I've been posting semi-regularly with updates about my journey through the Dance Dance Revolution series, and I suppose it was only a matter of time before I tried out the Karaoke Revolution series. Like the DDR series, the Karaoke series is also published by Konami, but otherwise the two series don't have much in common at all. The Karaoke games were developed by Harmonix, who went on to develop the hugely successful Guitar Hero and Rock Band games, although the first entry in the Karaoke Revolution series was one of their earliest games.
I played the first game in the series, simply called Karaoke Revolution, and released on PS2. Harmonix's lack of experience shows, as the interface and graphics (most notably the character models) are pretty basic even considering when it was released (late 2003). Along with selecting songs you pick a character, outfit, and venue, and the crowd reacts according to how well you're doing. You're given a rating for each phrase of the song, and as you'd expect from a rhythm game, you earn combos by getting a sequence of high ratings. The vocal detection seems decent, although there's a bit of a lag as the game recognizes your pitch, and to get higher scores it seems like you have to sing a little bit ahead of the soundtrack, which is kind of annoying. It'll be interesting to see how the recognition technology improves in subsequent games of this series and its competitors.
The game has several difficulty levels (the harder the mode, the harsher the judging of your pitch-matching), and the songs are also given a difficulty rating (one to three). The song list is divided so that there are four in a venue and the venues progress from a small club to a giant stadium. All the venues are unlocked to start, and each song also has target scores for you to earn gold and platinum medals, although the only unlockables are some outfits, a few songs, and some behind-the-scenes videos (basically just the developers singing some of the songs). There's also a versus mode and a karaoke-only mode (i.e. no scoring). As with the DDR games, the song features mostly covers rather than original songs, but I don't have a problem with that as the covers are good facsimiles of the originals and you're singing over them anyway. The song selection is definitely of its time, but even though I'm a pop music ignoramus, I knew at least one of the songs in each venue. For the songs I only half knew I could basically fake my way through the verses and then sing on the chorus, so the game should be an okay way to learn some new songs as well.
Overall the game was pretty enjoyable, despite the subpar presentation. I'll probably dip into a couple more games in the series before trying out some other karaoke-type video games, but I think it's pretty safe to say that I don't think I'm in danger of becoming as big a completist of the series as DDR (especially since there are country and American Idol editions of the game, haha.)