Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Sony recently released the SingStar Viewer in the PlayStation Store, and it’s really a great little (93MB) piece of free software. What you get is effectively a SingStar client that runs off your hard drive, but has none of the singing parts of the game. You can view the library of video and audio that you’ve captured while playing the game, and you can go online and use that functionality as well, viewing and rating some of the brilliant, adorable, and downright frightening videos that can be found there.

As much as I love this, I kind of wonder why they haven’t gone one step further and offered the entire SingStar client as a free download. I’m not expecting them to give away any songs, but let me put it this way: if you weren’t a SingStar person, but you were curious, wouldn’t you download the software for free and buy one song (they’re all less than $2) to give the thing a try? Call it a cheap demo, if you like. I mean, they’ll probably sell some SingStar to people who watch the videos and see how much fun these people are having, but how many more might take that extra step if they could sing one song, even if they had to pay for the one song?

As a person who’s already larynx-deep in SingStar, I would want the client for a different reason: less swapping of discs. Since there’s no song export functionality in SingStar, if I want to sing one of the PS2 songs in the PS3 game, I have to pull out one of my four SingStar PS3 discs and boot the game, then if the song I want to sing isn’t on that disc, I need to swap the discs for one of my five PS2 discs… and wait for that to load. A client that runs from the HDD saves me a significant portion of this process.

I’ve also wished for a while that I could see my entire song library in the menu of songs, and that I could pick a song and then have it tell me which disc to swap to. They recently patched the game to optionally show you all the songs you can buy in the store mixed in with the songs you’ve bought and the songs on the current disc, which is nice, but I’d also like to have the game know I have SingStar Amped and show those songs as available. It beats pulling out the game boxes and reading them all, then trying to remember, “ok, which song is that again…?”

The ideal here would be for Sony to implement the ability for me to export the songs from my PS2 SingStar discs so I can run them off the hard drive, just like I can with the DLC. Then I’d only have to load each disc once, then either wait for it to rip the videos off or download them from a server. Of course, with my library, I’d quickly need a larger hard drive, but that’s my problem. I’d even pay a Rock Band-style unlocking fee per disc for this.

While I’m at it, now’s as good a time as any for me to complain that it still costs $70 to import a pair of wireless SingStar microphones from the UK. Maybe if Sony made with the complete free client, they could make more money off the songs and Sony would bring these mics to the US.

By the way, if you want to see any of my SingStar videos, my PSN ID is stephenjm.