| Reviews: SingStar 80s and a Touch of Evil |
[02 Mar 2008|12:37am] |
Tonight I experienced both SingStar 80s and Touch of Evil. In every important way these things are from opposite poles of the American cultural experience, but I found my reaction to both similar: they are both badly flawed, but ultimately enjoyable.
You all know that I'm pretty much tone deaf, yet addicted to the Karaoke Revolution series of games. SingStar is a competitor with the same basic idea, produced by Sony. I got the "80s" version of the game for Christmas, but hadn't had the chance to break it open and play (all work makes Jack a dull boy). You literally do have to break it open --- it's packaged in that horrible invulnerable plastic that cuts your fingers and that was invented by Satan himself to teach you that materialism is evil. Anyway, Jill and I sang through every song.
The good news is that it has a fantastic song selection. Sony gets to use the real song versions (KKR primarily buys the rights and re-records the songs, though to surprisingly good effect in most cases). Sony's programmers also seem to have figured out how to make the song load and play immediately --- KKR has an annoying "loading" screen before every song. SingStar also records your singing and gives you the option to play it back, which always seemed like a missing feature to me in KKR. (Though in reality, of course, no one really wants to hear themselves sing ;-)
But the game play is terrible. The primary game mode of KKR is the most obvious one: you get a bunch of people together, and you take turns singing songs, and the game scores you. (Supply your own beer.) As far as I can tell, there's no easy way to do this in SingStar 80s. There are a bunch of atrocious "party games" that compel you to sing at the same time as the other person playing, often in a weird "medley" --- Sony's programmers apparently believe that "medley" means splicing random phrases from songs together with an "applause" effect. It's hideous. You can play in "solo" mode and just sing songs, but then you have to go back to the main screen to select a different player. We found it easiest to just share the same player and hand the mic back and forth. (You don't get an avatar, so the only defining characteristic of a player is a name and a score.)
The user interface is very poor in general. For some reason, the screen is not quite the right size for a 4:3 television set, just by a few pixels, so there's a special "slide the display around" mode that entirely fails to fix the problem --- you can either lose the bottom couple of pixels or the top couple. As Jill remarked, "wouldn't it have been easier to just fix the bug instead of develop an entire configuration screen to try to work around it?" Apparently not. They use a lot of light grey text on a white background, which is basically the worst possible color choice for legibility. Like KKR, it uses a "piano roll" notation to help the tone-impaired sing the right notes. But, unlike KKR, it doesn't scroll the piano roll continuously. Instead, it displays each phrase individually. That wouldn't be so bad, except that the pitches of the notes are displayed relative only to the other notes in the same phrase, *not* the other notes in the entire song. So it's extremely common for a very high note to wind up lower on the screen than a low note you *just sang*, simply because it's not in the same phrase. They have the same problem with rhythm: some phrases are very long and some are very short, but the notes always occupy about the same amount of horizontal space, so time seems to stretch and compress.
It's also pretty random about whether, at any given moment, you're expected to sing the lead vocal or a backing vocal. It often switches back and forth. I suppose you learn it pretty soon, but isn't singing the lead the obvious thing? (The game does give you the ability to pick which vocal you want to sing in duets: for instance, you can either sing Run or DMC in "It's Tricky." That one is weird, though, because there's a special "rap mode" that seems to be rhythm based.)
Most songs have the original music video playing in the background, though not "Eye of the Tiger" for some reason --- it just has a sort of tiger-striped screensaver thing going on. It's kind of fun to watch all the old new wave haircuts, but I'd rather have an avatar. It's much more engaging.
Verdict: it's possible to have fun with this game, once you get over the random crap it puts you through. KKR is, on balance, a much superior offering. If KKR's programmers and designers were given access to Sony's song catalog, everything would be super awesome. And I must remark that I sing "A Little Respect" remarkably well.
After dinner we watched Touch of Evil. Well, I watched Touch of Evil. (Spoilers ahead!) Jill got bored in the middle and went to bed. It's a very strange movie. First of all, Charlton Heston is not exactly convincing as a Mexican cop, especially when surrounded by very broad Latino stereotypes. The subplot involving Janet Leigh in the motel with the druggies sort of reminded me of a "Reefer Madness" kind of movie. There's a lot of barking back and forth with various Fifties Dudes interrupting each other and talking very quickly. I've always wondered if real people talked that way in the forties and fifties, or if it's just a movie thing.
Anyway, once Orson Welle's character starts hitting the bourbon, the whole thing gets a lot darker fast, and became more watchable for me. There are a couple of scenes which still manage to shock, but a lot of things "turn out okay" that would probably be more brutal in a more recent film. Janet Leigh's character in particular turns out not to be shot up with heroin but only drugged with sodium pentothal. That's just weird: a drug gang kidnaps her in order to ruin her husband's reputation by setting up her up as a druggie, but rather than actually filling her full of drugs, which presumably they have easy access to, they bother to go get sodium pentothal and use that? These are very charitable and oddly hard-working thugs. Needless to say, there are a bunch of other horrible things they could have done to her that they don't. Ultimately, of course, the drug lord isn't the truly evil character, so maybe that's the point.
Many things must have seemed like good ideas at the time, but really aren't. Marlene Dietrich's character is an example. She's a gypsy who runs some sort of house of ill repute. Maybe it's a brothel, maybe it's a bar, maybe it's a place to get your fortune told. All we know for sure is that there's a really annoying player piano going all the time, Orson Welles is her only customer, and he really likes her chili. (Many gypsies who hang out in Mexican border towns have learned to make a killer chili.) I think her character exists entirely to deliver the line "He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?"
Speaking of some kind of man, Charlton Heston needs to work on his priorities. He's just gotten married to a woman who spends most of her time lounging around dressed like this:
and yet he seems to feel the need to involve himself in a murder case outside of his jurisdiction, leaving her to the mercies of vendetta-driven drug lords. I can't help but feel that if he was a little less driven by Justice and a little more driven by Nookie, that a whole lot of problems could have been avoided. It turns out that the guy he was standing up for was guilty all along anyway.
So, great tracking shot at the beginning, but I'll take Citizen Kane.
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