In the high echelons of internet and geek culture, 2008 has seen the biggest argument amongst gamers since the debate over whether games are art: Casual Gaming. This so-called “new” market seeks to capture those people who don’t play games all the time, unlike the rest of us ‘normal geeks’. It seeks to appeal to mums, sisters, grandmas and grandpas, and because of the incredible success of the Nintendo Wii and DS, along with download services like Steam and Xbox Live Arcade, casual gaming has seen a massive spike of interest by the big players in the market.

Along with slashing the price of the Xbox Arcade System, Microsoft has pitched its once hardcore system to the casual gamer. The New Xbox Experience makes the interface clearer and simpler and adds a gimmicky but cute Avatar system, which allows you to personalise a character to your tastes and then see that character appear in the casual games such as Uno and SceneIt: Box Office Smash.

Lips is another attempt by Microsoft to capture the casual market. Made by Japanese studio iNiS, creators of Gitaroo Man and Elite Beat Agents, Lips is a Karoke game accompanied by two wireless microphones. Unlike Microsoft’s disastrous attempt to make a Karoke game for the original Xbox with the Xbox Music Mixer, the game functions as a very slick and cool Karoke simulator, but as a game, it falls a little flat.

The Microphones are striking and well crafted. They feel like a proper microphone in your hand, weighted properly for a sturdy and comfortable feel. The microphone itself is covered by a metal a foam spit guard, which is removed to access the batteries. When in action, LEDs strobe and change colour to the beat of the song, and they also contain motion detectors that interact with the game itself.

The first thing you notice when loading the game is the incredibly slick interface. It just oozes cool, and is insanely easy to use. Three button presses and you’re singing. It would have been nice to use the microphone in some way to navigate the menus, but unfortunately you need to have controllers connected, but it’s not a deal breaker. The first option is to sing, and pressing the button shows you your songs listed in alphabetical order. Selecting a song with the D-Pad plays a sample of the song, just in case you didn’t know it, and here you can also rate the songs and add it your playlists.

Another button press gets you into a staging area, where you can set up the options for the song. Here you can choose to sing the long or short versions of the songs, set up Versus or Cooperative modes, set the noise reduction to reduce the voice in the song, the effect of the microphone, and choose which background to sing along to – Music Video, Interactive Video, or one of 3 minigames. After adjusting your options, you start singing the song.

The singing section feels very similar to Rockband and Guitar Hero singing sections. A pitch line scrolls horizontally and you’re rewarded points for hitting the pitch and timing of the songs correctly. When you sing well enough, an icon appears on screen telling you to perform an action with the mic. Do this, and you activate Star power Star Stream. This gives you double points on all the notes you hit. This is where the motion detector comes into play, although simply shaking the mic rather than doing the exact move can set it off anyway. You can also shake the microphone to become a noise maker, acting as tambourine shakes or hand claps.

Music Video is exactly that – watch the music video as the song plays. Some songs are a little too old to have the original MTV video, or maybe it’s a clearance issue, but in those cases a custom video will play instead. Whilst videoclips are common to most Karoke set ups, I personally found this very distracting, especially during Beyonce’s clip where she’s strutting around in nothing much at all… it’s a bit hard to sing when your tongue is hanging out.

The interactive clip has motion captured dancers singing over a disco-esc flashy background, like those old rave music clips and amiga demos. (Gosh, I’m showing my age here!).You interact with the clip by swinging the microphone around. As you do certain moves, like spin around or move the mic up and down, the video responds in various ways. It’s kind of cool, especially with two people.

The minigames are a silly but fun distraction. Kiss has a cute 2D rendered scene, very reminiscent of Rub Rabbits, with two people running towards each other. Time the microphone movement right, and they’ll kiss. Vocal Fighters has two cartoon singers in spots of light. The better you sing, the brighter the light, forcing your opponent off stage. Time Bomb features a big bomb with a fuse, and by singing well you fill up a glass of water. Shake the microphone and put out the fuse.

There’s also a “jukebox” mode to the game, which allows you to set a playlist and play song after song after song – the ultimate party mode. If a person wants to sing, simply shaking the mic gets the person in the game. This is the same for any mode, but makes the most sense in this mode as you can have the game running as a video jukebox until your guests are drunk brave enough to start singing.

The biggest issue with all of these modes is there’s not really much point to singing well. Yes, you are scored on your progress, and are rewarded stars and medals which in turn give you more points, but there’s nothing to do with the points once you’ve earned them. You can’t fail a song, and moreover you don’t unlock more songs or higher difficulties, points are simply used for bragging rights. So, for a single player, you’ve scored 4 million points on Young MC’s Bust A Move, what’s the point in singing it again?

The 40 songs included are adequate, covering a range of songs and styles, although I feel it’s much more slanted to young females tastes compared to Rockband and Guitar Hero. I really appreciate the inclusion of some Australian greats – if you haven’t sang drunkenly to Khe Shan in a pub then you’re not really Australian to my mind, and now you can capture that feeling any time you want. But I really have to question to inclusion of Shannon Noll on the Australian disc at the expense of Duran Duran’s Hungry Like a Wolf. They could have at least made the songs of the other regions available as a free download.

You can import songs, but again the game misses a big opportunity here. Songs are simply imported – no lyrics can be included. Knowing that you can attach lyrics to music files using ID3 tags, I don’t understand why this ability wasn’t included. I do understand the licensing restrictions placed on content like this, but surely some kind of arrangement could be made with music publishers, even if it was some kind of proprietary file format that only LIPS could use.

Also, when you play your imported song, you’re still scored, although how exactly I can’t quite ascertain. It seems to work just as well if you make random noises into the microphone. And whilst it sends the details of the songs and artists back to Microsoft with the promise of including songs for download if they’re popular enough, for some reason I don’t think Kevin Bloody Wilson will be picked up any time soon.

Another minor issue with the songs is none of them are duets, so two people are in fact singing the same bits in each song. With two microphones, it seems like another missed opportunity to make the game more fun.

Another bigger problem is the lack of online play. You can challenge a person to beat your score on a song, but they’ve completely left out the ability to sing together online. There may be issues with voice and lag, but surely some kind of mode could have been incorporated. They could have also given people the ability to record themselves and upload it to youtube, ala SingStar, but alas that’s missing too. There’s an attempt at an online community, but like much of the rest of the game, it feels worthless. Sure, it’s nice knowing that 324,093 people have sung your favourite song, but it’s pretty unnecessary. I also think it’s a bit broken – it’s improbable that not one single person has attempted to sing Coldplay’s Yellow since the games release.

Conclusion:
Lips does a good job at being a Karoke simulator. It looks and sounds great, it’s simple to get started, and the party mode really is a great idea. The list of songs has something for everyone, and the ability to download more songs increases its appeal. It’s precisely the type of game you can put on at a party and have some fun with.

The problem is it’s not very good at being a game, especially compared to the other music games available. For a single player, there’s not really much incentive to play through all the songs. Yes, singing is fun, but you don’t unlock anything, you can’t change the difficulty. The lack of online modes is also very disappointing.

PROS:
Simple and intuitive and slick looking interface
Microphones feel very well crafted
Varied selection of tunes to suit a wide range of people
Great fun in a party atmosphere

CONS:
Not much of a game – no incentives or unlockables
Can’t import lyrics with imported songs
Scoring on imported songs doesn’t make sense
Severe lack of online play.

73/100