Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

After sitting in the shadow of Sony and its Singstar franchise, Microsoft has finally brought their own karaoke to market in the form of Lips.  While Lips provides a fun filled party atmosphere, and a savvy platform for future content, the single player will find themselves grasping for more to do with their $70 purchase.

Lips is, for lack of a better description, a karaoke game, but it adds a few wrinkles to the mix to separate it from the crowd.  Upon loading the game, you are presented with the main screen where you can select songs and sing them using a conventional karaoke format, where a pitch bar is above each word, and a pitch meter follows along to let you know if you are on, above or below pitch for each segment of the song.  It is a tried and true formula that has worked in Singstar, Karaoke Revolution and just about every karaoke machine in the land.

It is not the karaoke formula that Lips tries to improve on, but the surrounding accoutrements to make it a far more interactive and fun experience.  The two main changes that Lips brings to the table are song selection and the singing hardware itself.  Lips ships with two microphones, both of which are wireless, and have built in accelerometers.  The accelerometers allow the microphones to handle movement actions, which the game incorporates as a bonus type system.  Hit enough notes, and an action will occur on the screen.  Perform the action and you will get bonus stars to collect.  Adding to the microphones is the ability to stream music from your own collection into Lips.  Using an iPod, Zune or your computer, you can import music into the game, and the game will score your performance.  However, you do lose any sort of lyric or video support.  Not a huge deal, but unless you know your favorite songs by heart, you might lose some of the fun factor by importing these songs.

Lips ships with 40 song tracks, each with a full vocal track for single player and duet tracks as well as multiplayer battles.  Along with the music tracks which seem to be charted quite nicely, you also get original videos for most of the songs where available.  When the videos are not available, custom created music videos will be inserted, that seem very strange, as if someone was on a boat load of acid when they were made.  Song selection is from many different genres and from several decades.  There is a focus on the 90′s and later, but it is a solid selection of songs.

Karaoke is all about the party atmosphere, and Lips handles this challenge quite nicely.  The two microphones can be used by two players, while up to four controllers can be used by other people as noisemakers.  Think things like handclaps, cowbells, and maracas, and you have the idea of what noisemakers are like in Lips.  The mics support on the fly voice switching, meaning that they can be passed around mid-song without any problems with detecting voice changes.  The party modes of Lips is where the game really stands out, with the ability to involve several people at one time with the game.

Multiplayer adds to this a bit, but with a huge problem attached to it.  In Lips, you do not compete directly with people.  Instead, you have to send or receive challenges from other players.  Each contestant performs a song twice, and then the best score from each participant is used to determine the winner.  This is a nice idea, and not unlike playing against a ghost player, but there are not enough people out there with the game to make this feature usable.  Also, the person has to be on your friend list in order to challenge them, compounding the issue.

This leads into a bevy of issues that really hold Lips back.  Beyond the poor multiplayer support, you have a total lack of leaderboards in Lips.  You would think that Leaderboards would be a no-brainer in a vocal challenge game, but they do not exist.  The closest you get is a gauge of how many times you have sung a song, and how many times it has been sung in the world.  The videos that play in the background of songs that lacked original videos are obscure and strange, taking focus away from the music, which is a cardinal sin in karaoke.  Finally, while Lips comes with 40 good, solid songs, it is just not enough for a game that has a trickle of DLC coming to it two months later.  Yes the marketplace adds songs, now on a weekly basis, but only a few are natural selections.  There are many karaoke staples that are missing from the mix, and do not seem to be on anyone’s current horizon.  Lips does keep track of music titles that you add out of your own library when they are added, but there seems to be nothing that shows if that data is helping with the selection of upcoming DLC.  Also, while not a necessity for Lips, it would be nice if the wireless mics worked with other games, but as of this review, that feature is lacking, just adding to an uphill battle to sell more hardware to gamers.

Lips is a solid first attempt by iNiS, and it does make some big leaps in regards to interactivity and game design.  However, a small number of launch titles, and slow trickle of DLC has hampered Lips as a must buy for the public.  Some patches and enhancements could fix the game over time, but right now, it is an average title at best.  Lips gets 3 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.