There are few games that have provided me with as many memorable gaming moments as the Karaoke Revolution games. Maybe it’s that it’s so easy for anyone, gamer or non-gamer alike, to pick up, or maybe it’s all the fun of karaoke in a safe and private setting, but the most fun I’ve had where both groups of friends and gaming were involved has somehow revolved around one of the Karaoke Revolution games. In fact, Karaoke Revolution once caused me to miss a pivotal moment in recent entertainment history: Two years ago, the Boston-area Netjak editors got together for a Super Bowl party, and we of course decided to replace the halftime show with our own, courtesy of Karaoke Revolution. Needless to say, we had much more fun than we would have watching the real halftime show, but we also missed Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” in the process. (On second thought, perhaps we were better off with Karaoke Revolution after all.)
Of late, though, I’ve gotten somewhat uninterested in new entries in the Karaoke Revolution series. Karaoke Revolution Volumes 2 and 3 were essentially full-price expansion packs, with new songs and, eventually, duet support, but I never felt the magic of the original with the sequels. The song lists weren’t as good, the newness of the game was gone, and, for whatever reason, the sequels just didn’t feel the same. In short, the latter games seemed like a cheap money grab on Konami’s part, much as the later Mario Party games felt to me; Konami took the exact same code, threw in a new list of songs and a few more trivial features to make the game seem like it was improved, and then charged forty bucks for it.
That said, I approached Karaoke Revolution Party with some trepidation. However, when I saw that the game had added not only a bigger song list than ever before, but also featured voice-controlled mini-games and support for both the EyeToy and DDR dance pad, it became very apparent to me that Karaoke Revolution Party wasn’t going to be yet another simple repackaging of the same game. In fact, I might go so far to say that what they put back in may very well have been the magic.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. If you’re not familiar with the Karaoke Revolution series, the concept is about as simple as it gets. The game plays a song, and you sing along; the better you sing it, the more points you get. Now, the game isn’t actually determining how well you sing, or even if you get all the words right (despite the fact that it scrolls the lyrics at the bottom of the screen), but rather that the pitch and tempo match what it expects, displayed on the screen by green tubes on a musical scale. As you sing, a pointer appears on the scale; is it matches up vertically with the tubes (in effect, if you’re singing the note that the game wants you to sing), you get points. Even if you can’t sing very well, the strictness of the “judging” can be adjusted so that Broadway singers and shower singers alike can compete on a fairly even playing field.
Obviously, a game like this lives and dies by its song list, and Karaoke Revolution Party’s is the biggest of any Karaoke Revolution game to date, and it does a good job, as did the original game, of picking songs from a variety of eras that are instantly recognizable. With Volumes 2 and 3, I found myself using up all the songs I wanted to sing with two playing sessions, but not so with Party. Even if I didn’t like every song in the catalog (and it’s obviously impossible to please all the people all the time), I at least recognized most of them, which is saying something given that I’ve barely listened to any music radio over the past few years.
If you’re a fan of ‘80s music, you’ll be particularly excited, because there seems to be something of an emphasis on music from that decade, including classics like Material Girl, Take On Me, Everybody Wants to Rule the World, Uptown Girl, and Takin’ Care of Business. More current songs include Incubus’ Drive, Jimmy Eat World’s Pain, Beyonce’s Crazy In Love, and Ashlee Simpson’s Pieces of Me. (But, no, you can’t lip-sync and then do a jig and expect to earn points.) For those whose musical tastes predate the 1980s, there are tracks such as Sweet Caroline, I Left My Heart In San Francisco, Play That Funky Music, and That’s Amore. Needless to say, there’s something there for nearly everybody. Honestly, the song list for this version is so good that I honestly wouldn’t mind if that was the only new addition to the game. As always, it seems that the songs are not the original artists, but karaoke singers covering the tunes, but they do such a good job that, if I didn’t know that the songs weren’t being performed by the original artists, I’d never know the difference.
