SingStar Anthems is the fifth add on disk in the wildly successful SingStar series. For the price of a normal game you get two microphones, a USB adaptor and a song disk. If you’ve already purchased a SingStar title and have the mikes, then you can buy the standalone disk, which retails for half the price. The microphones easily plug into the PlayStation 2 and the aim of the game is to choose a song and then sing into the microphones. The microphones will judge your tone and pitch and give you a score out of 10,000. It’s a basic concept yet is so incredibly addictive. At first a lot of people appear to be reluctant to try out the microphones but once they do it’s hard to get them off the microphones.
It's a successful formula, and the game not only sells a lot of copies, but also a lot of consoles. This is pretty much the reason why Sony wants to keep pushing the SingStar titles out as quickly as possible, but they’ve definitely taken some shortcuts when it comes to SingStar Anthems. We’ve already mentioned the cut down song list, which is a severe disappointment, but each SingStar expansion used to be localised for each territory. For example, SingStar Rocks! included Men at Work and The Veronicas for Australia. The Anthems playlist hasn’t been localised though, so we’ve gotten the same tracks as the UK audience, which is a little surprising. It also means we've got a track from the now-defunct Steps, which is a little demoralising.
Look like that and you're not going to dance with anyone.
The track list literally is the only thing that has changed in SingStar Anthems. Whilst the songs you'll get to choose from are abbreviated versions, there are still quite a few decent tracks in the list, although some are rather lucky to be considered Anthems - surely Charlotte Church’s Crazy Chick is more of a description of her personality rather than an anthem. Some more Queen songs would have been good as well, considering they’ve got quite a few songs that would be great to sing along to, and are the ultimate anthem act.
The full track list is as follows:
- Queen - Radio Ga Ga
- Bonnie Tyler - Total Eclipse of the Heart
- Take That feat. Lulu - Relight My Fire
- Cher - If I Could Turn Back Time
- Steps - Deeper Shade of Blue
- Dead or Alive - You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)
- Candi Station - Young Hearts Run Free
- Gloria Gaynor - I Will Survive
- Bananarama - I Heard A Rumour
- Pussycat Dolls - Don’t Cha
- Leann Rimes - Can’t Fight the Moonlight
- Donner Summer - I Feel Love
- Bucks Fizz - Making Your Mind Up
- The Weather Girls - It’s Raining Men
- Ultra Nate - Free
- Scissor Sisters - Laura
- Kim Wilde - Kids in America
- Whitney Houston - I Wanna Dance With Somebody
- Girls Aloud - Biology
- Charlotte Church - Crazy Chick
Bonnie's ability to maintain dry pits, even in the heat of a film studio, impressed everybody.
SingStar isn’t a game you can just sit down and finish, and you’re bound to keep coming back when you’ve got friends over. The songs do admittedly become a little bit repetitive after a while, and twenty songs will tire a lot quicker than thirty. If you own any of the previous games, you can press select on the menu and insert another SingStar disk without having to go through all of the menus again, which saves a bit of time.
Despite the fact that the SingStar games are often rushed out, it normally isn’t all that evident. Unfortunately however, by trying to get the game out less than four months since the last, Anthem's tracklist has had to be cut down, and no territory specific songs have been included. Naturally, the appeal of the SingStar games is the tracklist and the core decision when considering whether to pick the latest version up or not should be whether you like the songs. However, whilst there are some great songs included, it’s a severe disappointment that there are only twenty songs this time; it really does feel like something is missing.
Loading...
