Sony has announced a modest new SingStar game for PS4, called SingStar Celebration. It's due Wednesday, 25th October, a day after my birthday in case you're wondering, and is part of Sony's PlayLink push. There's no word on price but I'm checking.
PlayLink is Sony trying to broaden the PlayStation audience a bit, much like how Sony broadened the PS2 audience with games like SingStar and Buzz! in the first place. But these days there's no need for an additional microphone or buzzer peripheral because we have smartphones.
SingStar Celebration, then, uses your - and your friends and family's - phone as the microphone via a free app. Otherwise it's SingStar as normal: sing along to a load of music videos while trying to match the pitch indicated by the blobby bars on screen.
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Sony has announced new features for the June update to SingStar, including the ability to instantly edit playlists remotely from a PSP.
Sony is justifiably proud of SingStar. It's sold over 17 million units. Over 4 million songs have been bought and downloaded. It's also almost universally adored by critics. Everyone at Eurogamer plays SingStar, for example, often to the exclusion of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. SingStar's brilliant, and it's a success. So it's slightly bizarre that the highest score it's ever had on Metacritic, across 26 individual disc releases, is 82, with the majority languishing in the mid-70s, if not lower.
Three Speech has just reported the news that all Singstar fans wanted to hear: full backwards compatibility for Singstar PS3 arrives tomorrow.
MTV Multiplayer has clarified that the SingStar disc-swapping feature announced by Sony Europe boss David Reeves last night won't allow you to rip songs to the hard disk.
