Wednesday, November 03, 2010

Video game number three hundred and twelve: SingStar Abba

Video game review number three hundred and twelve in my 365 Games in 365 Days project is "SingStar Abba".

This is the second SingStar expansion game for me in the past week, and so you'd think I'd be getting pretty good at them by now.

Frankly...I'm not sure what I can say about this game that I haven't already said about SingStar Queen. It's another expansion pack for the original, which means the trophies are once again tied into the original SingStar. The basic features of the game are all exactly the same as the original SingStar as well...so there's not much new to say there.

Frankly, if I knew these were expansions, and not standalone games (like Rock Band Green Day or Rock Band Beatles), I never would have put them on my Gamefly queue. These games are a waste of time and money unless you are a HUGE fan of the band that they feature, and you're willing to spend 50 bucks just to sing an entire disk of their songs.

The Rock Band standalone games have unique careers for the bands they feature, and you can take the band from their roots all the way to super stardom, with unique animations, unique achievements, and far more songs than these SingStar expansions have in them. By comparison, SingStar expansion games feel more like the "CD+G" disks you'd buy for a karaoke machine on Ebay, and the only reason they're any good is because the game they're based in is pretty awesome on it's own. If they were 15 bucks, I would think more highly of them, but these are FULL priced titles...and I think that's lame.

So what can I add about Abba? Well..I'm not as big of an Abba fan as I am a Queen fan, but I do know quite a few songs of theirs, and I sang them all. I liked that you could do either the lead or backing vocals (I tried backing on "Take a chance on me" and it's fucking hard). The videos are incredibly cheesy, just like the ones on the Queen disk were....and when I was playing it...I was reminded of bar karaoke more than ever before.

Except in a karaoke bar, I'd never sing Abba.

Overall Score? 3/10. Look, if you're a gigantic Abba fan, go buy this game. Otherwise...it's a waste of money. It might be fun to rent for a party, but I can't see how anyone but the biggest Abba fans out there would ever want to buy this. I'm giving this one a three simply because I discovered I liked the band (or at least this setlist) even less than I liked the one in SingStar Queen. No more SingStar expansions for me this year...that's it.

Trophies? I got one...for uploading a recording of me singing an Abba song to "My SingStar", and setting it to friends only. The song? Dancing Queen. Before any of my friends read this and get any ideas about downloading it and blackmailing me forever, you should know that I've already deleted it from both the service and my hard drive. I just did it to get the trophy, fuckers.


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