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Lips, a music franchise exclusively from Xbox 360, is the only singing game that offers wireless motion-sensitive microphones and the ability to sing from your own music collection. Start channeling your favorite pop star, because it’s you, your friends and, most important, your music that makes Lips the world’s ultimate party experience. Offering interactive motion-sensitive microphones to make your party rock all night long, Lips encourages players to toss apprehensions out the window and join the party.

Genre: Music

Publisher: Microsoft

Developer: iNiS

Online Play:

Local Play: 4 Co-op

November 20, 2008 –
There are a few Big Things being championed in the videogame industry these days, and some of the ones we hear about most often are casual, music and party games. The thinking goes that there’s a huge untapped market of spendy twentysomethings who are currently sitting around their loft apartments on Saturday nights twiddling their thumbs when they could be playing games instead.

Microsoft has made several attempts to cash in on this demographic with party games such as Scene It! and You’re In the Movies, and the results have been mixed. But the company’s latest effort in this area, Lips, is a little slicker and smarter than previous tries, partly because it relies on an age-old truth: People like to get drunk and sing.

Developed by Japanese company iNiS (Elite Beat Agents, Gitaroo Man), Lips is a party game disguised as a music game, which serves as both its strength and weakness. Play it in a room by yourself and it grows stale extremely quickly. But gather some friends around, and it turns into a true living room karaoke experience with flair and style, something the Xbox 360 has been lacking to date. Whereas the Karaoke Revolution games feel more like toys for teens, Lips is something you can confidently bust out at a party without feeling too silly.

However, that doesn’t mean it’s a very good game. In fact, it’s not really much of a game at all. It’s far too easy to offer much enjoyment for hardcore gamers, the single-player mode is fairly dull, there’s no real sense of progression, no online play and none of the now-standard music game features. Games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero are well-suited for casual gatherings where friends can bang away at fake instruments while sipping adult beverages. But those games also stand strong on their own for solo players, offering varying difficulty levels, career modes, opportunities for improvement and vast replayability. Lips has none of those things.

Click the image above to see Lips in action.

What it does have is a collection of 40 songs, all of which are master tracks with lyrics included. Those from the MTV era onward also include a music video, which you can set as the background while you belt your heart out. The $70 Lips bundle also comes with two beautifully designed wireless microphones that possess the uncanny ability to elicit gasps of delight from both 13-year-old girls and 30-year-old men alike. From my brief time with these sleek, light-up mics, I found them to be well-made and satisfying to use, and I’ll never look at those wired Rock Band mics the same way again.

The menu system in Lips is slick and easy to use, and the focus is squarely on the main event