INiS's Keiichi Yano quiet on Lips DLC pricing

By Tom Bramwell Published 16 July, 2008

Does clarify imported song functions.

Keiichi Yano, co-founder of Lips developer iNiS, was unable to clarify pricing for the ambitious Microsoft karaoke game or its downloadable song content when Eurogamer spoke to him on Tuesday at E3.

Although Yano said that DLC prices "will be competitive" - presumably a reference to SingStar's 99p price for song downloads on PS3 - the engaging developer couldn't say any more. As well as downloadable songs, you'll also get videos and "other stuff".

He did confirm that the game would ship with two of Microsoft's motion-sensitive microphones - black and white - which light up as you play, but couldn't confirm how much the bundle would cost either.

However, he did say that iNiS has three confirmed songs at this point - Peter, Bjorn & John's "Young Folks", Duffy's "Mercy" and Young MC's "Bust-A-Move" - and hopes to have around 40 on the disc at launch "this holiday season". Each of the bundled songs will be from a master recording and include the music video, Yano said.

We also saw Guns 'N Roses' "Sweet Child o' Mine" among others on a screen packed with test songs, but these were presumably placeholders.

One of Lips' unique selling points is its ability to let you sing along to music on your Xbox 360 hard disk, iPod or Zune. We actually had a Zune with us during the demo and Yano happily plugged it in and pulled up a listing of our songs (albeit limited to the first 100 in this demo build) so everyone could admire our tastes.

Although he couldn't show us how a song would look in gameplay ("I wish I could!" he pleaded), he did say that the game would be able to rate your performance as if you were playing along to one of the built-in tracks, that there would be vocal reduction on whatever you picked and that iNiS has a "very compelling solution" lined up for getting the screen to display the correct lyrics.

And yes, it will even work with junk you've encoded from old CDs and vinyl, he said, although the game will only support DRM-free content to begin with.

We'll bring you a full preview of Lips based on the product demo with Keiichi Yano very soon.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (4) Latest comment 4 years ago

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  • MENTAL1ST Verified Senior Software Engineer, Picsel UK Ltd. #1 4 years ago

    the game would be able to rate your performance as if you were playing along to one of the built-in tracks, that there would be vocal reduction on whatever you picked and that iNiS has a "very compelling solution" lined up for getting the screen to display the correct lyrics.

    Now that *is* interesting. I was expecting just a vocal reduction filter, then letting you sing what you like over it, like on the Xbox 1 Karaoke thing. If that really works, then this could be way better than Singstar.

  • Eighthours #2 4 years ago

    Yeah, it's how well the tech behind this works that'll be the killer here. Either it'll blow Singstar out of the wate with the "own tracks" feature, or be a pale imitation with a malfunctioning gimmick attached to it.

    We'll see.

  • SpaceMidget75 Verified Senior Software Developer, Minerva Computer Services #3 4 years ago

    We'll see indeed. I haven't got my hopes up.

    Do you need the vocal removed anyway? The vocals aren't reduced on Singstar, which has always been the appeal for me over 'normal' karaoke. You get to sing with the artist as if you were singing along to the radio.

    I'm not sure I want the vocal reduced or removed that much.

    The scoring and lyrics thing I do want though!

  • CheesecakeBobby #4 4 years ago

    I'm sure they'll be sensible and do what Rock Band does - let you adjust the volume of the vocal track and of your voice played back through the speakers.