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INiS's Keiichi Yano quiet on Lips DLC pricing

Does clarify imported song functions.

Tom Bramwell avatar
News by Tom Bramwell Former Editor-in-Chief
Updated on
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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.

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