As number one hits tend to be, the Lips sequel is filled with nothing but the safest of safe pop songs. Excellent stuff if you're a die hard fan of Aqua and Kanye West, but even if your tastes swing wildly toward the Pet Shop Boys and Dr. Dre, you'll be well served.

The full list is after this, an international mix that the kids are sure to love.

• "California Love" by 2Pac feat. Dr. Dre and Roger Troutman (U.S.)
• "Don't Matter" by Akon (U.S.)
• "Barbie Girl" by Aqua (Denmark)
• "The Tide is High (Get the Feeling)" by Atomic Kitten (U.K.)
• "Loser" by Beck (U.S.)
• "Don't Phunk With My Heart" by Black Eyed Peas (U.S.)
• "Heart of Glass" by Blondie (U.S.)
• "Love Generation" by Bob Sinclar (France)
• "Don't Worry, Be Happy" by Bobby McFerrin (U.S.)
• "Bubbly" by Colbie Caillat (U.S.)
• "Viva la Vida" by Coldplay (U.K.)
• "Karma Chameleon" by Culture Club (U.K.)
• "(I Just) Died In Your Arms" by Cutting Crew (U.K.)
• "Hey Baby" by DJ Ötzi (Austria)
• "More Than Words" by Extreme (U.S.)
• "Big Girls Don't Cry" by Fergie (U.S.)
• "She Drives Me Crazy" by Fine Young Cannibals (U.K.)
• "Broken Strings" by James Morrison feat. Nelly Furtado (U.K.)
• "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz (U.S.)
• "Heartless" by Kanye West (U.S.)
• "Just Dance" by Lady Gaga (U.S.)
• "The Fear" by Lily Allen (U.K.)
• "Around the Way Girl" by LL Cool J (U.S.)
• "Touch My Body" by Mariah Carey (U.S.)
• "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" by Marvin Gaye (U.S.)
• "U Can't Touch This" by MC Hammer (U.S.)
• "How You Remind Me" by Nickelback (Canada)
• "Always on My Mind" by Pet Shop Boys (U.K.)
• "Hey There Delilah" by Plain White T's (U.S.)
• "Disturbia" by Rihanna (Barbados)
• "Millennium" by Robbie Williams (U.K.)
• "The Look" by Roxette (Sweden)
• "Oh, Pretty Woman" by Roy Orbison (U.S.)
• "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'" by Scissor Sisters (U.S.)
• "Push the Button" by Sugababes (U.K.)
• "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" by Tears for Fears (U.K.)
• "I Get Around" by The Beach Boys (U.S.)
• "Lovefool" by The Cardigans (Sweden)
• "Apologize" by Timbaland feat. OneRepublic (U.S.)
• "Ready, Set, Go!" by Tokio Hotel (Germany)

The Royalty Network - a site cataloguing the latest licensing and royalty deals in the world of music - has made mention of a video game tentatively titled "Lips Uno". Now, the Royalty Network is no GameStop. There's no platform information, no publisher info, no word on a developer (the original was done by iNiS), nothing. Just the title "Lips Uno", and the fact it's licensing Timbaland's "The Way I Are".

Still, the fact it's got the word "Lips" in the title suggests it's got something to do with Microsoft's series, though whether it would be an expansion or a full-blown sequel remains unclear. Maybe it works with the existing Uno, and replaces the original's stylish videos with depictions of your avatar crooning its little heart out.

We've contacted Microsoft for comment.

The Royalty Network reveals Lips Uno, Guitar Hero 5 tracks, and a few new DDR licenses! [BRU]

Yes, Bobby Brown. "Every Little Step", if you must know, though just which Bobby Brown it is shouldn't matter. All songs will go for $2.

December 19

* "Over My Head (Cable Car)" — The Fray
* "Every Little Step" — Bobby Brown
* "Prisoner of Society" — The Living End
* "Virtual Insanity" — Jamiroquai

December 26

* "New Shoes" — Paolo Nutini
* "What's Love Got To Do With It" — Tina Turner
* "What Is Love?" — Haddaway

January 2

* "Where Did Our Love Go" — The Supremes
* "Let's Groove" — Earth, Wind and Fire
* "Be Good Johnny" — Men At Work
* "Somethin' Stupid" — Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman

January 9

* Superstar — Jamelia
* People are People — Depeche Mode
* Suddenly I See — KT Tunstall

Lips DLC Schedule Outlined [IGN]

All you need to do is hop over to the site and fill out a form to enter. It looks like they're pulling the winners in early January. That's the good news. The bad news is that only three people are going to win, so it looks like your chances are fairly slim.

