SingStar 80's

Oh, the shame, the humiliation, the pure silliness of it all.

My 18-year old is an avid fan of SCEA’s SingStar series. What she lacks in tone, she makes up for in enthusiasm. She considers it a mission when a new expansion is released to go through all the songs, in solo mode and earn the high score.

When SingStar 80s arrived on the doorstep, she took one look at the song list and started to drool. Sure, most of the songs were recorded before she was born, but she lives in a household that loves music and had heard most of the songs growing up. So her first order of business was to challenge her review-writing father to Battle mode in the karaoke-based game and she selected the song – Madonna’s Material Girl.

Now I wish I could say the score was close, but several hundred points difference is not that close. The win was not “eeked” out. It was a dominating performance, from opening notes to final chorus. When the song ended, she sat there, a stunned look on her face – a look that was mirrored in the faces of my 11- and 12-year old daughters as well. Yep, I smoked her.

“That is just wrong!” came the chorus from the girls.

My daughter decided that revenge (or retribution) was immediately in order. She knows I can’t rap worth a lick. In fact, when I last tried, with Eidos’ Get On Da Mic, I sent the cats scurrying in terror. They didn’t know what the sound was, but they didn’t like it. One hid for two days before showing itself again with that “is it safe?” look on its face.

SingStar ‘80s has Run DMC’s It’s Tricky on it. She picked it. The resulting point totals were nothing to brag about, but she lost … again.

“That’s right, homey …” I intoned, words cut off by the look on her face.

“Never do that again,” she stated, a steely edge to her voice. If the Run DMC song so much as rotates through when I am holding a mic, she yells “NO!!!!”

SingStar ‘80s is a solid collection of tunes that span the pop generation of the period. There are some rock songs, but the 80s was a little more sedate when compared to the sounds of the 70s. The 1970s gave us Bon Jovi (the early years), Deep Purple, Black Sabbath. The Doors, Iron Butterfly, Jimi Hendrix and the like. The 1980s were Billy Ocean, Simple Minds, INXS and so on. The music was changing and SingStar ‘80s celebrates that with the pop and rock sounds of the decade.

Included on this list are:

• Billy Joel – Uptown Girl

• Billy Ocean – Caribbean Queen

• Blondie – Heart of Glass

• Culture Club – Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?

• Cyndi Lauper – Time After Time

• Dead or Alive – You Spin Me Round

• Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Come on Eileen

• Duran Duran – Rio

• Erasure – Respect

• Europe – The Final Countdown

• Flock of Seagulls – I Ran (So Far Away)

• Foreigner – I Want to Know What Love Is

• Kim Wilde – Kids in America

• Madness – Our House

• Madonna – Material Girl

• Men At Work – Who Can it be Now?

• Nena – 99 Red Balloons

• R.E.M. – Stand

• Run DMC – It’s Tricky

• Simple Minds – Don’t You (Forget About Me)

• Soft Cell – Tainted Love

• Squeeze – Tempted

• Starship – We Built This City

• Survivor – Eye of the Tiger

• Tears for Fears – Everybody Wants to Rule the World

• The Pretenders – Brass in Pocket

• Thompson Twins – Hold Me Now

• Tina Turner – The Best

• Twisted Sister – We’re Not Going to Take It

• Wham! – Wake Me Up Before You Go Go

The list is diverse and a solid tribute, mingling rock with ballad pop. The songs do have broad appeal and play out well within the SingStar game.

If you don’t know what SingStar is … here is the overview:

It is a karaoke game that requires microphones (not included with the expansion – they came with the original release), and uses three visual elements for the game content. The visuals are comprised of the music video from the song being played, the lyrics along the bottom of the screen and a pitch meter cutting through the middle of the screen. The goal is to sing the songs, either in the shortened forms (with bigger points accumulating over the time frame) or over the course of the full song, hit the notes, get a score and try to ride the top of the charts. There is no online play, but there are party games in which you can battle another singer with the game’s two microphones (which came with the original release, what is being looked at here is an expansion), or sing as a team with the goal – again – being to outscore your opponents. There are three difficulty levels, which essentially means the level of forgiveness the game will give you as you sing. Being a bit off is fine at the Easy level, but you have to be almost dead on at the hard level to score well. The multiplayer, or Party, mode has several games from the head-to-head Battle mode, to Pass the Mic (teams undertake different singing challenges in turns) . The different challenges include singing medleys for scores or to keep the meter above a specific bar by hitting the notes.

This collection of tunes is very good and it is obvious that only so many songs can be included. It must be tough to look at the array of available tracks from such a broad spectrum as this decade produced and then try to wheedle it down. As it stands, while very good, SingStar ‘80s is not overly indicative of the time period in the music world. Still, it offers a solid collection of tunes that karaoke singers will thoroughly enjoy performing.

Gameplay: 7.5
The gameplay mechanics are exactly like other SingStar games. The only difference is the collection of songs and this is a good collection that should have wide appeal.

Graphics: 7.7
The music videos show the influence of the video-pop culture with higher production values and a sense of the story the song is trying to convey.

Sound: 8.9
More pop than rock, this is still a nice collection of songs reflective of the time period. Some of the bigger tunes of the 80s, though, are noticeably absent, like The Cars, Elvis Costello, America, The Bangles, Dire Straits, Depeche Mode, Motley Crue, Mr. Mister, The Go-Go’s and so on, not to even mention grunge bands that do pop up on other collections but are absent in this tribute to a particular decade of music.

Difficulty: Medium
Not too much here that will really stretch the vocal cords.

Concept: 7.0
A decent selection but it just does not go deep enough into the decade.

Multiplayer: 8.1
This is a song list that will get just about everyone up and competing.  

Overall: 7.8
The 80s feel like they were barely touched here. There was a lot of important music that came out of the decade – after all, it marked the transition from the harder edge of rock to a stronger diversity in the music genre. Grunge hit during the mid-80s, and this collection really doesn’t even address that movement. While SingStar ‘80s is a good collection, it is hardly definitive of the time frame. However, the songs are catchy and fun to sing, and this is supposed to be about fun, not to serve as a preservation of music history.