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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Yes SingStar is going free-to-play: Sony has confirmed it and I've interviewed the senior producer.
A father who undertook a 24-hour solo SingStar record to raise money for Great Ormond Street Hospital has successfully completed his marathon session, notching up nearly £3000 in donations.
A grateful father is attempting a 24-hour non-stop solo SingStar marathon this April to raise cash for the hospital that helped save his infant daughter.
How many extra SingStar songs have you bought and downloaded? 10, 20?
Sony has cancelled a number of games in development at its UK first-party developers and made an undisclosed number of people redundant.
Projects at Sony London, Sony Liverpool and Evolution Studios have been axed.
"It has been decided that production on a small number of projects within London Studio, Studio Liverpool, and Evolution Studios will be streamlined or closed due to a portfolio review and project prioritisation," Sony said in a statement issued this afternoon.
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Sony has relaunched the SingStar website with all sorts of new features that let you browse the series' back catalogue of songs and view performances from other players.
Sony has announced new features for the June update to SingStar, including the ability to instantly edit playlists remotely from a PSP.
Sony's announced that online battles between friends will be coming to SingStar in June. That's right, they weren't already there.
Sony's unveiled a new SingStar Viewer application that lets anyone browse the SingStore and MySingStarOnline community, the point being that you will not need a SingStar disc to do so.
SingStar's not just for Christmas: save some for New Year's Eve. Sony knows this and so has prepared four new SongPacks, plus a load of individual tracks, for the festive season.
Sony has announced that the SingStar series has reached more than 20 million sales, five and a half years after London Studio's singing game first launched on PS2.
Coincidentally, today also marks the release of the big old 4.3 patch, which fixes a lot of the calamitous bugs from last time out and introduces new features to the SingStore, MySingStarOnline and even the game itself.
When you're viewing somebody's media clips - i.e. Ellie wearing a wig - you can now click a "Quick Buy" button if you decide you want to buy the song, and this transfers you directly to its SingStore listing.
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SingStar game director Dave Ranyard has apologised to fans of Sony's multi-million-selling karaoke series who have had to put up with the fallout of a disastrous patch.
Writing on the European PlayStation blog, Ranyard revealed that "several serious bugs" slipped through the "normally rigorous" testing procedure before update 4.2 was released.
These included "SingStore songs being deleted from the hard drive", "Game crashing in the middle of a song" and "Media file corruption". Whoops! Not what you want after eight pints.
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Sony has signed a deal that will see Universal Music's songs appearing in the European SingStore.
Sony has told Eurogamer what will be in next Thursday's SingStore update, which arrives in time for the Saturday's Eurovision Song Contest 2009 final.
So much for the SingStar update that was supposed to go live yesterday - it won't be available for a little while yet.
"There's been a slight delay to the online update which is due to bring you lots of great new features," Sony told Eurogamer this morning.
"We promise it will be worth the wait and it will be with you early next week!"
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Sony is releasing an update introducing voice control to SingStar PS3.
SingStar players have uploaded over 96,000 videos to the game's community pages using PlayStation Network, Sony told Eurogamer this week.
Sony plans to launch a new section of the SingStore called "SingStar Extras" soon and use it to distribute paid-for or free gameplay updates for its monstrously popular music game series.
Sony has said that the long-awaited SingStar wireless microphones will be released "next year" in a post on its SingStar MySpace page.
Three Speech has just reported the news that all Singstar fans wanted to hear: full backwards compatibility for Singstar PS3 arrives tomorrow.
Sony plans to pop out a Festive Fun SongPack for SingStar this Thursday, 27th November.
Sony will be kicking off a new initiative for SingStar tomorrow with the arrival of two Queen-themed SongPacks.
SingStar boss Paulina Bozek has joined Atari to head a new London-based creative studio that will focus on mass-market games and online services for PC and consoles.
Sony has or at least is updating the SingStar SingStore with a bunch of new downloadable songs today, according to Three Speech.
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.
Sony is adding another meaty update to the PS3's SingStore this Friday.
