Giving Lip

Scrivener asked about the Lips game, and I was really late in getting back to him in the comments, so I thought I'd cheat and make a quick post out of my answer.

I like Lips a whole lot, and one of the really nice things about it is that you can add your own songs (unDRMed MP3s only, I think) to it, but it's not as seamless as you might hope. You don't get any lyrics or pitch targets with your own music. I don't care too much, because I just pop the lyrics up on my laptop, and I don't care too much about the pitch targets. The other downside is that they're releasing new songs every Friday (or thereabouts) which might sound really great, but each song is another purchase. They run about $2/song, but that gets you the song, the video, the lyrics and the pitch targets. I still don't know how I feel about all that, but I've bought several already.

Karaoke is the New Black

So, I got Lips for my Xbox a while back, and while it may not be a great game for solo playing, it's absolutely great for a party. I brought it to the Christmas gathering, and it was hilarious (in a good way). Sister, brother-in-law, brother, sister-in-law and I each sang and even 2/3 of the niece-ing crew did a bang-up rendering of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer.

Lessons learned:

• It's possible that Simon LeBon wasn't exactly a talented poet.
• Each song that you think you know really well has lyrics that you've never heard.
  
• There are way too many words in Bust a Move
• The old videos are so much funier than you remember. Walk like an Egyptian? Painfully funny
• I know no new music.
  

It ended up being a fairly video-game-centric holiday. Other winning party games:

• Burnout Paradise - I learned its fun to crash as long as it is a pretty crash
  
• Boom Blox - The neices loved telling us where to throw and counting the points
• American Idol - better pitch mechanism the Lips, and you get to build your own singer
• Portal - very very trippy. Puzzles need multiple brains to solve.