LIPS: Threat or Menace?!

[chronovore]

I like singing in Rock Band, so I picked up Lips at launch. Ever since then, the annoying little game has presented a parade of bad design decisions that could only result from combining a Japanese developer with limited understanding of the 360, and Microsoft hiring them to make a 360 exclusive.

Recently it was patched, which added... wait for it: XBL-wide Leaderboards. It also fixed a mean issue where DLC could be purchased, but would not show up in the game. Now the DLC shows up in the right spot, but I'm not biting, because after the first purchase, and spending 30 minutes on the phone to refund my account, I'm just not that anxious to verify their fix worked, just so I can belt out Smashmouth's ALL-STAR.

But rather than continue to catalog the other minor gripes, I'll just hit the one that inspired this post: LIPS' shitty, illogical, apparently random auto-save feature, engaged itself just as I used the GUIDE to quit to Dashboard, thus corrupting my save data. This wiped all the progress I'd made in the game, including all of the accumulated badges and multiplayer wins. The latter's the only important one, because I only have one remaining Achievement, and it is based on the multiplayer wins.

It's possible that some of you are interested in it at its low US$39 price point, if for no other reason than the announced patch for Rock Band which will allow LIPS' wireless mics to work with RB. Wait for the patch to see if it ever manifests, or you may be stuck with a half-assed karaoke game.

[demi]

meh, just boost with a friend

[originalz]

Oh, they fixed it so DLC isn't region locked anymore?  I got kind of pissed off and stopped playing when it ate my points and I couldn't play the song I bought, but I'll pop it back in if I can actually expand the songlist this time.

[FatalT]

I just got it from the Microsoft Retail Expert site for $10 along with Banjo Kazooie, Fable 2, and Too Human.

[chronovore]

Holy crap. That's pretty great.

[Bebpo]

I didn't read the OP, but aren't "threat" and "menace" generally interchangeable words?

[Great Rumbler]

I didn't read the OP, but aren't "threat" and "menace" generally interchangeable words?

Isn't that the point?

[Bebpo]

Is it?  Maybe it's my deteriorating English skills but I read the title as something akin to "Lips:  Jumping or Hopping?!" which sounds weird because I don't understand what it's trying to convey.  Normally when you have "Z: X or Y?!" it's asking the reader is Z X or Y for example: "Religion: Good or Bad?!".  But if X and Y are basically the same word then there's no point in choosing one of them.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

THAT'S THE JOKE

[pilonv1]

[chronovore]

I didn't read the OP, but aren't "threat" and "menace" generally interchangeable words?

In the old Spider-Man comics, J. Jonah Jameson was known for posting headlines like "SPIDER-MAN: THREAT OR MENACE?" It conveys that, though it appears to be asking a question, it's actually determining the readers' supposed response to the subject.

JJJ: writing Fox News' playbook before they knew what they needed.

[originalz]

Woah, awesome, they did fix the DLC issue.  This power up pack seems to add more functionally to the game too, although there's still no way to just view a single music video, which is such a dumb oversight.

Oh well, I guess I'll start playing the game again.

[chronovore]

Woah, awesome, they did fix the DLC issue.  This power up pack seems to add more functionally to the game too, although there's still no way to just view a single music video, which is such a dumb oversight.

Oh well, I guess I'll start playing the game again.

Almost certainly not an oversight. Having it as an actual jukebox with videos would remove it from being a "game" license to being a video player, and likely engages all manner of contractual considerations ($$$). That's why the darned thing only plays 30 seconds of the videos if no-one's singing, though it will happily play the full songs of any MP3s you've assigned to your Playlist.

[chronovore]

Groo shot me a challenge the other day for a song on his disc that isn't on mine. This CANCELED the challenge immediately, but prevents me from issuing another Challenge until Groo logs in and also gets the message that the Challenge was canceled.

After losing the accumulated wins the other day, I figured out that any local profile can be used to boost by myself. Just log in as one, issue the challenge, log in as the other, compete, lather rinse, repeat.

This worked exactly ONE time, and on the 2nd attempt the game tells my main account that I won, and the other account that the Challenge was CANCELED. Good grief, what a buggy, sloppy piece of crap.

