The Best Karaoke Game is Karaoke

So late last night I got to Japan and made my way to the place I'm staying.  Of course, nothing goes the way its supposed to and my suitcase got stuck in Hong Kong airport so here I am, sat in a Japanese apartment with nothing more than my portable systems, my computer and the clothes on my back.

So of course, the most logical thing I could do to kill time while I wait for all my things to arrive was go and kill time in the local karaoke place.  Now there are lots of Karaoke games on the market, stuff like Singstar and whatnot but now that the karaoke machines in Japan have added a game mode type thing, the definitive karaoke game is to just to go to karaoke itself.

So it works exactly like Singstar or Rock Band or any other game that has had a singing thing built into it.  A bar sweeps across the screen and passes little blocks and as you sing the blocks light up if you do it wrong, or they don't light up and another bar appears to tell you how wrong you are.

At the end of the song the machine gives you points out of 100 and gives you a load of stats about how good are you are at things like vibrato and other singing stuff.

On top of all that, it ranks you across everyone else in the country so you can compare your singing skills with everyone else in Japan, which is fun if your the competitive type.

The best part is that there isn't any of this buying of song pack crap.  You just pay for the booth which is cheap as hell in this country and you can sing for ages and probably get free drinks while you do it.  Of course, if you don't want your singing to be graded, you can just turn off the feature and enjoying singing with your crap voice.

So put down all that singstar crap, hop on a plane to Japan and get the best karaoke experience imaginable.

Why Japanese karaoke is awesome

Well I went an missed another blog post again because I went out, spent 6 hours inside a Karaoke booth and then followed it up by seeing a movie that was just recently released called Helter Skelter.

Helter Skelter will get its own post later, but for now, I wanted to do something short letting everyone know about the joys of Karaoke in Japan.

For any readers who don't know how this shit works over here, it's very simple.  In England, most karaoke is done in pubs and bars, where you have to get up in front of a whole buildings worth of people and sing a song.   This immediately turns some people off as they get nervous singing in front of so many onlookers.  However in Japan, they have these huge buildings filled with little rooms, and you rent out one of these rooms with your buddies and just have a grand old time with people that you feel comfortable with.

I would just like to point out, that above picture is not from one of my local karaoke places.  I lifted it off some other dudes blog after a quick image search, but it's a chain called Big Echo and they all look exactly the fucking same anyway.

"But Tau, this is a gaming blog, why the fuck are you talking about singing goddamn pop songs?!"

Well let me fuckin' tell you!  Inside the data banks of the various types of karaoke machines in Japan, there is a shit ton of video game and anime music.  I barely watch anime, but some of my standard go to songs when I'm out at Karaoke are Suteki da Ne (FFX), Real Emotion (FFX-2 English AND Japanese), Hikari/Simple and Clean (Kingdom hearts) as well as a shit ton of other assorted video game tracks.

But then what really blew my mind, was this!

That's right! They had fuckin' Snake Eater from MGS3!  Not only is this one of the best video game songs EVER FUCKIN' WRITTEN, but nothing feels more awesome than blasting this out at karaoke, while the video shows clips of Snake being a badass in the background.

THAT people, is why Japanese karaoke is FUCKIN' AWESOME!

UPDATE: It's not a big echo in the picture, its a Karaoke Kan, they are all so tightly packed in Nagoya I thought they were the same thing.  THE MORE YA KNOW!