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Thursday, April 24, 2008

Voltaire said that illusion is the first of all the pleasures, and nowhere did the "Candide" author's words ring more true than in the hollow, parched town of Coachella near Palm Springs. For it was during these dry, 100-degree days and nights on those manure-smelling polo grounds that the zombified, pot-polluted desert dwellers called rock 'n' roll fans gathered to witness what seemed to be bands more numerous than I have strands of DNA.

It all began with a Sony-sponsored trek to Palm Springs to the supposedly tony La Quinta Resort where golf is king, Frank Capra once slept, and a cheap room is a mere $450 a night. Within these perfumed and flowered confines, where it rains just four times a year and where the constantly-watered grass is golf-green short, I would witness the new SingStar karaoke party game for the PlayStation 3, which drops on May 20. I wanted to sing. I needed to sing. Like a star.

They tucked us dusty, non-Amex-Black-carded gamer geeks way back in the hinterlands at something dubbed the Legacy Villas, a gated community where the drunken and non-drunken alike find it difficult to find their faux adobe abodes after the sun has set and the colorful desert hummingbirds hum no more. The environment was like Malvena Reynolds' brilliant protest song, "Little Boxes": Every adobe-topped villa looks alike and the water-sprinkled lawns hiss with sad anger all through the night and the day. It's an evil game of mazes at night, like playing Sony's upcoming, M.C. Escher-inspired echochrome on a blank screen.

Friday, April 25, 2008

At the Legacy Villas Clubhouse, I expected the concierge to try to sell me a time-share. Instead, within a conference room, the pixie-ish Paulina Bozek, a fellow Pole who is SingStar franchise director out of Sony's London office, explained the ins and out of the both the disk and the store. She said that there have been 90 SingStar disks thus far, including many localized editions. There's been a Bollywood edition and an Apres Ski Party edition. 1,300 songs have been licensed and the various versions have sold 13 million copies worldwide. That's so much singing, it'd make you hoarse.

The big difference with the PlayStation 3 version? Online, downloadable music videos. Bozak said that in the four and a half months in which SingStar PS3 has been available in Europe, a million songs have been downloaded by 140,000 users of the new online site, the SingStore, accessible via the PS3.

When SingStar PS3 hits these shores on in the third week of May, the online store will be enhanced by a social networking site called My SingStar Online, basically a MySpace meets YouTube meets Facebook for those who like to show off their singing chops. The store will be packed with 200 songs at launch. Yeah, there should be more, and Sony acknowledges it, saying the goal will be to have 25-50 new songs available each month.

While the pricing of $59.99 for the 30 song-disk with two mics is attractive and a deal, I have to say that $1.49 per song may be too much in this time of recession. Affable U.S. SingStar producer Petro Piaseckyj made the case that the price per video is reasonable because "You're not just getting a song like you do in iTunes. You're getting a video, too." Time will tell. Heck, maybe they'll have a sale from time to time.