Turn your Wii into a karaoke machine with Sing 4, featuring more than three dozen songs and includes a microphone. Watch the actual music videos as you sing along to popular tunes, mostly from 2001 and above.

The music selection features a song from the 60’s by The Doors, Sweet Home Alabama from the 70’s, and a handful of 80’s songs (Yay, 80’s music!). But the rest of the songs are from this century. Sorry 90’s music fans, you’re out of luck with this game. But that’s OK since most music from the 90’s sucked anyway (sorry). Even though I’m not so good at keeping track of today’s modern songs, I’ve heard most of these before, so you KNOW they have to be popular.

The game contains 39 songs in all (I counted). The back of the box says 40, but there is one missing song even though it says it’s on there. Which song got cut out? Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up (yes kids, that’s the Rick Roll song). But if you have your Wii connected to the internet via WiFi, you can download a handful of new songs for 200 points a pop.

Gameplay is similar to the vocal portions of Rock Band. Sing a line of a song and try to stay in tune by watching bars on screen. You don’t have to sing the actual words to the song, but the game can tell if you are singing or humming. If you see gold words and a gold bar, try to stay right on pitch and time to get a bonus score. Up to four can play, but I’m not sure how you get four microphones since there are only two USB ports on the Wii that I know of.

You can sing in Practice mode without having to worry about your performance, or try and get a high score on a tune in the regular Play Mode. You can also watch the music videos and hear the songs by themselves in Jukebox Mode (I guess they show music videos on YouTube now instead of MTV like when I was a kid). Only bad thing is there is no widescreen support. You can also have different voice effects for the microphone, as well as toggle other options. I recommend turning the mic’s sensitivity to the highest setting (it works better that way), and turning on the pitch indicator before you play. Aside from the game freezing up on me once, and the lack of widescreen support, Sing 4 seems to be a fairly decent music game.

Kid Factor:

Sing 4 is rated T for Teen with ESRB descriptors of Alcohol Reference, Mild Lyrics, Partial Nudity, Suggestive Themes, and Tobacco Reference. If you are comfortable with your kids listening and singing to popular radio songs and watching the music videos, they’ll be OK with this game, too. Reading skill is needed for menus and song lyrics.

Tags: Game Reviews