As we do this, a video for the song plays in the centre of the screen while a series of narrow grey lines pops up in the foreground for each lyric - the idea being that these lines represent the relative positions of the various notes we're attempting to hit, acting as a kind of visual cue and also demonstrating how close we are to being in tune.Īs we sing, they fill up with our respective colours. We plug in the pair of supplied microphones (chunky, suitably heavy red and blue instruments with SingStar logos and a little USB adapter), pick a difficulty level and one of the game's 30 songs and then sing along to the words on the screen. Ostensibly SingStar is karaoke with a scoring system. We needn't have just walked off the set of Pop Idol with Simon Cowell's marriage proposal in our back pocket to drag a single to the top of the charts and score highly in SingStar. Late at night as we listen on our headphones. Because, even if we can't sing, we still do.
Not being able to sing is probably the best possible reason to buy SingStar. And yet the disappointment of this discovery didn't last long, because, believe it or not, our increasingly desperate efforts to scale the peaks and plough the troughs of the Canadian's towering vocalisations quickly proved to be the funniest thing to hit the lounge since a brick through the window with a Tommy Cooper DVD strung round it. Up to the point that we first listened to ourselves, caught up in the vein-popping throes of Avril Lavigne's skater anthem 'Complicated' in a roomful of intoxicated friends, it had never quite sunk in that our singing voices are such a screeching catastrophe of never-quite-notes and vocoder-ish octave hopping.