Lips: Number One Hits Hands-On

While we enjoyed the original Lips, we certainly felt that it had more potential. The wireless microphones were great, but they weren't accurate enough, and shaking them to play instruments seemed rather pointless. Lips: Number One Hits seems to fix these issues: it's more stringent in recognising your pitch, while the new instrument sections score you for shaking the mic to a beat. These are just two of the improvements being made to the game, among many others, as we found out from the game's creative director, Keichi Yanno.

Lips: Number One Hits will feature 40 new songs, and while they span many genres and time periods, they've all been number one on the chart somewhere in the world. The new menu interface is a lot different to the old one, thanks mainly to avatar integration, and you can now set up four different players on one console and assign them one of the two mics.

Once we started playing the game, we found Lips: Number One Hits to be a much more cohesive experience than its predecessor. First of all, the shaking of the mic to play a musical instrument has now been turned into a challenge. Like in Rock Band, you have to shake the mic when instructed by the game, with points awarded for accurate rhythm. The special moves have also been improved, and the poses and dance moves now replicate what's happening in the video.

One of the best new features is the real-time updating of your world ranking as you're singing. Your rank is displayed in the centre of the screen, creating a real incentive to improve your performance as you go. Sadly, there's no option to show your friends' scores onscreen, but at the end of each song you see a screen with two leaderboards, one with the world rankings and another with just your friends.

Sadly, there are no plans to implement camera support in this version of Lips, although Yanno clearly would like to do this in the future. The game will not support the Rock Band and Guitar Hero mics, but the Xbox 360 wireless microphones will support games such as Rock Band 2, Guitar Hero Metallica, and Disney Sing It: High School Musical 3: Senior Year. The import feature has been improved to make iPod or MP3 player scanning much faster than before. The game is scheduled for release on October 20 in the US and on October 23 in Europe.