[originalz]

I have the American version of the game so you can shoot me challenges if you want.  I've never used the challenge system before so I dunno what it entails.

Yeah, Lips does have some annoying interface quirks that really should have been fixed.  Is there any easy way to see your scores on a single song?  Playing it again yesterday made me remember all of these small nags that kind of turned me off from the game.  Oh well, I'll try to get some more mileage out of it, although I kind of wish they did a system like Joysound Wii, where you just pay a monthly subscription and can sing to as many songs as you want.  Might be due to copyright laws tho.

They should make a Japanese version of Lips!

[Bebpo]

tbh I don't really have any idea what this game is other than it comes with a mic.  Is it basically Singstar XBOX?

[demi]

yes

[chronovore]

tbh I don't really have any idea what this game is other than it comes with a mic.  Is it basically Singstar XBOX?

Yeah, I think that was their goal. It's a good party game, in that it supports co-op (duet) or competitive drop-in play, and does not have any FAILURE in its structure. You can score as low as you want, even zero points, and you'll only get a low rank ("Biscuit"). In fact, the Challenge can generate wins for each side if both players agree to play without mics active, resulting in a 0-0 draw. This, of course, assumes that the FUCKING THING DOESN'T HAVE A BUG WHICH CANCELS THE CHALLENGE.

:shakesbonyfists

[chronovore]

meh, just boost with a friend

Groo helped me out some, then I figured out how to play with myself. Er, "by myself." In desperation, I tried sending Challenges from a local Silver account, and managed to spend THE MOST BORING HOUR EVER sending challenges back and forth. 1000 gamerscore at last.

[chronovore]

I thought, "Is there a LIPS thread on The Bore?" and it turns out there is, and I am the sack who made it. :-/

So, MS has been trying to make this Singstar 360 and cranked out a couple of titles I couldn't work up a care about. Lips #1 Hits is nothing but new crap and Lips Party Classics has a few songs I know, but nothing I want to spend US$40 or more to sing.

But now this:

Lips: I Love the'80s - I keep wishing Rock Band would get more New Wave tracks, I've bought the Psychedelic Furs and B-52s, and am even unreasonably stoked that The Muffs' cover of Kids in America was a default track in RB2...

So happy this was made, but apparently it's only on sale in the UK so far. There's an ESRB rating associated with it, so it's been submitted there and will probably come out in the USA, but there's no announcement of it, no news, nothing. What could be holding it up?

What region code are UK 360s? Could I run this on a US 360?

spoiler (click to show/hide)

"They keep pulling me back in!"

[close]

[Sho Nuff]

Oh Japanese developers, when will you finally get it?

spoiler (click to show/hide)

They won't

[close]

[The Sceneman]

It'll be PAL if its UK, and most likely region locked to PAL consoles.

[demi]

It's also a MS release, which are often region free. ABGX says its region free

[chronovore]

If it's region free, I'ma order from Amazon.co.uk -- no sense in delaying gratification, THAT WAS THE ENTIRE THEME OF THE '80s!

How do you tell if it was really region free? What is ABGX? All google returns for that are pirate sites... 

[maxy]

If it's region free, I'ma order from Amazon.co.uk -- no sense in delaying gratification, THAT WAS THE ENTIRE THEME OF THE '80s!

How do you tell if it was really region free? What is ABGX? All google returns for that are pirate sites... 

http://http://www.abgx.net/filename/?ch=6

[chronovore]

Thanks!

Oh, man. Those three, pretty, green Y-is-for-YES off to the right. I am so importing this, my first UK-import game, which is cool because when CDs first came out, most of the crap I bought was British import.
:walletcry

[Joe Molotov]

OMG, it has Vienna by Ultravox. I may have to have this.

[chronovore]

Yeah, actually that was the one song where I was thinking, "Yeah, I love that song, but I don't think I want to subject anyone else to my rendition of it..." 

[Joe Molotov]

That's why you play it at night, with your door shut.

