Looking For An Ego Boost In All The Wrong Places

I recently (read: three days ago) received Karaoke Revolution: Glee as a gift. I’ve always been a fan of video games that incorporate singing (like Rock Band), but I’ve never owned one myself.  So, naturally, I did what any excited twenty-something would do… I waited for my family to leave for New York and started trying it out when I had the house to myself. For whatever reason, I can perform on stage without a problem, but singing in front of a handful of people is an issue. Go figure.

Now, I’ve been listening to the music from Glee for quite a while… I was a little over-zealous when the first two CDs came out, and bought them both on the days they were released, and both then became staples in my car CD player. On top of that, I knew most of those songs from hearing the originals on the radio (yes, any random readers I get who were born after 1990… songs on Glee were real songs first!). Because of both these facts, I figured the game should be a piece of cake. I turned it on to a random song, which just so happened to be the biggest, most downplayed song the show ever did, “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going.”

Yes, I have my diva moments. Moving on.

Here’s how I thought I was doing:

In actuality, this is what happened:

Luckily I kept my composure better than this girl, and finished the song. The way this karaoke deal works is that there are the notes you sing, and those notes are broken up into phrases. To do well, you need to get a certain number of notes correct per phrase. You get scores on accuracy (percentage of correct notes) and phrases (how many phrases you “completed”). While I had hit 85% of the notes, I had only completed 30 of the 69 (tee hee) phrases. Both of these, in my very humble and unbiased opinion, were just not true. So I decided to try an experiment.

I sang the entire song on “ooo.” I thought of that at one point in the song, when I was holding a particularly long “me” that the game said wasn’t even near the correct pitch. I changed to an “ooo” while holding the same note (which, yes, means I had to "meow" while singing), and I was magically correct!

The result of my experiment? 96% accuracy, 65/69 (... tee hee) phrases.

My conclusion? Ghosts would do very well with this game. Also, I’m too much talent for Karaoke Revolution: Glee to handle. And, really, isn’t that what the game, like the hokey pokey, is what it’s all about?