In one sense, a SingStar title based around one of Australia's most enduring musical acts is a rather obvious step for Sony to take. Countless millions of Wiggles albums, stickers, pasta meals, socks, puppets and T-shirts have been sold in the nearly 20 years since the Wiggles were first formed, and that translates into a lot of brand loyalty and more than a few fans. With more than 40 albums under their belts, the boys in blue, red, purple and yellow certainly have a fair selection of classic kids tunes to pick from.
(Hot Potato, Hot Potato...)
The track list covers a range of Wiggles hits, and not too many of the obviously-public-domain tracks that have made up much of the Wiggles' recent releases. Specifically, you'll get to croon along to Hot Potato, Can You (Point Your Fingers And Do The Twist?), Fruit Salad, Rock-A-Bye Your Bear, Toot Toot Chugga Chugga Big Red Car, Wake Up Jeff! Captain Feathersword Fell Asleep On His Pirate Ship (Quack Quack), The Monkey Dance, Get Ready To Wiggle, Move Your Arms Like Henry, Lights Camera Action Wiggles!, Play Your Guitar With Murray, To Have A Tea Party, Getting Strong!, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, I'm Dorothy the Dinosaur, Dr Knickerbocker, The Shimmie Shake!, Wags The Dog Is Chasing His Tail, and Hot Poppin' Popcorn.
Older Wiggles fans will appreciate that original Yellow Wiggle Greg is still prominently featured, with Sam only taking up the Yellow skivvy for a few select tracks. The other way of looking at that is that much younger Wiggles fans — and given the Wiggles fanbase, that's likely to be most of them — might be a touch confused as to who Greg actually is.
In a SingStar sense, all Sony's done is grab the relevant music tracks, lyrics and videos and slapped them within the same SingStar engine that it's used for previous SingStar games. Annoyingly, this is a PlayStation 2 only release. It'll run on first-generation PlayStation 3 machines, but if you've got a newer "slim" PS3 without backwards compatibility, there's no PS3-specific version for you.
(Hot Potato, Hot Potato, Potato, Potato, Potato, Potato)
SingStar games have always been a balance of public ridicule karaoke and fierce competition between people who privately seem to think they'd have a chance on Australian Idol, but thankfully for a Wiggles title, the scoring aspect has been toned down slightly. You're still scored on your ability to keep pitch with the songs, but not on the accuracy of the songs itself. This suits younger voices well, as mumbling in pitch is exactly the same thing as the lyric itself as far as SingStar is concerned.
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