Schamlippen!

My husband loves him some video games. I am quite tolerant of most video games, but especially like to watch him play games with a clear storyline like Spiderman 3 or any GTA. I can live without the Halos and the Call of Duties. These games are best played on weekend afternoons when I am out of the house and after 11pm when I am in bed.

My husband is very smart. He knows that the best way for me to continue to enable his Xbox habit is through participation. After noting my excellent Rock Band vocals, CinS decided to buy me a new game, Lips.

Lips is a karaoke game that comes pre-loaded with karaoke favorites like Hungry Like the Wolf, Call Me, and my personal karaoke go-to song - Bust A Move. But the beauty of Lips is that it also lets you upload your own music from your MP3 player. Yes, that's right. You can wail Avril Lavigne and OK Go and Paramore and all of your personal cheesy, dance-around-the-room pop against a video backdrop of a giant cobra licking an enormous ice cream cone. BEST GAME EVER!

CinS brought Lips home on Thursday night and we were so excited to play. We loaded up the Xbox, and after 20 minutes of CinS personalizing his new XBox Live avatar, we were ready to rock out.

The Lips opener is rad. There is a crowded party, and two lonely souls sit awkwardly alone on two opposite sides of a couch. The guy looks at the girl, smiles, and picks up a wayward microphone from a beer-can-strewn coffee table. He starts to sing the lyrics of that whistling song, Yong Folks. The girl finds her own mic and joins in. True love.

After the opener, the menu appears. Entirely written in German.

I've never seen so many umlauts in my life.

Yes, our version of Lips is German. The available songs are all US favorites – not a Hasselhoff tune in sight – but all the instructions, encouragement, and results are in German. We played anyway.

CinS and I made it through about 4 songs, screaming random German phrases at one another, before we gave up. While it would be totally awesome to have kept the German game for its novelty value, we decided to return it. The vocals weren’t synched with the game and it was driving me crazy. So when you come over and play our totally vanilla, English version of Lips, you can blame it on me.