[originalz]

I bought #1 hits for cheap and didn't really like it that much.  It had a few good songs but the majority of them were shitty modern pop songs that I had long gotten sick of.  It also messed up my DLC, for some reason #1 hits won't let you play certain DLC songs in Japan, but I can still play them if I use my original disc, bloody bizarre.  It also added a bunch of stupid-ass forced motion controls and noisemaker prompts in the middle of the song.  Maybe some people like that shit but it was just a nuisance for me, and there's no way to disable it.

Oh well, I'll probably keep buying the games if just to expand my karaoke skillz to impress more people.  The games are a pretty good trainer for the real thing!  The Karaoke Joysound series for the Wii are also really good, you can buy the monthly subscription and gain access to the same database as the real Japanese karaoke studios have.  There's no realtime scoring and the English song selection is questionable, but it can't be beat for Japanese songs.

[chronovore]

Yeah, for every song on Lips: Number One Hits that I think "ooh, I like that song" there is another that I haven't heard of by a band I know that I don't like.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_in_Lips_2

I am lolz at the "choose one free DLC track pack" choices.
    * Lips House Party
    LL Cool J – Going Back To Cali
    Bobby Brown – My Prerogative
    Janet Jackson – Nasty
    Paula Abdul – Straight Up
    Montell Jordan – This Is How We Do It

    * Lips Hearts and Heartbreak Tour
    James Blunt – 1973
    Daniel Powter – Bad Day
    Robbie Williams – Eternity
    Daniel Bedingfield – If You're Not the One
    Jewel – You Were Meant For Me

    * Lips Turn It Up to 11 Tour
    30 Seconds to Mars – From Yesterday
    Coldplay – Lost!
    Nickelback – Photograph
    Hoobastank – The Reason
    My Chemical Romance – Welcome to the Black Parade

"Um... Can I choose not to choose?"

...And I'm COMPLETELY unsurprised that the DLC is borked again. They messed it up with the first game, really, really badly. The DLC was visible in the Games Markeplace in the Dashboard, could be purchased, but did not show up in the game. The items also did not show up for sale in the game's My Music menu, but because there was no standard, in-game store it wasn't readily apparent that this was just as-designed. The items are all mixed in with the disc's songs, any shared music libraries and anything ripped to the HDD, unless you filter against those sources. And the game takes FOREVER to update since I've shared my computer's music library of 6000+ songs.

So I had bought a song through the Dashboard, and could not figure out how to actually get it to play. I looked up on forums and dealt with MS tech support on it, and in the end they never admitted what was wrong and I pursued it until they refunded the points. Much later on a patch fixed the store to show the available songs, but it sounds like the complexity of mixing different discs for different regions, and different DLC depending on the region, is beyond the grasp of both INIS and MS QA teams.

[chronovore]

Wrong thread, Borys?

[Smooth Groove]

I really can't tell if Borys is purposely trying to be a stereotype or not. 

[chronovore]

No, just look at the date of Patel's post.

Ah, so you can read months and days, but have trouble with years?

spoiler (click to show/hide)

That is a pretty funny coincidence. AH, the dangers of thread necro-ing.

[close]

[chronovore]

Looking through Xbox360Achievements.org, apparently Lips: I Love the '80s has been nixed for US-release as a standalone, and they're instead making the 40 songs on it available for 160MSP each.

Let's examine how this shapes up:
Disc-based original Lips game was 60~70 USD (with microphones), and offered 1000 Achievement points.

DLC is available for 2 USD (160 MSP) each song

The existing disc-based sequels, Lips: #1 Hits and Party Classics, each a standalone game, cost 50~60 USD, and offer +250 gamerscore to the original Lips game's total available points. With these two, the total became 1500.

Lips: I Love the '80s also adds 250 points to the Achievement total, bringing it to 1750. But the game will not be sold in the USA, only the UK. 'Cheev whores amcry

Buying the piecemeal DLC does not provide access to the Achievements, which seems obvious but has surprised some of the boneheads at x360a.org

Buying the DLC for all 40 songs costs 80USD total.

The game is £12.98 (1698 Japanese yen, 18.77 USD) through Amazon.co.uk

Why can't Microsoft respect its own rules? Any full priced, disc-based retail title should have 1000 gamerscore available to it, but these only have +250 gamerscore.

