There was a time in the not to distant past where music game peripherals were not cross game compatible, but with the current iteration of Guitar Hero: World Tour, Rock Band 2, and Rock Revolution the developers and publishers involved listened to the consumers complaints about having to repeatedly buy new plastic instruments with each game and made all three title’s instruments work with the other games. Given that, I was a little surprised when I saw the report on MTV’s Mutiplayer Blog that the microphone for the newest music game ‘Lips’ would not work with Guitar Hero: World Tour or Rock Band 2. You would think that any microphone would work just fine for all three games, but apparently not:
We’ve come to start expecting cross-game compatibility with our music game peripherals. They may not gel perfectly, but they work.
If you’ve been looking forward to Microsoft’s karaoke game, “Lips,” be aware, however — it won’t work in your other music games.
During a hotel demo of “Lips,” creator Keiichi Yano of Inis told MTV Multiplayer his wireless, accelerometer-enhanced microphone will only work with “Lips” at launch.
That’s the catch — at launch. It could come later. Yano’s open to the idea, but because the “Lips” device is not just a USB mic, it’s not as simple as plugging the mic in. Both the “Rock Band” and “Guitar Hero” mics are wired.
“That’s a great idea!” he laughed. “I hope so. It’s not something we can do, obviously [the games would require a patch]. I mean, I hope so for ‘Rock Band,’ ‘Guitar Hero.’ It won’t work out of the box but it’s relatively easy to kind of get it going.”
So, it is not completely out of the realm of possibilities that it may work in the future, but it will require an update. So, the developers of Lips want to put the ball back into Activision and Harmonix courts to patch their games instead of just making a microphone that would work not only with Lips, but with the other games on the market.
Lips is unlike any other kareoke game released on a console in the past in that it allows people to play not only the songs on the list, but to also import songs from their own MP3 collection.
this game is sick but the mic not bieng compatable with all the others sucks balls rock bAND TWO IS THE BOMB YO
The Lips mic works fine with Guitar Hero: Metallica (tried it in the GH:M demo).
As said above, Guitar Hero: Metallica was the first from that series to add support for the LIPS mics. Not sure if they’ll have a patch to download from XBOX Live Marketplace for free for the older variations of the Guitar Hero game.