the battery life is pretty impressive already, on prototype hardware.
• Lips will be bundled with a black and a white controller

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/07/17/details-on-lips-microphone-your-songs-its-songs/

Also, if you preorder from Amazon or Gamestop you get 1 free song download every week for the next 2 months.


Tommy McClain

 

[AlNom]

Comes with _2_ wireless motion-senstive microphones.

Ah ok. That's better.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Eurogamer has a review. Ignoring their score, it sounds like Lips has issues.

Play through a few songs, and it becomes clear that Lips is easier than any of the other singing games, and with no adjustable difficulty level. Play through a few dozen, and you encounter glitches and hilarious shortcuts to success that neuter the online challenge aspect as well. Beware people who challenge you to rap songs, for example, because they can simply hum a monotone to hit every single note perfectly. For singing, Lips seems to focus on when you're wrong rather than right, and sometimes just gives up and pretends you're wicked, like when you're dragging the mic head back and forth on the carpet during Beyoncé's "Irreplaceable" and it reckons you're hitting every note and doing vibrato on the long ones. At one point, player one's mic claimed to be receiving a brilliant but slightly imperfect rendition of every song we queued up, despite nobody making any noise and the TV having been muted. Only after we reset the 360 did it behave properly.

This makes it hard to trust the voice detection engine is reliable. They also found iPod attachment was buggy, and when it did work, it sounded like all that happens is the tune plays, with no pitch detection or lyrics or vids. Eurogamer are unclear on this :

One thing you can do with Lips, at least, is import songs from your iPod or other compatible devices, but our luck with iPods was mixed. Our iPod Touch didn't work and our iPod Video crashed the Xbox 360 outright a number of times...There are no lyrics or music videos to back the action, of course, so when you select the songs they're simply played back with the microphones live, and you can adjust mic volume up and down as you can for any of the regular songs. Still, if you can tolerate giving personal usage data away, you can report what you import to Microsoft so the Redmond DLC machine can make decisions about what to license.

The last point suggests this is how MS will supply lyrics, but is there really no voice-track cancellation in the usual karaoke style?

 

[DrJay24]

like when you're dragging the mic head back and forth on the carpet during Beyoncé's "Irreplaceable" and it reckons you're hitting every note and doing vibrato on the long ones

Ok, that is LOL funny.

 

[Arwin]

Eurogamer has a review. Ignoring their score, it sounds like Lips has issues.

It certainly does. Eurogamer's preview was quite hopeful, but this review certainly isn't.

This makes it hard to trust the voice detection engine is reliable. They also found iPod attachment was buggy, and when it did work, it sounded like all that happens is the tune plays, with no pitch detection or lyrics or vids. Eurogamer are unclear on this :
The last point suggests this is how MS will supply lyrics, but is there really no voice-track cancellation in the usual karaoke style?

Nah, it's not for supplying lyrics, but for making these songs available as proper 'Lips' downloadable tracks in the future, like in the SingStore.

 

[Tap In]

yikes!


it'll fill a need though and probably still sell "ok" -my opinion

 

[RobertR1]

How do I turn off the mic after usage? Even if I turn off the 360, the mics seem to blink for a while before some auto shut off kicks in. Also, the batteries that came with the mics barely lasted at all.

I wonder if the mic are battery hogs when not in use like GH instrumentments that ate up battery life when not in use. Anyone have any exp with them?

 

[ErnstH]

To turn them off, just push the button underneat them for a couple of seconds. They blink a couple of times, then shut down. And btw, the recent update made it a whole new game: scoring is much more accurate, and leaderboards are always fun to check against.