Win an Xbox 360

From intent to mechanics, the mission brief for the iNiS team was never “make an original, inspiring music title for the Xbox 360”. It was “do SingStar, but on the Xbox 360”. And that’s exactly how we’re going to assess the game.

So, does it “do” SingStar on the 360? Or even outdo SingStar on the 360? Let’s find out.

Loved
Slick – Oh boy is this game slick. Where SingStar is a cold, sterile affair, Lips is bursting with flair, from jazzy menu screens to OTT song ratings and a ridiculous levelling-up system.

iNiS – Which leads me to my next love. The iNiS touch. If Microsoft were looking for their karaoke game to be packed full of cute custom videos and game modes – including bringing two love birds together through song and defusing a bomb with your voice – that bring home the smiles, then they got what they were looking for.

Library Expansion – My 360 is linked to my PC via Media Centre, and Lips is able to instantly recognise songs shared via the service and import them into the game. Adding thousands of songs – all of them favourites of mine – to the game is a promising touch.

Hardware – The one area Lips really trounces SingStar. The game’s motion-sensitive, wireless mics are well-made, can be shook to simulate instruments when you’re not singing and, once synched to your 360, are easy to manage. Perhaps the neatest features are the fact their bases glow in time with the music, and idle mics need only be picked up and shaken to turn a solo song into a duet.

Hated
It Doesn’t Work – You know how SingStar (and Rock Band, and GH: World Tour) works? With the words displayed across the screen ahead of time? Yeah, Lips does that too. Except, instead of showing 10-15 words, it shows 3-4. Which means if you don’t already know the words (and timing) to a song, you’re totally fucked.

It Doesn’t Work – Importing thousands of my own songs was both easy and promising. Pity, then, they’re largely useless. You don’t get lyrics, you don’t get a music video, Lips won’t even use/download the song’s album art. It just plays the song, and asks you to sing along, scoring you on how you match the “sound” of the song. Making things worse, it can’t tell the difference between music and lyrics, meaning some game modes farcically require you to make the “waah waah” noises of a guitar to stay in the game.

It…You Get The Idea – The game’s scoring system is either lenient or broken. It’s hard to tell which, but going off the success iNiS have had with the rest of the mechanics, I’m assuming it’s the latter. Gentle humming can see you through most songs, while for high notes, the game seems almost random in deciding whether you're hitting them or not.

Look, Lips, you tried. You’re charming, you look nice, your initial song selection is surprisingly great and your wireless mics are fantastic. Your heart was in the right place. But you just can’t work as a karaoke game when your mechanics are as broken as they are. See, karaoke games are for parties. There are all types of folks at parties. And if you need to know every word and every piece of timing for a song, it’s useless, because the average person doesn’t know that.

Maybe next time – if the market affords you a next time – spend more time copying what SingStar did right (the nuts and bolts of scoring a karaoke session…ie, the important stuff) instead of what it did wrong (its cold presentation, which really, doesn’t matter), because as it stands, it’s hard to recommend Lips in the state it’s in, whether someone has access to a Sony console/SingStar franchise or not.

Lips was developed by iNiS and published by Microsoft Games Studios, released in North America on Nov. 18 for Xbox 360. Retails for $69.99. Played all songs in both single and multiplayer, either in co-op or vs mode.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

If I really know the song, I can score literally millions of points. I score three or four million points on some of these songs, and that's great for the person that is very confident in his vocal capabilities. But, for the person who might not be, or if you're just drunk, it's just like you don't even care.

But you just want to jam to the song, and you're [warbles incoherently], and it's all this crazy stuff. But, you're still getting a score, right? And that's really important, because at the end of the song, you're drunk and you're still saying, "Ha! I scored better than you!" or whatever, right?

And that is really enough to carry the experience. People don't even question it. [They don't say], "Oh, yeah! It's not ending prematurely." I would even say that a lot of people that don't normally play games even think about that. If anything, it's the reverse. "Why did the song end prematurely? I want to enjoy the song." That's what we're giving them.

I'm glad to know that the needs of drunken karaoke singers enters into design decisions. Nice interview on an interesting subject, from the perspective of a company that has worked exclusively on music titles since their founding.