However, Konami’s completely reworked and improved every aspect of the game. For starters, the Showcase mode, which would present songs in groups of four and require one to be completed in order to move on to the next level (and ultimately unlock new songs and characters) is gone, replaced with the Quick Play mode as the primary vehicle for unlocking songs. Given that I always ignored the Showcase mode once I’d unlocked everything, I wasn’t particularly sad to see it go.
What’s new in Karaoke Revolution Party, though, is the new Sing and Dance mode. This combines the singing of Karaoke Revolution with the dancing of Dance Dance Revolution, and provides a completely new challenge once one has mastered the singing portion of the game. In this mode, one has to continue to sing the song correctly while simultaneously stepping on the appropriate arrows on the dance pad; the score is a combination of how accurately the player completed both tasks for a certain phrase of the song. If you like both Karaoke Revolution and DDR, you’re going to love this mode, even if it is somewhat awkward at first. For songs I knew very well, the mode felt just like singing along with DDR; for songs that I didn’t know well, watching the screen to see both what notes to sing and which arrows to step on felt very much like attempting to pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time. That feeling diminishes with familiarity with the songs and with the DDR mechanics, though, and it definitely adds a new level of replay to the game.
Karaoke Revolution also adds some microphone mini-games to the mix, though they’re more of a novelty than anything else. For one microphone, there are two games, Beach Volleyball and Yo! Dude! Rock! Beach Volleyball requires singing high and low notes to move your volleyball players up and down the court, respectively; the result is that you end up screeching into the microphone a lot, and it’s not a whole lot of fun. Yo! Dude! Rock! Involves singing particular notes at the second that one of your performers runs to the end of the stage to make him dive, but suffers from the same problem as Beach Volleyball. They’re interesting ideas and provide innovative ways to use the microphone as a controller, but they’re just not fun as implemented.
The real fun new mode, though, is the KR Party mode. Here, the game provides random events in two to five rounds for up to eight players. These can include any of the standard modes (full song, short song, medley, etc.), as well as, optionally, the mini-games and Sing and Dance. But the real fun comes for the advanced player, as KR Party mode offers advanced modes, which typically remove something from the screen, like the lyrics, the note tubes, or, ultimately, everything but the score. The latter is a true test of your mastery of the song, and can make for some entertaining moments when a player reaches an unfamiliar part of the song. This mode, for me, makes Karaoke Revolution Party worth a purchase; between this and Sing and Dance mode, you’ll get quite a bit of play time out of this game.
If that weren’t enough, Karaoke Revolution Party provides a full character customization utility. You can build characters from any of the character bases and accessories that have been unlocked up to that point, as well as adjust attributes like height and girth. Plus, if you have an EyeToy, you can use EyeToy: Cameo to create a 3D model of your head that you can then import into Karaoke Revolution Party and create a character based on that. This isn’t necessarily a feature that I’ve ever felt was missing from the Karaoke Revolution games (I’ve always been perfectly happy having the big guy in the bear suit represent me on stage), but it’s definitely a nice touch.
Graphics are more or less on par with the other Karaoke Revolution games, which is to say that they’re cartoony but do their job, which is to fill the 70% of the screen not taken up by the lyrics and note tubes. The venues from the earlier Karaoke Revolution games return, including a couple of new venues for variety’s sake. For a game like this, as long as the graphics aren’t harmful to the eyes or sensibilities, then they’re perfectly acceptable, and I’ve never had a problem with anything on-screen while playing Karaoke Revolution Party.
In all, if you’ve gotten burned out on Karaoke Revolution games by the previous sequels, Karaoke Revolution Party will bring you back. If you’ve never played any of the games in the series before, this is an excellent one to start with. The song list and feature list are both big enough to make Karaoke Revolution with a purchase, as is the fact that it’s one of the few non-sports games that you’ll be able to get nearly anyone to play with you. I had my doubts, but Konami has definitely rekindled the magic with Karaoke Revolution Party.
