Review: High School Musical Sing It! for Nintendo Wii

This is going to be a quick review as we've only played the game a few times. The real info comes in what I heard when the wife tried to start playing... You see, our daughter got High School Musical Sing It! for the Wii on her birthday (oh, yeah, we got a Wii over the holidays, yay!). She's a big fan of HSM, and a kindergartner, so we figured this would be a good match.

Sadly, the game makes having fun far too difficult. One of the best things about the Wii is the intuitive menu system. This sounds esoteric, but a complex device like a modern game machine actually requires finesse to make things "just work" without the usual screaming and frustration you'd find on your average PC. So when you go to do something, you find that it is really pretty easy to do, or it is obvious as to *what* you should do.

But HSM Sing It! completely drops the ball. I don't know if the geniuses at Disney Interactive were just lazy or mad or what, but I haven't seen an interface this frustrating since Windows ME. For example, we still can't figure out how to sing as a girl, so for a LONG time you'll have to sing as Troy. Because clearly 10-year-old boys are the target audience (!?!?!). And when you're in story mode, you'll be there for the forseeable future, as every time you try to bolt out of it, the game warns you: "ALL YOUR DATA WILL NOT BE SAVED." That's just bad game design-- let me save when I'm done with a song! In fact, the stuff you unlock is saved, but your progress isn't saved, which means you'll be singing the same several songs over and over and over again until the game decides it will smile upon you and finally save your data. Totally lame.

Worse still, the absolute basics are convoluted. We wound up naming our character "A" because that's all it would let us do. Menuing back and forth is like the world's most confusing corn maze. The gameplay is good, but not great, and you'll be wishing for a more complete playlist sooner than you think (would it have been so hard to include a couple of other Disney songs?).

Unless you're willing to slog through menus that make no sense, settings that don't stick and a very unforgiving save mechanism, this is really only for the hard-core HSM fan. Luckily my daughter IS such a creature, and thus far hasn't been completely disillusioned by the crappy game scheme outside the gameplay itself.

More reviews coming!

Coming soon, reviews of:
- Imaginext, the pirate ship, a dinosaur, the castle and the jungle playset
- Leapster (not the max), plus about 6 games (details people, you won't find 'em anywhere else!)
- Hot Wheels tracks vs. the knockoffs
- DC SuperFriends figures (Green Lantern, Flash, Batman and Superman) from Mattel, for younger kids

Stay tuned!

LEGO people marching

LEGO people marching
Originally uploaded by toyblogging.

LEGO's are some of the most fun, expansive toys you can buy. We recently got a big box of LEGO's that span a couple of generations. Problem is, when you get these old sets there are a lot of pieces missing. The other, bigger problem, is that you get a lot of flat "base" pieces. These are the flats that come with small sets, but you can only use them as a base (they don't have the female brick side on the bottom-- it is just flat).

So if you are first introducing your kids to LEGO, after stepping up from Duplo, we recommend you strip out all those confusing ray guns, hinges, and flat pieces. Stick to blocks! The little tiny buttons are cool, but tough to build with. The long, skinny flat "connectors" are useful, but will only aggravate kids who don't yet understand how to connect things.

But if the LEGO set is a bunch of blocks? You can't go wrong. People are nice too, but our daughter spent her first round with them ripping off their heads and stacking them. Cute, but annoying, as we then had to put them all together again so none got lost!

Stick with blocks and kids will spend hours just building stuff.

rocket belt pic

www.tecaeromex.com-13
Originally uploaded by Smiles for the world.

Disappeared from the previous post!