Why does the Wii suck so hard for karaoke games?

[Jophiel]

Seriously. For the “Hey, the whole family and all the adults love it and it’s an instant fun-party-time-hooray!” game console, you’d think there’d be some decent selection of karaoke games for it. Beyond American Idol Revolution and a couple knock-off “not by the original artist” games. I’m not counting the full band games, just straight up karaoke stuff.

I understand it’s somewhat crippled by the lack of a hard drive so it doesn’t have the same online content capacity as the PS3 or Xbox 360 but, Christ, even the PS2 has the Singstar series (1, 2, Legends, Amped, Country, 80s, 90s).

Is there an actual reason for this or some gold mine I’m missing? Not that I’m heavily vested into karaoke but the wife enjoys it and she liked the AI:Revolution game but kind of beat it into the ground and needs new territory.

[Justin_Bailey]

@Jophiel

Seriously. For the “Hey, the whole family and all the adults love it and it’s an instant fun-party-time-hooray!” game console, you’d think there’d be some decent selection of karaoke games for it. Beyond American Idol Revolution and a couple knock-off “not by the original artist” games. I’m not counting the full band games, just straight up karaoke stuff.

Is there an actual reason for this or some gold mine I’m missing? Not that I’m heavily vested into karaoke but the wife enjoys it and she liked the AI:Revolution game but kind of beat it into the ground and needs new territory.

There’s also the Disney Sing It games.

But really, what did you expect? Beyond Disney Sing It, SingStar and the aforementioned American Idol game, the PS3 doesn’t have any other karaoke games either. Nor does the Xbox 360 after Disney Sing It, Lips and the AI game.

[Ferret_Herder]

Have you considered buying Rock Band and just the mic? There’s a decent song selection just in practice mode alone, and the tour mode will let her unlock even more songs. Buy both RB 1 and 2 discs, and then download songs over the Wii network, and she’ll have a fair selection of songs available. There is a Wiki article that shows what songs are available for each platform, and they’re still releasing more on a regular basis.

[Jophiel]

@Justin_Bailey

Beyond Disney Sing It, SingStar and the aforementioned American Idol game, the PS3 doesn’t have any other karaoke games either. Nor does the Xbox 360 after Disney Sing It, Lips and the AI game.

I guess the annoyance comes from the fact that the Wii doesn’t support downloading new songs so the AI game is crippled compared to its other console counterparts and the Singstar catalog isn’t available for the Wii at all. If either one or the other wasn’t true, it wouldn’t seem so bad. The surprise comes from the notion that the Wii keeps getting hailed as a swell console for casual “grown ups” play so I’m a little surprised to see that it’s the worst of the three for this particular genre of game.

Edited to add…

@Ferret_Herder

Have you considered buying Rock Band and just the mic? There’s a decent song selection just in practice mode alone, and the tour mode will let her unlock even more songs. Buy both RB 1 and 2 discs, and then download songs over the Wii network, and she’ll have a fair selection of songs available. There is a Wiki article that shows what songs are available for each platform, and they’re still releasing more on a regular basis.

I didn’t know that the Wii allowed song downloads for Rockband. This is news I can use

[Ferret_Herder]

@Jophiel

Edited to add…I didn’t know that the Wii allowed song downloads for Rockband. This is news I can use

Not all of the available songs by any means, but they are out there: Linky

[Jophiel]

Ouch, yeah that’s a pretty abbreviated list.

[Ferret_Herder]

I should emphasize those are the downloadable extra songs, outside of those available on the RB and RB2 game discs. But it’s still annoying, I agree.