Welcome to my internet.
Carrie just introduced me to a fun game: start typing “how to” on google and check out the popular searches that pop up. It’s like a little peek at the zeitgeist. The incredibly awkward, nerdy zeitgeist.
A relatively SFW example:
Have fun!
If you haven’t seen this star-studded 3 minute internet musical, you should. Starring Jack Black, John C. Reilly, Margaret Cho, Neil Patrick Harris, and many more. Book and score written by Mark Shaiman, composer of Hairspray (about six weeks later than he shoulda, he admits).
Check it out: Prop 8 - The Musical
I recently acquired Lips for Xbox360. I expected to love this game because I enjoy doing vocals on Rock Band. And now that I’ve played it for about 2 hours - yes, it’s fun, but there are enough annoying little issues to prevent me from going ga-ga over it.
A word on delay: LCD HDTVs have lag, whereas receivers don’t so much, so the sound ends up ahead of the video. Rock Band provides a configuration tool that allows you to globally adjust for the lag and get everything synced up. Rock Band 2 can even do the configuration automatically if you one of the newer guitar with light and sound sensors. Lips also allows you to adjust for lag… on a per-song basis. What? I tried 9 different songs, and they all needed a -0.2 second adjustment to work right. Why do I have to set it in every song?
Also, these per-song settings are way too difficult to access. To adjust for lag, I have to select a song, select the video I want to use with the song, then hit start to break out of the flow and see settings, L stick to the delay page of settings, hit A, use the L stick to adjust, hit A again, L stick to another settings page, hit A, hit L stick to select “Yes, apply changes”, and hit A. Really?
There are a few other UX things that need polish. For example, once you’ve added a song to your instant playlist (what you’re about to sing), it seems the only way to get rid of it is to sing it all the way through. (I would love to be wrong about this - please correct me if I am.) Once the second mic joins the game, there is no way to remove it and get back to solo mode - and it’s easy to join the second mic by accident (knocking it off the couch does it pretty reliably).
That said, I did just play for two hours. I like the included song selection: out of the 40 songs, I knew 19 of them by name, which made for a good first experience with the game. It’s very clear how to buy new Lips songs from Xbox LIVE (though the selection is currently small), and not so clear how to add songs from your own collection, or what kind of experience they offer for plain ol’ mp3s the lack the karaoke lyrics/timing metadata that the Lips songs have.
I wish there were more quest-type things, a la Rock Band 2 (play this gig to get a Merch Girl!), but Lips does level you up as you amass more points, and the achievements flow freely.
In summary: great concept and great start on implementing it, UX needs some more love, and a more compelling story would really help.
In short, Lips 2 is really going to bring down the house.
email me: rachel at this domain.
