Singstar Wireless Mics & Voice Control Feature

Welcome updates, despite the high price tag for the mics.

Well, they’ve taken a really long time to get here, but Sony’s wireless mics for SingStar have finally replaced the old wired versions in my lounge. So how do they perform? Read on to find out!

The best thing that can be said about the wireless mics is that you quickly forget they’re even there. At first I noticed a slight difference in timing, but I think they actually have less lag than their wired counterparts. Sounds crazy, I know, but I’ve played far too much SingStar and can detect this kind of thing.

Setup is painless, which is more than can be said of the Lips microphones. You just plug the USB dongle in, power up the mics (batteries are included), and away you go – no messing around with synchronizing them to your console. The dongle is pretty sizable, however, so good luck stashing it somewhere out of the way if you’re concerned about tidiness.

In a nice move, the mics are compatible with both the PlayStation 2 and 3, so you can join in the wireless fun with whichever console you own. It’s hard to find more things to say about the mics, really – they seem well made, and act precisely how you’d expect them to act.

The main bad thing about them is the price. At roughly $100, these mics aren’t cheap – and as of this writing, they don’t even come packaged with a SingStar game. Hopefully this will change in the near future and we start seeing wireless mics bundled with software.

Do you desperately need to get rid of as many wires as you can? Does the idea of cavorting about the lounge without tripping over cables sound immensely appealing? Then you probably won’t mind stumping up the money for these mics. If you’re wavering, on the other hand, I’d recommend waiting for any bundles that might come out down the road.

Voice Control

Coming as an update to the PlayStation 3 version of SingStar, in-game voice control lets you throw the controller aside and use your voice to navigate through the game. It sounds like a mad idea, but surprisingly, it works just fine – up to a certain level of intoxication, anyway.

After a quick setup routine, you can browse through your song library in a number of ways. Want to sing “Sex on Fire” by Kings of Leon? You can just say the band’s name, or choose to search by song and say its title. You can also browse through by saying ‘go left’ or ‘go right’, but in this case it’s quicker just to use a controller. However, if you know what you want to sing, it’s much more convenient.

While testing this out with a bunch of mates, we found it a lot less hassle than reaching for (or trying to find) the controller. However, after a certain number of drinks had been consumed, people started a) slurring and b) shouting incoherently into the microphone, which just confused poor old SingStar. Having a lot of background noise going on also seemed to affect how easily it could understand you.

Still, that’s really our fault, particularly when we started congratulating the game whenever it recognised a command – it ended up listening to that congratulation and landing us on Chris Brown songs. Not cool.

Overall, this is a really welcome (and free) update. Along with trophy support, it’s nice to see Sony spicing things up a little. Now we just need a couple new gameplay modes and we’ll finally have something else to talk about besides new song listings.

One small warning, however: after a while, you may start attempting to navigate the main PS3 menu and other games using voice control. This doesn’t work, despite a lot of scientific testing.