More Than Just Lips: Keiichi Yano On Music Game Innovation [Gamasutra]

Starting in on December 5, Lips will start getting holiday music by a number of artists including Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley and Gene Autry. The songs all start at 160 Microsoft Points a pop, or about $2.

Here’s the breakdown of this and next weeks songs:

November 21
Adele – Chasing Pavements
Estelle – No Substitute Love
Jason Mraz – The Remedy (I Won’t Worry)
Coldplay – Violet Hill

November 28
Supertramp – Give a Little Bit
Smash Mouth – All Star
Vanessa Carlton – A Thousand Miles

Microsoft is aware that Nintendo is the company that "puts more smiles on more faces," so it doesn't bother trying to compete on the happy front. Instead, the company wants to invade your nightmares, filling them with hollowed out heads and disembodied mouth creatures. The company's newest creative torment is for the iNiS developed Xbox 360 singing game Lips, in which a man is haunted by a stalking pair of sentient, lyric-forgetting lips. The mouth beast travels across harsh terrain and unfavorable weather conditions to force the man to do his bidding — to sing A-Ha's "Take On Me" for the sadistic ambling maw's delight. The horror....

The soundtrack — full listing after the jump — features a healthy mix of musical styles, from pop to hip hop to country, with modern day and classic karaoke classics. Stand bys, like Duran Duran's “Hungry Like the Wolf” and Radiohead's “Fake Plastic Trees,” are wisely included alongside newer jams like Lupe Fiasco's “Superstar”, a rapping and singing duet.

Lips' shunning of "punitive gaming," however, as Microsoft Game Studios' Chris Esaki calls it, may be its most interesting design choice.

Not unlike the recently released Wii Music, Lips won't punish players for flubbing notes. This is a party game and, as such, issues regular rewards. We saw some of the game's leveling system at E3 earlier this year, which provides positive feedback for everything you do.

"There are no difficulty modes," Esaki told us during a phone interview. "It's great if you just try. Lips is about physical gameplay. You become part of the entertainment."

That "entertainment" Esaki is referring to is the kind of good natured embarrassment that often makes karaoke participation so popular. It's okay if you can't sing, because you'll be enjoyably shaming yourself with song and gestures — Esaki mentioned "David Lee Roth-style jumps" as something we may do in Lips — getting those who aren't singing get into the game.

One of Lips' biggest value propositions is its ability to stream in music from MP3 players, external hard drives and Windows Media Center. When we saw the function at E3, it was still incomplete, with the promise of more information to come. According to Microsoft, your "digital rights management-free songs" will be supported by Lips, but that the title "won't be launching day one with any lyrics support." iNiS's Keiichi Yano told us at E3 that the developer had a "creative solution" coming, so we hope that this feature hasn't been dropped.

The interface for singing along with your off-soundtrack tunes will be slightly different from the core game. The Freestyle Mode will instead feature "virtual music videos" and a visualizer for melodic sing-along parts. Esaki told us that one of the more bizarre track selections he's currently playing is the Star Wars "Imperial March" theme.

It sounds like Lips has room to grow, because Esaki told us that Microsoft views the game as "a platform for experiences around music." Sound familiar?

That means that even though Avatar support isn't included out of the box, it may come in a future update.

The full Lips soundtrack is as follows.

a-ha “Take on Me”
Alicia Keys “No One”
Aly & AJ “Potential Break Up Song”
Avril Lavigne “Complicated”
Ben E. King “Stand by Me”
Beyoncé “Irreplaceable”
Blondie “Call Me”
Chris Brown “With You”
Coldplay “Yellow”
Depeche Mode “Personal Jesus”
Destiny’s Child “Survivor”
Dido “White Flag”
Duffy “Mercy”
Duran Duran “Hungry Like the Wolf”
John Denver “Take Me Home, Country Roads”
Johnny Cash “Ring of Fire”
Leona Lewis “Bleeding Love”
Lil’ Mama “Lip Gloss”
Lupe Fiasco (featuring Matthew Santos) “Superstar”
Maroon 5 “Makes Me Wonder”
Nirvana “In Bloom”
Peter Bjorn and John “Young Folks”
Queen “Another One Bites the Dust”
R.E.M. “The One I Love”
Radiohead “Fake Plastic Trees”
The Ramones “I Wanna Be Sedated”
Rascal Flatts “Stand”
Rihanna “Umbrella”
Roxette “Listen to Your Heart”
Sara Bareilles “Love Song”
Sheryl Crow “Soak Up the Sun”
Taylor Swift “I’m Only Me When I’m With You”
The Bangles “Walk Like an Egyptian”
The Fray “Over My Head (Cable Car)”
The Jackson 5 “ABC”
The Police “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic”
The Raveonettes “Love in a Trashcan”
Trace Adkins “Ladies Love Country Boys”
Weezer “Island in the Sun”
Young MC “Bust a Move”

