The Great Playthrough: Game 39 - Singstar Rocks!

Another day, another playthrough blog. However, this time I’m not alone – no, this time I am joined by the ever-wonderful Neety! And why is this? Well today I am playing a game which is quite definitely not designed for single-player use.

Singstar Rocks!

Released on: Playstation 2

Played on: Playstation 2

Release date: 2004

Firstly, let’s get this out of the way. I don’t approve of the exclamation mark used in the title. It seems to be going out of it’s way to tell me how exciting and how much this game rocks, and frankly, that puts my back up just a little bit. (And yes, I understand that they have used the suffix Rocks to denote that this particular edition of Singstar utilises rock music – which as you are all (probably) aware, should be right up my street.  

Getting past that, I've played a Singstar game before – if you live with Neety then at some point in a drunken evening it does tend to become compulsory. But I’d never sat down to play it, as a game, sober. So this was going to be a new experience for me.

But as I said at the start of this, it’s not really a game designed for single-player, so Neety and I sat down to play some two-player competition.

And it was OK. Not the best game I've ever played – and that’s not because it’s a party game, or a music-based game. I love to play Guitar Hero, and will happily play it for hours at a time, and while I was playing, I couldn't figure out why Singstar wasn't entertaining me anywhere near as much as Guitar Hero or Rockband do.

Yes, part of it was the tracklisting, as bar a few songs, the majority of the set list was not to my taste – I'm not a fan of Bloc Party, or The Hives, or Snow Patrol… and also, why in hell is Gwen Stefani on the track listing for a game that is supposed be featuring rock music? Yes, she was in a ska-punk band, but when she left them she started to create some of the most hellish R&B inspired pap that I have ever encountered, so including one of those songs in this game made me feel physically sick.

But that wasn't my big reason for not enjoying the game a lot. My primary reason? I'm not very good at it – and it doesn't seem to be a game where skills improve.

Yes, there is a definite advantage to knowing the song that you are singing, but unlike something like Guitar Hero, where there is a right button to press and a wrong button to press – but instead, you have to sing along and, if your voice is like mine, it doesn't stay on the same note consistently. I have a definite tone to my voice (which is not something I dislike, particularly) but it means that it is very hard to stay exactly on the note…

I'm not describing this very well. Let me try and describe it in pictures.

If this is how Singstar displays a long, held, correctly sung note (the way it would be sung by Neety) is like this:

-----------------------------------   

Then me attempting to sing the same note looks like this:

                   ___

--_---_-_-_-      _---_--_---

There may be lots of little fluctuations, but the note sounds right to the human ear…. But not to Singstar.

And that’s my biggest problem with the game. I could talk about how well designed it’s party game elements are (which they are), and how it helped pave the way for music games on modern consoles (which it did), but at the end of the day it’s a game for which I cannot develop my skills. And that infuriates me.

So it’s fun, and all, but I won’t be going back to play it unless it is as part of a drunken entertaining evening.

Rating: 6/10

Time Played: 30 mins

Would I play it again? Only as a part of a fun drunken evening.

And if you enjoyed this? Come back tomorrow (Friday 15th Feb) at 7pm GMT for the next installment...