Parent's Guide: We Sing: 80s - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

As you may have guessed from the name, We Sing 80s is a karaoke game for the Wii, packed full of those hits you remember from the formative decade. With a healthy dose of cheese, drum machines and leg warmers, all you need to do is plug in enough microphones to go round and decide on a song or twelve to play, and you're set for a night of karaoke nostalgia.

Once the song starts, all you have to do is sing along with the pitch bars and lyrics appearing on screen, with the bars height and length giving you a visual indication of what you have to sing, and how long you need to sing for, as you work towards a high score.

Of course, the decade of choice means this perhaps isn't the best choice for the young 'uns, purely due to their potential lack of familiarity with many of the songs - unless you happen to blast them out the car stereo on the school run, anyway. That said, if they know the songs well enough or can read well enough to pick out the lyrics (or they could always go for the old fail-safe of humming along), they'll probably relish the opportunity to croon along with everyone. There's no scope for failing a song if you're not very good either, so there's no need to worry if you're tone deaf - although you might want to provide your audience with ear plugs first.

Some games are made for multiplayer - and the We Sing series is definitely one of them, with masses of multiplayer choices for up to four players. Depending on your mood, you might fancy a bit of co-operation in the standard We Sing mode, where everyone co-operates for the best score or Pass The Mic, where each person gets to sing a section of the song, before passing the microphone onto the next randomly selected player. There's also a fair few competitive modes, from the standard Versus and Team Battle, where it's a competition for the highest score, either individually or in teams. Marathon lets you set up a list of songs to sing through, with the person with the highest score being declared the winner, Blind has the sound and lyrics disappearing at random intervals leaving just you and your memory to fend for themselves, and Expert is for the serious karaoke singers, as there's no lyrics or pitch bars shown on the screen at all. Phew!

Being a karaoke game, We Sing 80s is pretty clean - they're the sort of games that are at the mercy of the songs they include. Usually skipping over/blanking out/replacing any naughty words in songs, you can be reasonably safe in the knowledge that there'll be nothing untoward in the games. But what is probably worth a mention is the inclusion of the 'Pass the Dutchie' song, with 'Dutchie' having now become a slang term for drugs - even if the song (which was itself a cover) had it's lyrics changed in an effort to move away from it's association with cannabis.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Nintendo Wii