The videos, as mentioned, are also a bit weak in places - the Johnny Cash video is particularly atrocious, but equally we didn't understand why the full music video (or at least some live footage) for other tracks such as The Smiths' This Charming Man wasn't used. What have we missed? Some of the weaker links in the chain, perhaps - the team makes a sterling effort with Blur's Parklife by dividing it up into a duet with different tracks for Damon's singing and the other guy's cockney mumblings, with the latter being scored on the "rap meter" rather than as singing, but sadly it's still not much fun to sing. Okay, it's probably quite hard to get the whole family around to sing, but when the game boasts a range that extends from Barry White's The First, The Last, My Everything and Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong's duet Let's Call the Whole Thing Off through to Black Sabbath's Paranoid and Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit for the more hirsute and less washed members of the family, Sony is certainly making a damn good stab at making it happen. Whether by design or by happy coincidence, this collection turns Singstar Legends into a genuine family product. For John Lennon, you get Imagine for Johnny Cash, you get Ring of Fire (albeit with a ridiculous backing video which caused us to collapse into giggles at a key moment when the word "BURN" pulsed onto the screen looking like a refugee from a bad rave music video). Best of all, for each artist, it's their best known track (or damn close) which graces this collection. The above paragraph was surprisingly hard to write, because picking stand-out tracks from Singstar Legends is difficult - in choosing those named tracks, I missed out on tracks from Depeche Mode, The Police, the Pet Shop Boys, the Righteous Brothers, the Rolling Stones, the Monkees, Madonna, Marvin Gaye. In fact, out of all the Singstar games, this is by far the one with the least filler material. The Jackson 5 belting out I Want You Back sits alongside Jackie Wilson's Reet Petite and Elvis Presley's Blue Suede Shoes, Bowie's Life on Mars and The Smiths' This Charming Man cosy up to Elton John's Rocket Man, while on the ladies' side of things, Patsy Cline's Crazy, Dusty Springfield's Son of a Preacher Man, Aretha Franklin's Respect and Tina Turner's What's Love Got To Do With It are the basis of a track listing that is packed with genuinely iconic tracks. The resulting collection is simultaneously eclectic and fantastic. The resulting mix of songs is a mish-mash of instantly recognisable classics from the last fifty years, with almost every song being universally well-known and pretty much every generation represented with at least a few classics of the era. While recent Singstar titles have attempted to provide packs of songs along a specific theme - Singstar Rocks was an obvious one, while Singstar Anthems was very, very comfortable with its sexuality - Legends returns to the original formula of providing something for everyone, albeit with a heavy emphasis on artists who are, rightly or wrongly, considered to be legendary. So, what delights do Sony have in store this time? Let's break out the alcohol and the silly hats, and find out. That said, what decent human being would cheat at karaoke games in such a fashion? Only a cad of the highest order, I dare say.Īs such, reviewing a new Singstar is basically the same as reviewing the track listing, for the most part. It still boasts the best system for recognising the pitch of singing found in any karaoke game, but has a number of exploitable flaws - such as the ability to sing any words you like, or simply make a loud noise at broadly the right pitch to score perfectly. Nothing has changed technologically in Singstar for several iterations now, and it seems unlikely that anything major will happen to the series before its PS3 debut. Depending on how outgoing or inebriated you are, this is a recipe either for heaven or hell. You know the drill by now on that front two microphones, a PlayStation 2, thirty tracks of music (yes, it's a full thirty here, unlike in Anthems) and a variety of different solo, duet, battle and team game modes to test your vocal skills on. But there's a further problem your dad will probably like this too.ĭepending on your age, and possibly on your relationship with your parents, that's probably either an intriguing prospect or a horrifying one - which isn't too bad a description of Singstar itself, in fact. Your mum probably isn't all that bad, when you think about it. Heres a phrase that you probably don't associate with the majority of videogame reviews:
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