Karaoke Revolution Specifics Unearthed

Thanks to GameSpy for their hands-on preview of Karaoke Revolution, Konami's PlayStation 2 title that uses the USB headset and "...requires you to match the rhythm and pitch for the vocals in a song" (although luckily for the tone-deaf among us: "Karaoke mode allows you to just kick it to a song without having to worry about performance.") This Harmonix-developed title, originally unveiled a couple of months back, sports "more than 35 tracks in all", from Mr.Mister to Avril Lavigne, and the previewer handily points out that "Not everyone can rock a guitar or a keyboard. Not everyone can dance... but almost all of us can sing (whether the results are appealing or not is another matter)."

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Karoake Revolution Song List

[cdneng2]

Karoake Revolution's song list is available here, which I've shown below:

Addicted
I'm Coming Out
All You Wanted
It's End of the World As We Know It
Are You Happy Now?
Kiss Me
Believe
Ladies' Night
Billie Jean
Like a Virgin
Bizarre Love Triangle
One Week
Broken Wings
Red Red Wine
Celebration
Save Tonite
Chain of Fools
Science Genius Girl
Complicated
She Talks To Angels
Crawling in the Dark
Smooth Criminal
Don't Know Why
Son of a Preacher Man
Every Morning
The Power of Love
Everything You Want
Waiting For Tonight
Girls Just Want To Have Fun
When a Man Loves a Woman
Hey Jealousy
Wind Beneath my Wings
Hit Me With Your Best Shot
You Really Got Me
How You Remind Me
You're the One That I Want

I think the success of this game will mostly be determined by the selection of songs available. Everyone's taste is different, so I'd question the appeal of the songs to teenagers. It almost seems like the song selection is specifically targetted to GenXers (us old farts that are 25-35) that like to reminisce.

It'd be nice to be able to pop in a CD of your favorite song, and Karoake to any of your favorites. Most ghetto blasters and bookshelf systems had that function built in for free during the Karoake fad, so I couldn't see how difficult it may have been for them to do have done this to the PS2 game version.

Regardless, the last time I karoaked, I was trashed... and now that you can do this in the privacy of your own home, it seems like a pretty good bet for a party game. I just have to remember to have alcohol around so that I can blame something for my terrible singing.

I'd rather buy the Xbox Karaoke game.

[JFMulder]

Go see it here.
It will feature music and lyrics obviously, like a real karaoke machine, but it will let you copy your own MP3's and WMA's from your PC, more or less rip out the voice from the song, add your own lyrics and upload them to your Xbox. New songs will also be available on Xbox live.

Add to that the possibility of uploading pictures on the box and viewing them on your TV screen, and you've got a really good product.

Re:I'd rather buy the Xbox Karaoke game.

[JFMulder]

I remember there was a Winamp plugin a few years back that managed to do this in realtime. Basically, it tries to remove the frequencies that are related to human voice in the song. The problem with it of course is that it also censors out some musical instruments that also operate in that frequency, but from my experience it achieved pretty good results. Not perfect, as you could still hear an echo of the lyrics, but anyway, when you're singing on top of it with your friends, you won't hear the echo anymore. They will never sound as good as real karaoke files, but with a little bit of tinkering, they might be able to pull it off quite well.

What would be great are CD's in the DVD Audio format with DD5.1. Imagine ripping each channels except the center one where the voice would be recorded and only get the band playing. Now that would make some pretty cool karaoke files.

Re:Can you sing along with me on this tune?

[Masem]

Harmonix has previously done Amplitude and Frequency, both music oriented games, and the same question "Can I import my own songs into it?" has been asked, and the answer is no. It's not issues with copyright, legality or the like. But instead, it's a lot of extra audio and programming work to get the songs into Amp/Freq/KR because they have to break down the songs into the individual components, fine tune it, and other difficult tasks that can bring up the size of the file to a huge size, larger than what can fit on a standard mem card. KR is going to be to Karaoke as Amp/Freq was to a jukebox -- neither was MEANT to be a replacement for that, but only a way to provide some play value to it.