Review: Hannah Montana Music Jam
Story
A new pop sensation, Savannah Star, is burning up the charts threatening to leave Hannah Montana yesterday’s fad. Central to Savannah’s popularity is the fact that she actually plays her own instruments. Hannah, determined not to give up without a fight, challenges Savannah to music-video-off where each pop star will produce a music video a day for four straight days to be voted on by the fans on a TRLesque show.
To help giver herself the edge, Hannah Montana teaches herself how to play her own instruments as well. And wouldn’t you know it, Hannah wins the competition!
While Hannah is busy trying to win the competition her best friend Lilly starts hanging out with the new kid at school, Josie Moore. If Miley isn’t careful to balance her work life with her personal life she is going to lose her best friend as well.
After winning the competition Hannah Montana scores a cameo on the hit tv show Zombie High. The producer decides that it would be great invite Savannah onto the show as well to fight each other in an epic dance off. Well as fate would have it Hannah and Savannah turn out to have more in common than they thought. Savannah is actually Josie and now your bff!
Presentation
This is by no means a graphical stunner but I was impressed by a lot of the presentation’s details. The game starts out in Hannah’s house and I was able to navigate it with ease because it had the exact same layout as on the show. The soundtrack was all Hannah Montana songs, well done I might add. Every word that came out of each character’s dialogue fit the character perfectly – I’d guess they got one of the writers from the show involved.
Gameplay
This is a mini game compilation broken into two genres of games.
All of the mini games associated with Hannah Montana are rhythm games. You learn to play rhythm guitar, bass guitar, lead guitar, drums, and vocals. For each of the guitar games the d-pad was your fretting (left, right, up, down, open) and you either strummed across all the strings (rhythm) or plucked a specific string (bass, lead).
This was a simple but surprisingly fun mechanic. The notes you played followed the song well and were overlay on the songs from the basic soundtrack so you really felt like your notes were adding to the song.
Drums were fun but less so. You had four drums and four cymbals to hit with your stylus. Rings centered on the correct drum would start from off screen and get smaller and smaller until it was the size of the drum which is when you needed to hit it. The issue is when several notes worth of rings are on the screen it is really hard to tell which drum you are suppose to hit next.
I think I had more fun with the vocal mini game then any other gaming in the last year and for all the wrong reasons. The game is Arkanoid complete with power ups except that you control the paddle with the pitch of your voice. Lower your pitch to move left, raise it to move right. Now the part that took this game from good to awesome for me was the paddle was looking for a specific pitch in a specific octave and in order for me to move the paddle I had to sing in falsetto. Ridiculous? Ridiculously awesome!
Miley based mini games were less memorable overall. A racing game very reminiscent of micro machines for the NES, ice skating, pizza cooking, a geometry game, ect.
Between acts was the music video editor. This was easily the low light of the game. Making a music video was as easy as picking the music, background, Hannah’s pose and clothes, and the lighting for each frame. To win the competition with Savannah you had to score a minimum number of votes with your video but getting high votes simply meant never repeating the same element twice.
I will make a special note of the music editor though. You were given more votes for making your own song instead of a stock song and the editor was pretty flexible. I made a pretty decent knock off of weezer’s sweater song for my video. Of course, those without any musical talent are doomed to fail here, a wii music syndrome so to speak.
Final Thoughts
I had a lot of fun with this game especially with the rhythm games, the music editor, and the geometry game. By no means was it ground breaking but still I genuinely enjoyed my time with it.
I think it would be fair to compare this game to Final Fantasy Fables Chocobo Tales because they are exact clones of each other only differing in their storyline material. To be fair I even went back to Chocobo Tales for a bit simply to remind myself of the game for comparisons sake.
Chocobo undoubtedly has prettier graphics. However, I found the story line to be clichéd drivel and most of the mini games to be adequate at best. I lost interest in the game 5 hours 48 minutes and 40 seconds in (horray for playtime clocks!) and going back to it now was more painful than fun.
For my time and money I prefer Hannah Montana Music Jam to Chocobo’s Tale. As hard as it will be for some to swallow, this was actually a pretty good game.