Leading the 33-song influx has to be Toni Braxton with her ballad "Un-Break My Heart". [Rob is clearly too young to appreciate it is in fact Foreigner who top the list. Now this mountain I must climb feels like a world upon my shoulders. - Dep Ed]
Also on the list is "Step by Step" by New Kids on the Block, who were all ridiculous but we watched the cartoon about the band anyway. [In this order: Jordan, Joe, Jon, Donnie, Danny - Dep Ed] There's some Shakin' Stevens, Foreigner and Leonard Cohen too.
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Sony Europe boss David Reeves has told Eurogamer to expect "the next generation of SingStar" at Games Convention.
Sony's SingStar wizards are preparing to conjure another 18 English language songs and 15 for other European gamers as part of tomorrow's SingStore update.
Good news, karaoke fans - Sony has whacked a bundle of new songs in the SingStore.
Sony has filled another carrier bag full of songs and emptied it on the PS3 SingStore.
Sony has revealed it will be filming a Europe-wide talent search for fresh acts to appear in SingStar.
Sony has walloped another batch of recycled SingStar songs onto the PS3 SingStore.
Sony is bragging that karaoke series SingStar has shifted more than 12 million copies around the world.
Apparently five million were sold between April 2007 and March 2008, while its online SingStore flogged more than one million tracks in the first four months.
Sony has also seen more than 140,000 or you share around 20,000 videos of yourselves singing along to your favourite tracks. Our rendition of "I Try" by Macy Gray is hard to beat.
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The next wave of recycled SingStar songs will be added to the PS3 SingStore tomorrow.
The SingStar team has revealed that each back catalogue song has to be re-cleared before it can be offered as a download on the PS3 SingStore, hence the slight delay.
Sony will be unleashing 24 fresh songs on the SingStore tomorrow.
Sony plans to release a healthy batch of tracks to refresh the SingStore on 7th March.
Those of us singing in English will get 46 in total. Highlights are "I Want To Dance With Somebody" by Whitney Houston, "Deeper Shade of Blue" by Steps, and "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls [Is there something you want to tell me? - Ed].
Germans and Italians will both get eight new songs, Norwegians will get three, and Spanish will get two.
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Sony has issued a statement to Eurogamer regarding the current lack of songs on the SingStar PS3 SingStore, promising new content on 18th January and more to follow in early February.
Sony says that songs bought through SingStar PS3's online "SingStore" will cost GBP 0.99 / EUR 1.49 each when the service launches alongside the game on 7th December.
Sony has overcome whatever issues were holding it up and stamped a 7th December release date on SingStar for PS3 in the UK, with European versions arriving on 12th December.
Sony has finally decided that SingStar PS3 will be out in December, after making us fear the worst recently by saying the game was stuck in "release limbo".
A release date for SingStar on the PlayStation 3 is currently up in the air as Sony continues to test downloadable content and community features for the next-gen version of one of its most popular social gaming franchises, GamesIndustry.biz reports.
Speaking in her keynote at this morning's Nordic Game conference, Sony's Paulina Bozek focused on "mass customisation" and how current trends have influenced the development of the PS3 instalment in the SingStar series, GamesIndustry.biz is reporting.
Sony Computer Entertainment has dismissed reports that downloadable tracks for the PlayStation 3 instalment of SingStar will cost GBP 1.49 each.
Sony has revealed a few more snippets of info regarding SingStar PS3 - including news of how much we'll have to pay to download tracks via the new SingStore service.
SingStar on PS3 will have an all-new track listing, new microphones, and a download service that allows you to access every single track in the PS2 series' back catalogue - with high definition videos where possible. Plus, it'll be a launch title for PS3.
That's what we've had coming out of Sony's conference in LA today - and speaking to the development team afterward and having a quick go on the revised version, it's looking like the service is pretty much what SingStar fans have been crying out for.
Through a "My SingStar" profile section you'll be able to share recorded footage of your singing and download it to PSP to take away with you, we were told. The more sophisticated PS3 video compression means the 30-second-or-so segments are easily handled over the net. These videos will probably still work on the basis of snapping "key moments", according to the team, but equally it's possible there may be a manual-record mode.
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While the crowds are still queuing up to get out of the sunshine and into the hugely crowded, probably already sweaty conference halls, Sony has treated everyone back home to a bunch of new screens for some of the PS3 launch titles.
