Songs from 'High School Musical' showcased in rhythm game

— -- Riding the success of High School Musical 2, the direct-to-TV Disney movie that aired Aug. 17 to record numbers of viewers, Disney Interactive has released High School Musical: Makin' the Cut, a video game for the Nintendo DS that features the songs and cast of both the original movie and the sequel. This game is about playing rhythm puzzles as you listen to the music from the movies.

The game uses 12 songs as the background music for the series of rhythm puzzles. Each puzzle appears on the bottom touch-sensitive screen while a performance featuring cartoon versions of the movies' stars appears in the top screen. How well you do in the rhythm puzzle affects how the performers dance in the top screen. Mess up, and they fall down in the middle of their performance.

To play the rhythm puzzles, you must coordinate four different actions: tapping, sliding over arrows, tracing patterns and moving basketballs through a hoop. The majority of the puzzle play involves tapping icons. An icon appears on the lower touch-sensitive screen surrounded by a circle meter that gradually fills with color from yellow to green. The object is to tap the icon when it is green. As the puzzles get harder, the icons appear more often and in faster sequences. Your ability to hit the icons at the right time is graded, as is your talent to repeat the process without mistakes.

The game offers four modes of play: story, quickplay, video studio and multiplayer. In the story mode, High School Musical stars Troy, Gabriella, Sharpay, Ryan, Chad and Taylor need your help as they travel to four locations to compete for the title of "Best Youth Musical in America." The narrative, while weak, is playable on four levels of difficulty presented as local, state, regional and national competitions. After playing a puzzle in the story mode, you unlock it in the other modes.

Quickplay lets you replay a puzzle for a better grade and create a custom character to perform it. In the video studio mode, you can watch what happened on the top screen while you were playing a puzzle, and then edit it by changing camera angles and adding lighting and special effects. Multiplayer lets you compete in the rhythm puzzles against another who also owns the game. You can also share your in-game-created video performances.