That gamerscore will not be available to American players; how can MS not launch this game in their biggest territory?

Instead of piecemeal, per song DLC, why not offer the entire game through Games on Demand?

Anyway, I've a local expat friend is from the UK, so she's having a copy shipped over from me, since Amazon doesn't ship videogames outside their immediate territory.

[chronovore]

Holy shitcakes. Epic coding fail confirmed.

Original Lips has one savedata format, all its sequel discs have a different one. So any points made previously are not counted toward the new stuff. No problem, I can deal, it's just singing, whatevs.

Their fuckwitted load/save scheme, which chooses to save at the Start Menu, and when entering some submenus, and when exiting others, and which takes FUCKING FOREVER to complete... Playing Original Lips some time ago, it managed to kill my savedata when it initiated a save as I turned off the machine. I lost a mess of progress.

That was a couple years ago.

Recently I bought the new Xbox to replace the old one, transferred my saves over to the new machine... but for some reason the Lips sequel discs were no longer showing the original game's songs as available content. The sequels reference the save data, and allow for disc swapping between them, but the old stuff just doesn't show up. I googled the problem and found out that the incompatible savedata format requires some specific order.

In the Dashboard's Memory utility, there were two savedata for Lips. No idea which was which, so I moved the oldest savedata to my USB stick, and booted the Original Lips game to force a new savedata. It worked, kinda: it acted as though everything was brand new. OK, cool, now I boot the newer Lips games like Party Classics, which still has its unmoved savedata on HDD...

...oh. No, apparently the Original Lips disc just wrote over the existing savedata, ERADICATING ALL PROGRESS AGAIN.

Holy hopping christ on a pogo stick, Microsoft is the ONLY company who would hand-wave through QA a bunch of this maniacally demented, pipeline breaking, consistency destroying, party ending CRAP. If any of you like karaoke games, and don't care about progress and 'cheevs, this is an OK game. If you do care about it, it's like nailing your dick to a door and then slamming it.

[chronovore]

Follow-up for anyone who is curious, and FOR PEEPS WHO CAN'T SEE SOME OF THEIR SONGS: It is an incompatibility with the savedata type, Lips confusing itself so it can't see other discs' songs, DLC songs, or even causing on occasion ALL SONGS to disappear ("Sing" menu shows "0 Songs" available).

In these cases, it's an incompatibility between Original Lips' save file being created after the add-ons' save file. I even tapped an acquaintance at INIS to get information, and the team heisman'd him and suggested that it be approached through MS Tech Support. Who have no fixes. Because it's a bug.

If you don't mind losing your progress to regain your songs, delete your save file(s) and load the Original then any add-on disc. Viola! Everything comes back. If you want to keep your progress, I have no solution, since I accidentally lost my data when it modified my data.

Two save files do not necessarily occur for everyone. My friend at work has Original and Party Classics, the game only has one save file for him, only asks him for one save file location. Mine has two, and asks for a storage device twice at load, with neither one showing a message explaining what it wants or why.

MS Tech Support stated that once Original Lips "modifies" the existing save file and erases all progress from non-Original-Lips games, that data is permanently lost. This is ironic because Original Lips also saves its data on a game server at MS, so any progress there is backed up online, free from danger. Only the sequels, with their sequel specific grinding progress 'cheevs are in danger.

[chronovore]

Found a guide to abusing the Freestyle mode in this POS game which will auto-grindan for the 150K and 200K Stars.
http://www.xbox360achievements.org/forum/showthread.php?t=212369

He has tutorial pics. The guy's setup is pretty hilarious. Even sillier than him though, I was up until 2 a.m. trying to get it to work, failing. This morning though I managed to get a variation of the setup going, and ground out 9000+ Stars in just over 30 minutes.

When I've unlocked all the 'cheevs, I'll still play this game. I just won't feel like it's a chore. Singing along to music videos is plenty of fun. So much fun that, were INIS not entirely incompetent, I'd actually have these 'cheevs legitimately between the Original Lips and the expansion discs. No, I won't feel bad at all about knocking these out IN MY SLEEP TONIGHT.

[chronovore]

DONE.