SingStar hits 20m sold, gets big patch

Sony has announced that the SingStar series has reached more than 20 million sales, five and a half years after London Studio's singing game first launched on PS2.

Coincidentally, today also marks the release of the big old 4.3 patch, which fixes a lot of the calamitous bugs from last time out and introduces new features to the SingStore, MySingStarOnline and even the game itself.

When you're viewing somebody's media clips - i.e. Ellie wearing a wig - you can now click a "Quick Buy" button if you decide you want to buy the song, and this transfers you directly to its SingStore listing.

There's also an extremely dangerous-sounding thing called "SingStore On Demand", where you can preview SingStore songs directly from the Song Selection screen in-game. At least when you had to jump through hoops to go to the shop you could try to not spend 15 quid every other Friday. Thanks Sony.

Elsewhere there's a new "What's Hot?" section showing a mixture of popular and high-profile content, an option to transfer club leadership, another to bookmark favourite media clips in MySingStarOnline, and an option to "Download all purchased songs again", which sounds handy.

Nothing too drastic has gone on in-game, but apparently you can now choose names from XMB profiles rather than having to type them in when you're setting things up, and there's also a child-friendly alternative to the end-of-song screen.

For more details, check out the PlayStation blog.