Red Box: Rock, Dine and Roll
Thinking of a place to hang out with your friends, co-workers or family? You should consider checking out Red Box: Rock, Dine and Roll. Yes redefines KTV with it's revamped brand. It's not only a place to have fun singing but it's also a place to dine and play. In short, it's for everyone! All Rock Dine and Roll locations are equipped with the the most popular songs minus the usual corny video. You know what I'm talking about.
The Red Box we went to was the Eastwood branch. It's located in the topmost floor of the new mall beside cinema 7. The signage looked big and inviting. It looked very cool from the outside
If you don't want to be seen by other people going to Red Box Eastwood, you can park at the basement elevator entrance of the hotel and take the lift. The escalator will take you inside Red Box bypassing the main entrance.
The Eastwood branch of Red Box has about 30 rooms that can accommodate different group sizes.
There are regular sized rooms that could fit a comfortable 10 people. Each room had 2 wired microphones. There are also large sized rooms that can accommodate 50 people. One of their largest rooms is actually a merger of 2 rooms. There's a retractable panel that divides the 2 room. Simply open the folding panel and voila, you have one large room with 2 sets of KTV. Of course it might not be a good idea to keep the rooms open with both the machines being used.
For smokers, you can hang out in this shared room with transparent windows. It's still fully air conditioned so you need not worry about getting sweaty. Although I couldn't say the same once people you don't know starts coming in and listen while you sing.
If you're a group of girls and guys, girls having the desire to sing and guys having the urge to play, this room is for you. There's both a karaoke set and a billiards table you can use for free (I'll explain later the costing). There's also rooms you can play console games in so if you're a bunch of guys who want's to either play the rockband or just plain play the console, you can also get it here. I wasn't able to see what consoles and games they have available so you should probably ask before going.
Let's get to the pricing.
If you go within the lunch hour (12PM - 3PM), you pay P399 for an Eat
all you can Lunch Buffet with 1 free drink and room use from 12PM - 3PM.
If you're only staying for an hour, you just pay P199 for the buffet
and 1 hour of room use.
Go within 7PM - 12MN and fork only P499 for 2 drinks and room use within those same hours. Add P199 to avail the dinner buffet. The buffet however is only available within Sundays to Thursdays only
If you go within the happy hours of 3PM - 7PM, you only pay P299 inclusive of 2 drinks and room use within those hours
For insomniacs, there's after hours of 12MN - 3AM. Pay P299 and get 2 drinks and room use within those hours. Available only on Friday and Saturday.
It looks as if it's a promotional price but it's not. It's actually their regular price. See the pricing here on Red Box Facebook page. Note that the pricing differs per branch.
What's notable here is that all prices are on a per head basis. This means that if you are on a solo flight or on a mission to practice singing or killing time while waiting for something or someone, you can go alone! Yes you can have 1 whole room to yourself. No minimum headcount required. That is so unlike other KTV places.
The food we tried that night was good enough for the price. There's chicken, pork, fish and vegetables. There's even a salad and dessert station. Not bad. Not bad at all.
The sounds was quite nice. You could easily control the audio of the music, the volume of the microphone and you could even change the pitch of the song. The latter is especially great for those with high and low voices who want to sing a song that isn't their normal pitch.
A romantic date? Why not? Remember, there's no minimum head count for any rooms
I wasn't able to take photos of the remote but it was about one and a half iPhone. What I liked about the remote is that you could hold it with one hand. Some KTV bars have those remote that was so large (probably because it had a full qwerty keyboard) that you couldn't hold it in one hand. My issue with the Red Box remote however was that it wasn't very easy to operate. You had to read the provided laminated remote guide to understand how it works. But once you get the hang of it, you would find yourself saving one song after another.
A few of the old songs only had a blue background which looked a bit dull. I'd rather have the corny video than a blue screen.
I did however appreciate the fact that they put another screen below (see photo above) to browse through songs. The upside for this is that you don't need to pass on those bulky song books to browse thought the songs you like. The downside is only the person holding the remote could get to browse through the songs. For me, I would prefer doing away with the song books. What I usually do is I browse though the song one by one by scrolling one page at a time on the music selection screen.
One of the most important thing lacking in the music selection screen is the search mode. There's no way of directly looking for a song. You had to either go to the artist menu to see if the song you like is available or go to the song title menu and browse the song arranged alphabetically.
Red Box never did have a scoring mode which I always find amusing. Even you sang really bad, the machine scored it high. You just had to sing loud. I always get a hoot out of that.
Another downside is that some of the newer songs only had an MTV that had vocals you couldn't remove. What's the point of going to a KTV bar if that's the case right? Maybe they would improve their system soon.
For more information, log on to Red Box: Rock, Dine and Roll Facebook page
