Well, Singstar has finally made its appearance on the PS3 and it certainly took long enough. Was it worth the wait? That is yet to be seen. In the graphics department, things look pretty good. As with previous iterations, the music videos for each song play in the background, which can be cool but also a distraction. The updated interface is very stylized, however, and looks really slick. With the incorporation of the PS3 Eye, you can now film yourself during your performance and share your star-power moments with your online friends. However, do be aware that if your PS3 Eye is plugged in, SingStar will be recording you regardless of whether or not you tell it to. After your performance, you can opt to keep the snapshots or not.

The song selection that comes packaged with SingStar kind of threw me, to be honest. While there are some good tunes included in the 30 songs that come prepackaged with SingStar, most struck me as odd. Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black" for instance. Why not the smash hit "Rehab" or "You Know I'm No Good", both really fun songs to sing? Also, several of the songs included are already available on either a version of Karaoke Revolution or on Rock Band. Fans of karaoke-styled videogames probably already have these other games (I know I do), so who wants old songs that you've already played on another title? Sure, there's some fun songs like Pixies' "Here Comes Your Man" and OutKast's "Hey Ya!", but then there are songs like Britney's "Toxic" and Blink-182's "All the Small Things" that are just tired rehashes from other games.

You can also download new songs fairly easily via the SingStore, but it took several weeks for them to get some decent material up there. Still, I am not thrilled with the selections, but at least I was able to find some fun songs to download such as Pet Shop Boys' "Always On My Mind" and David Lee Roth's "Just a Gigolo". Hopefully, they will continue to increase the available selection.

There's not a big difference between the way plays from the previous iterations on the PS2, aside from the ability to download fresh songs from the SingStore. You can opt to play by yourself in Solo mode or you can play with friends in Battle, Duet or Pass the Mic. There's also a Practice mode for either one or two players, and in all modes, you can opt to play the Normal length or the Short length, which keeps things moving along at parties.

As I mentioned earlier, the PS3 Eye will record a video of your performance, as well as a number of snapshots, and you can keep these and upload them to share with friends, if you want to. Do be careful, however, since SingStar is always filming you if your PS3 Eye is plugged in. I discovered this while looking rather shabby in the midst of a nasty cold and seeing some pretty funky snapshots of myself after I finished a performance. Did I mention they were also at an odd angle because my Eye was on the floor and on its side? Singstar was trying to catch upskirts of me! Needless to say, these gems weren't uploaded to my profile.

I did notice that this iteration of Singstar seems to keep time with the music a lot better than past versions. What I mean by that is that in past Singstar versions, the pitch bar timing and the way that it would fill up was never a true representation of the timing of the music. Hence, if you weren't super-familiar with the song you chose, it was hard to wing it. Now, the timing seems to be much truer to the song and there's also a nice song length progress bar that tells you how long the tune is and how much longer before you are done. On songs that are painful and all in German, such as the aforementioned "Rock Me Amadeus", this was a nice thing to have.

You can choose between Easy, Medium and Hard and depending on which you select, you will be judged accordingly. If you just want to have fun with it, I suggest Easy. You are judged fairly leniently, actually even more so than on previous iterations, it appears. If you want more of a challenge, step things up to Medium. For a brutal challenge, go for Hard. You will be required to maintain the pitch exactly and your task will not be easy.

Truthfully speaking, though, all you're really going to suffer is the possibility of being razzed by the game and, possibly, anyone within earshot. Unlike most music games on the market, you are allowed to play all the way through a song no matter how badly you perform. In this respect, difficulty becomes sort of a non-issue. If you're content to watch the music video in the background by itself or sing loudly and off-key while it plays, more power to you; If you want to challenge yourself, try to get a good score.

Plug in your USB microphone, select a song, and go! It's almost as easy as that. Those of you who have HDTV's may experience some lag while playing and that's a big drag. However, the good news is that there's an option for latency and you can calibrate it to your HDTV so that you can eliminate a good bit of the lag. I wasn't able to get it perfect, but it was down to an easily tolerable bare minimum. Once you've got the lag squared away, its time to get down to business.

You select a song of your choice, or a medley if you want a tad bit more challenge. The words will scroll across the screen and there will be a pitch bar in blue. If you hit the right pitch, you score points. Score enough points and you can become a SingStar.

The big draw with SingStar on the PS3 is the downloadable content. However, the offerings are not all they could be, but it's still a bit early yet. At about $1.49 per song, the costs are minimal and hopefully they'll have more to offer soon. They offer a small, looping preview of each song and that's cool, however I did feel tricked by certain songs. Take "Rock Me Amadeus" for example. I don't remember that entire song (aside from the chorus that says "Rock me Amadeus") being in German?!? After I downloaded it, I was really sorry I had wasted my money. So keep these things in mind. Sony seems to have a real affinity for songs that seem to appeal to Europeans and maybe that is because SingStar has been such a smash hit in Europe until this point. But I hope that they start to put more songs up for download that have a wider appeal in the US.