In our visit to iNis, we got to see a lot of cool games and devices that I would never have looked into otherwise. Most of the games that iNis develops are music based. This is because their creative director was a jazz musician before becoming a lucrative business man in the video game field. They showed us cheerleader games, guitar games and a karaoke game called “Lips.”
Lips stands out from the rest of the singing games for Xbox 360 because it comes with two glowing, wireless mics.
These mics have motion sensors that detect how you’re holding the device, when/which way it’s moving and sudden stops (clapping or mock-tamborining).
While Lips isn’t very popular with America’s Rock Band and Guitar Hero crowds, there is a patch underway to make the Lips mics compatible with Rock Band. No definitive release date has been set for the patch for Rock Band and no desire to make a patch has been made known by Activision (Guitar Hero’s publisher).
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Inis was quite the company. It was crazy seeing Americans give us an actual presentation. I was amazed that it was not some Japanese person translating another CEO. Inis was a very cool site visit because a week later they announced another sequel to the game Lips. This one has all the major hits. All the songs from the top of the charts. I found this very intriguing.
I can’t wait for the Lips microphones to be compatible with Rock Band. While I like Lips a lot, Karaoke only allows two people to play, while Rock Band allows 4 and I think for a party setting, it is more popular. However, the Lips mics are an incredible piece of hardware – especially for the price. Motion-sensing, wireless, color-changing depending on the music- they have it all. I really liked the guys at iNiS, they really seemed like they do it because they love it and were really excited to have Harmonix and Activision jumping at the chance to use the mics.