Sing when you're winning

Karaoke-styled games such as American Idol Encore and Sony's SingStar series are becoming a craze with gamers.

Simon Cowell thinks I'm awesome. "You are a natural, a complete and utter natural," raves the American Idol judge, after I croon the '70s-era song Come Sail Away into my Xbox 360.

"You're one of the best we've ever had," he offers, after a performance of the grunge-era Black Hole Sun.

Cowell isn't famous for flattery, of course, unless you turn the settings way down to "easy" on a new video game based on the TV show. Then you can get away with quite a bit of tone-deafness. Personal note to Randy J.: I love you too, dawg.

American Idol Encore is one of the latest video games that invite players to plug a microphone, rather than a game controller, into their home system. It's like karaoke: Pick a song and follow the notes represented by horizontal bars that whiz by on your TV screen, along with the words. The game tells you whether you're in tune. Hit the right notes, and you win points; go off key for too long, and you might get booted off the virtual stage.

Singing games have been around for a while, but this could be a breakthrough year for the genre. Lately, it seems big-box electronics stores have a wide range of titles for almost every contemporary music taste, from musicals to hard rock. Game publisher Electronic Arts has even launched a social-networking site where users post and rate each other's performances.

One of the biggest video-game phenomenons of the moment, Rock Band, riffs off the success of the Guitar Hero series by throwing in a microphone with guitar and drum game controllers. Despite the game's hefty $170 price tag, the set sells like hotcakes.

There are more sing-along games on the way: The latest to create waves is Sony's SingStar series, exclusively for PlayStation consoles.

While other singing games display an avatar busting moves to the music, the gimmick with this series is that it plays a song's original video as your friends sing in head-to-head or duet modes.

Previous versions of the series have had an '80s theme or been based on more current pop songs from the likes of Avril Lavigne to Britney Spears. The latest version, SingStar 90s, features songs from Chumbawamba and R.E.M. The franchise has sold 11 million copies worldwide.

Sony doesn't seem to like it much if you refer to SingStar as a karaoke game. Jeff Reese, Sony's director of software marketing, says the k-word has "negative connotations" among consumers. Reese said the company hopes the game's broad appeal will help its game consoles crack a more mainstream market of consumers.

"We see this as appealing to a new audience for us," said Reese. "It really serves to bring in nontraditional gamers."

Sony's PlayStation 3 version of the SingStar games has been launched along with an online store for the game. While the SingStar games have been limited in holding about 30 tracks on each game disc, the PS3's hard drive will allow fans to buy and download as many songs as they like. Fans will also be able to upload their recordings.

EA has a new-ish social networking-style site based on karaoke, called the Sims on Stage, where users occasionally win perks from EA such as concert tickets. The company wouldn't say exactly how large its community is so far, but EA Vice President Ranah Edelin said users are posting thousands of new recordings every day.

"Not being a (good) singer doesn't mean you can't get up and sing," said Edelin. "As some of our users have shown."