SingStar Popworld • Eurogamer.net

Also: feedback for "natural vibrato".

Sony has announced new features for the June update to SingStar, including the ability to instantly edit playlists remotely from a PSP.

FeatureSingStar: Past, Present and Future

Sony's karaoke revolution.

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.

SingStar backwards compatibility arrives

SingStar PS3 to work with PS2 discs Tues.

Three Speech has just reported the news that all Singstar fans wanted to hear: full backwards compatibility for Singstar PS3 arrives tomorrow.

PS2 songs in PS3 SingStar clarified

Won't involve ripping to hard disk.

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.

SingStar Popworld

Noteworthy. Makes for a much better Party.

Leather-tongued, lead-headed, dizzy and worryingly positioned with my head in a pile of dirty socks, I awoke this morning surrounded by empty bottles and overstocked rubbish bins with three thoughts buzzing through my head. 1) SingStar Popworld is a major return to form for Sony's competitive karaoke series. 2) Given the amount of alcohol required to truly enjoy it, it's arguably the only PS2 game with a subscription fee worth paying. 3) Doo-wah-diddy-diddy-dum-diddy-doo!

The original SingStar, which you should certainly own by now, definitely struck a chord when it came out last year. Karaoke has always been fun, but the way SingStar measured your performance basing its assessment on your ability to hold a tune rather than simply hit notes gave the karaoke a much-needed competitive edge. It played videos at the same time, too. It was so much its own thing, Sony reasoned, that it discouraged its official website writers from using the 'k' word in describing it.

There were a few problems. Player voices were slightly out of synch with singer voices on playback, you were expected to pick the right component of a harmony instinctively, which didn't always pan out, and it was possible to fool the game into giving out a high score simply by humming (or even blatantly singing the wrong lyrics - in our editor's case, a string of expletivesr) as long as you were in tune. Meanwhile the game fooled you by penalising you for any little flowery vocal embellishments. Presumably why there are no Christina Aguilera songs. (Man, imagine if there were no Christina Aguilera songs!)