According to the BUPA website, consumption of alcohol can lead to personality disorders, liver and kidney damage, dependency and premature ageing. Alcoholics Anonymous points out that nationally nearly 18% of people regularly binge drink over twice the recommended level. I believe there is an underlying cause for this health crisis in the making - not one of rising levels of depression, of the spiralling cost of living strengthening escapist impulses, or even extending opening hours.

Karaoke.

Yes - I can see the light of realisation in your eye now. It all makes sense. What other force in the world can turn the honest salaryman into a lurching, shouting, sweaty beast even before he's had a half dozen pink gins? Where else will alcohol no longer be 'a social facilitator' but a stone cold necessity if you're going to commit an utterly unnatural act in public? What other group activity actually has a direct correlation between its enjoyability and volume of Pina Colada consumed per person? I think its time Daily Mail readers banned this sick filth sharpish.

Until the crackdown comes, the best and most reliably enjoyable way for you and your friends to facilitate your habit remains the PlayStation 2 (and by reverse compatibility PS3) and the series, most lately with SingStar Pop. For those that haven't run into this enormously compulsive social menace as yet, the SingStar series are karaoke software models that have different playlists of about 30 loosely genre related tracks plugged into them to make SingStar Rocks, SingStar 80's, SingStar Gilbert & Sullivan Operetta, etc. The latest incarnation is SingStar Pop, with an eclectic mix that confusingly includes Manfred Mann and The Clash as well as more standard pop-ish fare such as Ashlee Simpson, Beyonce and Girls Aloud.

In buying the full game pack, you'll get two pleasingly solid and professional feeling USB microphones that will slot into your PlayStation with the minimum of fuss and configuration troubles. The closest players will get to tweaking settings is turning the volume of the microphones up and down using the controllers shoulder buttons, which means even the most technical illiterate or inebriate party should have no troubles.

The game system works by running the song with upcoming lyrics overlaid on the video at the bottom of the screen in traditional karaoke style. The key feature of the SingStar titles is the series of horizontal bars that will cruise from right to left across the screen as gauges of your singing prowess. Hit the right pitch and timing and these bars will fill up - start mangling the song and they will be patchy or empty, and you score and rating will be counted accordingly. This is pretty much as complicated as the concept gets, and can be grasped in seconds. One of the strongest aspects of the SingStar series is the ability to introduce your mates with the bare minimum of explanation or instruction.

The correlations between alcohol imbibitions and Karaoke are indeed manifold - as doing either as a social activity is acceptable, but sitting in your home alone doing either speaks of a problem and impending psychosis. There is a singleplayer function in SingStar, but there should be a thick layer of virtual dust over that option button compared with the party modes of Battle, Duet, and Pass the Mic. Battle is probably the true heart of the game, where two players take a microphone each and yodel away to the same track and the score will be tabulated at the end, the winner announced and apportioned slightly less shame and mockery than the loser, now bring forth the next challenger to the Mighty Mic Master and yes another lager would be lovely.

The other party modes include Duet, which is the slightly less rewarding co-operative mode, and Pass The Mic mode which enables up to 8 participants to hack away at the same song in a relay fashion.

The SingStar software is typically pretty well put together, and the simplicity of the product ensures that most users will have no problems with it. The games interpretation of what is the right pitch and timing can sometimes be debatable - not that I ever saw any of the tracks actually sung well per se - but this can be countered by altering the difficulty level in the options menu. As the audio tracks seem to be encoded on the disk as audio rather than digitally embedded, there is the possibility once in a while for the audio to slip out of sequence with the pitch bars, but should this happen a quick restart of the track solves the problem and provides a moment to top up the fizzy white wine.

One of the more unholy options is the chance to plug up your EyeToy as well as your microphone. Shy of trying to interact with your or 3 with only the focused power of your mind, you have now plugged both of the most notoriously problematic ways of interacting with a games console in at the same time. This alone should warn you of the imminent danger. With the EyeToy, the video background will now be replaced with the sight of you gripping the mic and crooning your heart out. When a little gold icon pops up at big moment in the song, you'll be recorded for posterity, so strike an appropriately power ballad pose. The drawback of this is that ideally you are already singing in the company of friends, so TV projection is a little redundant, or your singing alone and thus seeing yourself up there is going to shatter any little comfy illusion of your own competence that you might have been enjoying. The inclusion of the EyeToy seems to suggest the designers did not appreciate that the game was already a ludicrous enough party experience in itself and needed no further help. The same can be said for the option to replay you last attempts without the benefit of the professional backing singers, and then further warp it in 'Chipmunk' or 'Robot' style. Trust me - you sounded shocking in the first place, its not going to get any funnier to your friends or any worse artistically.

The soundtrack really is the last grumble you can legitimately level at this series of solid and ultimately highly amusing party titles. This Pop incarnation seems to have the least cohesive concept regarding its genre, having mixed 80's karaoke favourites with obscure quasi-modern popular hits and songs that are just instant losers in a karaoke context. Everybody now - Ain't no party like a Keane party cos' a Keane party don't start. SingStar probably hit their apogee with SingStar 80's - as hammering out Erasure 'A Little Respect' or channelling the spirit of big hair with Foreigner 'I Want to Know What Love Is' is going to be a massively better party moment than following a Fountains of Wayne track no one had ever heard.

SingStar Pop is probably one of the less appealing line ups in the series, but will still defiantly hit all the right buttons with you and your cohorts after coming back from the pub of an evening. The SingStar titles can be bought with or without mics, so if this is your first foray into karaoke you can later pick up some of the additional disks after having exhausted the appeal of some of these tracks. Remember kids - dinking alcohol is not big, nor is it clever, but in conjunction with SingStar Pop it will probably be a great deal of fun.

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By Duncan Lawson