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SingStar Ultimate Party is a piece of garbage. WTF SCEE London / SCEWWS

J

John Bender

Banned
Well, I don't know what the hell is going on with Sony's Worldwide Studios lately,
but their output isn't really something to brag about.

On topic: SingStar - Ultimate Garbage
Sony celebrates SingStar's 10th Anniversary by releasing a gigantic turd.

The SingStar IP is HUGE in europe. People love it, sales are great.
Sony sold over 26 million copies worldwide and over 25 million songs!!
It had a lot of (multiplayer) modes, great content, and so on.
It's fun! Simple as that.

From all that was good, almost nothing remains.

My girl-friend loves SingStar.
So of course she bought it (main reason why she owns a PS3 and PS4).
Her mood changed quickly after maybe 20 minutes.
Why? Well:
- Most of the well known modes are missing.
- Remember 8-Player SingStar multiplayer matches? Have fun with max. 2-Player only! "Ultimate Party"? lmao
- Game is buggy as hell (crashes/freezes regularly)
- The "oh so great" new feature, the Smartphone app, is garbage and doesn't even work properly
- Using your smartphone as a mic and an ordinary SingStar mic at the same time? Forget it!
- The loading times...... Jesus....!
- The songs you bought digitally on the PS3? You can't use them! (maybe they fixed it by now)
- The variety of the tracks...... lmao!

The list goes on and on.
Is my girl-friend the only person with this issue?
Well, let me take a quick look at the meta score:
http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-4/singstar-ultimate-party
37%

37%!!! for a "Blockbuster 1st Party game (see sales numbers).

Eurogamer Review
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-11-13-singstar-ultimate-party-review
2 out of 10
Eurogamer: "It's a shame that such a much-loved series has come to this, but here we are. So to conclude, SingStar Ultimate Party gets one point for nice menu screens and one point for Carly Rae Jepsen."

GamesRadar Review:
http://www.gamesradar.com/singstar-ultimate-party-review/
1.5 out of 5

Amazon UK Customer Reviews:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00KGSW5P4/

Amazon Germany Customer Reviews:
http://www.amazon.de/dp/B00KY2CAAC/

Yup, the game is garbage!
No wonder why SCEE rebooted their studios, or even closed them (see Liverpool).
They heavily downsized the London Studio (over 300 employees to 120 now) and here we go.
We get a heavily downsized and broken SingStar game.

First that "turd of a game" DRIVECLUB and now SingStar - Ultimate Party (a party of two = "Ultimate Party", according to SCEE).
Great job, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.
If your SCEE studios suck ass, get rid of them, upgrade your SCEE XDev Studio and make more collaborations with 3rd Party devs (who can actually make good games) like the "SCE Japan Studio + From Software" example for Bloodborne.

But hey.... at least SCEE London studio's new twitter account "@LondonStudioHQ" still works.
At least one accomplishment....
 
I

Impeccable

Member
If Rock Band came to PS4 I would not expect all the tracks I bought to work on it because of many reasons, new engines but more importantly licensing issues.

As for everything else, well, it is probably why we haven't heard practically anything about the game - I did not even know it released.
 
F

Fox1304

Member
Bought the game ; tried to play it 5 times, each time ending with a freeze of the game on the song selection screen.
Never been able to sing, it's incredible how shitty this game can be when they have 10 years of Singstar history behind them, and that's coming from a huge fan of the franchise.
 
L

littleornothin

Neo Member
I was in the beta and all these issues plus a whole lot of other complaints did came up.
Only thing I saw that they fixed was the border around the pitch lines. In the beta there was almost none, so with a bright or busy background it was impossible to see the pitch.

We used to sing every other weekend here at home but not anymore. Havent tried the updated PS3 version yet since I heard that it keeps crashing.. :\
 
S

Shinriji

Member
Agreed. They changed the core game for the worst (looks like GH/Rock Band singing, which I hate it), the new interface is garbage, buying songs on the PS4 requires that you buy the songs for the PS3 version and transfering the licence afterwards, no new songs, pass the mic is gone, streams don't work, etc,etc.

I don't know, maybe my time with singstar is long gone.
 
O

Orniletter

Banned
There really is something wrong with Sony´s firstparty studios.

Something as broken as Singstar Ultimate should not have been released.
 
bug_42

bug_42

Member
Singstar has been on its way down for a while. God for bid if your Playstation crashes.

Don't get me wrong, I love Singstar, but throw me a bone.
 
D

Dinjooh

Member
Eurogamer said:
It's a shame that such a much-loved series has come to this, but here we are. So to conclude, SingStar Ultimate Party gets one point for nice menu screens and one point for Carly Rae Jepsen.
Click to expand...

top lel.

Will wait a few years to buy this one then, no rush.
 
K

KratosEnergyDrink

Member
Sony seal of quality ;-)

Sincerely how could this happen with a first party game? Singstar was once a big and well known franchise and Sony let it die.

So ... I went on and play Wii Karaoke U ;-)
 
G

glaurung

Member
spwolf said:
i believe many people reported here that they could transfer many of their songs...
Click to expand...
Well, I had about 40 songs purchased from the PS3 era.

So far, I have been able to transfer less than 20 songs from my PS3 purchase history over to PS4. And to add insult to injury, they are definitely my less popular tracks. SingStar developers have offered no timeline, no roadmap as to when the rest will be available for transfer.

The removal of game modes is also a very poor step on their behalf.

As of 2 weeks since the new SingStar launched, the SingStore is still a total mess.

