After you’ve started the game and gone through the microphone check (you only have to do this once), it’s time to start laying down tracks. To get started, you select a movie and a scene. You can then view the scene in its entirety or begin to work on your recording. It’s best to rehearse the lines first before recording since the pacing of some of the dialogue is a bit tricky. Once you’ve got it down you select a take to save your recording in, hit the record button and then follow the on screen cues. The game runs the scene a few lines before the new dialog starts so you have a chance to prepare yourself. Once the scene is over, you can replay your take to see how well you did. Of course, you don’t have to use the movie dialog; you can create your own. For example, you could replace the dialog where Jim and his dad talk awkwardly about sex with “You’re not my father” scene from
The Empire Strikes Back. OK, so that’s a bit geeky but it’s just a hint of what you can do with the game.
The actual audio recording isn’t bad but it’s not great. It’s a bit jarring when they switch from the movie dialog but that’s not too unexpected. I don’t have a movie quality recording studio in the house so a little roughness is to be expected. The file sizes are about one MB per take so if you do a lot of takes you’ll need to watch your hard drive space. The game itself runs completely from the CD so the only things it puts on your hard drive are the recordings.
Another cool feature of the game is that you can e-mail your takes to friends. As long as they have a copy of the game, then they can replay back your take. This allows you to create scenes using takes from different people and they don’t even have to be in the same location to participate. This is just another good example of the well thought out design in the game.
My gripes are pretty small. The video is a bit grainy (probably a necessity to get as many movie scenes on the CD) and I would have liked to have a diagram of what everything on the screen does rather than having to rely on tool tips. The game also didn’t install a shortcut on the desktop or in the Programs menu so any time you want to run the game you have to either open and close the CD player to activate the auto run feature or you have to open up the Explorer view and root out the executable to get the game running.
All in all this is a pretty solid product. If you have the
Shrek or
Goldmember DVD’s, then you already have a copy of this you can try out before you take the plunge. At $29.99, it’s a good deal for how much fun you could have with the product.
Movie Karaoke could also be a killer Home Theatre PC application, especially if you had a wireless microphone. This is one of those games that doesn’t do a lot but what it does it does very well.
B+ | A solid karaoke experience that will provide a lot of entertainment without having to torture others with your singing voice. |
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