Xbox Live Marketplace is set to feature Lips compatible music downloads at launch, but song pricing hasn't yet been revealed. Microsoft has confirmed that Estelle's "No Substitute Love" will be available from the Marketplace at launch.

Lips is planned to ship mid-November for the Xbox 360 at $69.99 USD, including two microphones.

Lips Pre-Order - Get Stuff! [Gamerscore]

...you discover the true essence about what is great about a certain song. You look at certain things and you go, 'I really like this phrase, and that’s why I like this song'; it's half a rediscovery, it’s half a digestion of the song in a different way.

You pick up things that you might not have realized if you'd just listened to it — through singing, you recognize certain nuances that you wouldn’t have noticed before. The game helps to accentuate that because of the fact that it is trying to score you.

You don't play Lips, Lips plays you.

Yano: Lips will make players 'discover the true essence of music' [develop]

"Rest assured there are things you haven't seen yet," we were told at yesterday's Lips hands-on session. "There's a lot of iNiS in there."

What does that mean exactly? Lips might not feature oddball heroes like a talking robot dog and male cheerleaders saving the lives of the less fortunate, but it has the iNiS polish. Little things, like jump-in coop play — just shake the second mic to join an in-progress game — and a perfectly honed interface, may not be the sexiest of features, but it sets a solid foundation for Lips as a more than worthy competitor to SingStar.

We got a chance to take a look at three of the confirmed songs in Lips: Duffy's "Mercy", Peter, Bjorn and John's "Young Folks" and the Young MC classic "Bust A Move." That last song features a slightly different note chart system than the more melodically driven tracks, with beat matching more important than keeping your performance in tune. Lips' syllable detection tech makes the experience feel more playable than previous hip-hop game efforts.

The iNiS touch comes through in adding replayability to each song, with a deep scoring system, six unlockable medals per song, and a leveling system making the experience more than just about having perfect pitch.

Lips is planned to ship with some 40 songs, but it also lets players stream tracks from their Zunes or iPods. It takes a few seconds to pull in a track list, but after the game recognizes your music library, you're good to go. Songs are streamed from an external device, not copied over.

So, how will you be scored on songs that aren't on the disc or purchased from the in-game store? And what about plugging in Microsoft and iNiS aren't saying. There's a "creative solution" for this, iNiS creative director Keiichi Yanno said, something that they plan to announce later.

We're looking forward to see what they have up their sleeves — Yanno sounds like he's chomping at the bit to tell us what's coming — and think that it will find a pretty big fanbase.

Other early shots give us a look at the Lips microphones that have lights on the shaft that "pulse to the rhythm of your voice" along with motion sensors that let players "dance, move or swing to score points," according to previously leaked marketing documents.

Gamekyo lists Lips as shipping in November.

Lips: first pics of the new karaoke game! [Gamekyo]

Microsoft to debut a new music game at E3 [Variety]

Joystiq writes that an anonymous tipster tells them that iNis is the go to dev for the project, which makes a lot of sense what with their beat-game background and 360 project.

Rumor: Elite Beat-dev iNiS developing Xbox 360's 'Lips' karaoke game [Joystiq]

This cosplay performance of the [spoiler alert!] last level in Moero! Nekketsu Rhythm Damashii Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan 2 may scream "amateur hour" and have a distinct lack of cheerleaders that don't look like spindly boys, but it's the thought that counts. You can barely hear the Sambomaster and the camera looks to be mounted on a radio controlled helicopter piloted by a drunk being tasered, but you have to give these attendees of Singapore's Anime@Expo EOY con credit for giving it a go.

Thanks, Michael!

However, when if there were Xbox 360 games that iNiS itself is in development on, Yano guardedly confirmed: "Yeah. We are currently working on a title. I can't really get into it more than, 'Yes, we're working on something!'" No further details on publisher or genre were available for the game.

iNiS' Yano Confirms Xbox 360 Project, Engine Development [Gamasutra]