HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL: DVD Game

"Get'cha Head in the Game!"

Sing! Dance! Act! Play! Those promising words on the box art of the High School Musical: DVD Game are to get you all hopped up to express all of your song and dance talents in the comfort of your own home, just like the kids in the ubiquitous movie series. And you know what? This DVD Game isn't half bad and pretty much delivers what it promises.

The disc is chock full of games of various participation levels. For some of the choices, you can sit on your 'tocks alone on your couch and play the game just fine. In other cases, a game begs for a room full of squealing girls pushing the furniture aside to allow for full jumping up and down participation. If this disc wasn't made for slumber parties, I'll eat a microphone.

Of the sit-on-your-butt variety, the games that are the most fun are the "East High Graduation Challenge," which offers an endless trivia quiz (literally endless), and a funny "BFFs" quiz (Best Friends Forever, for those of you who have been living in a cave), where you and your pals answer multiple-choice questions about each other... if you guess the answer that your friend selected about themselves, why, you're BFFs (my co-hort player guessed more answers correctly about me than vice-versa... her questions were harder! gosh!). I also enjoyed the "Career Finder Quiz," which gives players a series of questions, then tells them their ideal careers. Apparently I'm supposed to be a Yoga Instructor, and my friend a Zookeeper. We felt those should have been switched, but it was still good for a laugh.

If you want to get up and dance, you literally can with "Prom Night," a Dance Dance Revolution-style game where you follow the dance steps (this one made me tired, but I could totally see getting into it if you love the dancing in the movies). Or if you want to sing, there are just-for-fun karaoke-style videos featuring songs from all three High School Musical movies. Most of these have been available on the DVD releases of the first two movies, but there are some tunes from HSM3, so fans will get excited about that while they wait for the latest movie to get its regular DVD release.

The 'tween set should love this disc, and there is enough of a variety of games that you can find stuff to enjoy as a single player, as well as plenty of games that groups of players can play together. For a change, the game is impressively easy to manuever with a regular DVD remote control, and, for the most part, the games uniformly use the same up/down/left/right arrows as their main gaming buttons. High School Musical: DVD Game is a perfect match for its audience, plus it offers enough fun to entertain the less-hardcore fans that may be forced to submit to the fun.