Someone from the singstar.com forums said that there is some manner of a workaround and that you can actually re-download any SingStore songs with a weird "hack". Surely his comment was deleted and I have not tried it out myself, but it was something like:
  1. Load up SingStar.
  2. Go to My Songs or whereever you do the downloading from.
  3. Tap the PS home button and load up PSN Store.
  4. Manually search for any SingStore song. Open any such song's store page.
  5. Tap back to SingStar.
  6. All your purchased songs should now appear in the transfer listing.
Though I expect they've patched it by now.
 
B

benny_a

extra source of jiggaflops
What a fantastic review by Ellie Gibson (Eurogamer). I guess negative reviews have more creative liberty but this is just gold:

[...] Sony has made karaoke no fun.

The signs are there from the moment the game boots up. After all, nothing says, "Let's get this party started!" like the message "Network conditions may cause vocal delay." WOOP WOOP! The Venga Bus is coming!
 
C

Carcetti

Member
Only tried it for a bit but I really disliked the UI and the song selection makes my skin crawl. SingStar was absolutely the best in PS2 era but I guess they already used up all the good karaoke songs they had access to.

edit: the stuff in the download store isn't better. The picks there are absolutely terrible.
 
O

Oersted

Member
Impeccable said:
If Rock Band came to PS4 I would not expect all the tracks I bought to work on it because of many reasons, new engines but more importantly licensing issues.

As for everything else, well, it is probably why we haven't heard practically anything about the game - I did not even know it released.
Click to expand...

Very prominently featured in a new ad, with women singing along. Point in case...

Endoplasmatisch said:
Is it REALLY that bad? Or hyperbole much? Any more experiences?
A (female) friend of mine wants to buy a PS4 solely for Singstar...
Click to expand...

You got more impressions above you, reviews... just read.
 
K

King Endymion

Member
While the game haven't frozen on me yet, it still sucks compared to the older ones.
- Not being able to change difficulty? Wtf, looks like it's easy mode.
- Not being able to put in your names when starting the game, you now have to type in your name EVERY time you enter the top 5 for each song.
- Not being able to listen to your singing afterwards (unless you have a camera now?) is also ridiculous, it was an awkward, fun thing to do, lol.
 
R

repeater

Member
The only sound explanation is that most of the people at Sony London were transferred over to work on the Last Guardian..
Get hype!!
:/
 
PJV3

PJV3

Member
What there is of it has worked fine for me, but i'm sticking with the PS3 version until the features return. I was pleasantly surprised to see any of the songs being transferable without having to phone Sony and having to wait a week.
 
C

Canis lupus

Member
What the hell is happening to SCE?? The first party games continue to get panned by critics. That must be the lowest scored SCE game to date.
 
P

Piccoro

Member
Speaking of which, the mandatory Singstar PS3 app resets my PS3 whever I exit the app. Does it happen to anybody else?
 
Alx

Alx

Member
That's surprising, I would have thought a game like Singstar would be hard to mess up. After all it's a simple but proven recipe, that mostly needs content updates.

*edit : wow, that Eurogamer review is cold.
On top of that, there's no Move support. It's unlikely anyone over the age of six will cry about this, but still. It would have been nice to get one more use out of those things before giving them to the dog to chew.
Click to expand...
 
J

Jonnax

Member
It really is bad. They've stripped down what was a game packed with features and replaced it with barebones pile of crap with a shiny interface.

Seriously, who greenlighted this?
 
L

Lionheart

Member
Man, this sounds very bad. SCE output hasn't been top notch yet this generation, still above average, but this and the DriveClub issues really disappoint me.

Benzychenz said:
Sony does this with every franchise and it continues to baffle me.

GT is pretty much the only one that's managed to stick around.
Click to expand...
I wouldn't go that far, but it does hurt me that they've let go of Studio Liverpool when looking at their output this generation so far. I mean, WipEout was a franchise that was always top notch presentation wise and in pretty much any other area, even when they had to rush it for a product launch.
 
Fattony12000

Fattony12000

Member
'Great Seb, love the bunting. Now move the White Company diffuser to the left and turn the books round so people can't see they're all biographies of Goebbels and Myra Hindley.'
Click to expand...

That might be one of the greatest image captions used in any video game review ever.
 
p_xavier

p_xavier

Authorized Fister
Endoplasmatisch said:
Is it REALLY that bad? Or hyperbole much? Any more experiences?
A (female) friend of mine wants to buy a PS4 solely for Singstar...
Click to expand...
Hyperbole much.

I bought new songs directly on the PS4. I Transferred about 100 songs to my PS4.

The menus are top notch, love the new interfaces. Love the weekly challenges.

What is obviously missing:
- Diverse sound inputs
- Auto mic mapping to user
- Different play modes
- My other 1000 songs to get transferred.
 
G

glaurung

Member
There are tons of complaints about the new SingStar, but mine is special:

What the fuck are the experience points good for?

It's like someone designed the experience/star gathering system, having something completely different in mind. But now, for fuck's sake, we have this half-baked, nonsensical, pointless point accrual system that does fuck all. I think there aren't even any trophies tied to it.

If this does not effectively tell the story of a half-assed product, what would?
 
S

Salex_

Member
7PjvUJ6.jpg
 
B

Bumhat

Member
benny_a said:
What a fantastic review by Ellie Gibson (Eurogamer). I guess negative reviews have more creative liberty but this is just gold:

[...] Sony has made karaoke no fun.

The signs are there from the moment the game boots up. After all, nothing says, "Let's get this party started!" like the message "Network conditions may cause vocal delay." WOOP WOOP! The Venga Bus is coming!
Click to expand...

Tried to stifle a loud guffaw in the office; failed.
 
K

kiguel182

Member
Well, I tried to play the game but the mobile app didn't recognise it so I couldn't. I think it has something to do with the PS4 being connected via ethernet or something.

Clearly I'm not missing much.
 
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