Lips Hands On

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The microphones also have another trick up their sleeve - they're motion-sensitive. Now, this isn't exactly a stealth Wiimote for the 360, but Lips does use the motion-sensing in a variety of ways - most notably, you can clap along with the percussion in some parts of the songs. Granted, Rock Band manages the same trick without a motion sensor in sight, but Lips' approach is a little more subtle - shaking the microphones makes them into tambourines, clapping them turns them into cymbals, and so on. At certain points the game will also reward you for posing in certain ways, or even twirling around.

We can see the latter aspect ending in disaster on many a drunken night, as bowls of Twiglets and bottles of cheap wine fly all over the place. In fact, this is one element of the game we sort of hope you can turn off - the posing aspects will be fun for some, but others just want to sing (or prefer their musical posing to be more impromptu, rather than this kind of regimented, score-deductible Fun).

Speaking of score, this is another area where Lips really has an edge over SingStar. Not to put too fine a point on it, Sony's game largely rewards you for being dull and boring. Genuinely good, entertaining singers do badly at SingStar (and Rock Band, for that matter) because the game rewards you for holding perfect notes, rather than actually singing.

It's too early to say just how much Lips improves on that - but it's hugely promising to note that on long notes, the game actually gives you a bonus for vibrato, rather than deducting points. It was revealing to watch A-Ha front-man Morten Harket singing Take On Me at Microsoft's event (it was also mind-boggling fantasy fulfilment for an unashamed child of the eighties), because as he sang, the game constantly popped up bonuses and rewards not only for singing notes accurately, but also for doing interesting things with them.

Oh good, I do like jam. The ability to play with real-time 3D backgrounds rather than videos is a bit of an odd one - we're not sure we see the point.

As a result, we're seriously looking forward to getting our hands on the game and inviting some properly-good singer pals around to see how they get on with it. Although the basic display - a track the notes follow, and the level your voice is at - looks hugely similar, the audio processing that Lips is doing is obviously much more complex than SingStar's efforts. Quite right too - it was a serious let-down when SingStar's PS3 edition turned out to be doing nothing more advanced in the scoring department than its PS3 ancestors.

Visually, Lips does look rather like SingStar, but it's significantly "busier" on-screen. Various special effects and gauges are littered over the play area which indicate when you're doing really well (or badly, presumably, but we wouldn't know about that...), and some may be a bit disappointed to note that the original music videos are quite obscured by all the scoring stuff. Curiously, there also seems to be an option to sing without the music videos - replacing them with 3D "visualiser" style effects instead. We're not sure what the point of this is (except perhaps to avoid having to look at Celine Dion's face?) - further investigation is required.

Er... Actually, we take it back. Replacing videos with real-time 3D is the best feature in a karaoke game ever.

The other key element of Lips - which is much-discussed - is the integration with your existing MP3 collection. Frankly, at this point in time, this sounds like a complete red herring to us. Microsoft has alluded to this feature repeatedly but has never properly explained how it'll work - and as far as we can gather at this point in time, it'll just play the music on your Xbox 360 with a visualisation in the background, and let you sing along through the microphones. It'll help to pad out the anorexic catalogue of music in the early weeks, but it's no substitute in the long-term.