High School Musical

High School Musical is apparently one of the Disney Channel's most successful creations ever. Unfortunately, as we don't avidly tune into the Disney Channel, it's completely passed us by.

However, the game has since taught us it's like a modern-day, made-for-TV Grease musical, which stars a lot of clear-skinned, bright eyed teenagers who look like they've never given their parents a second of trouble in the whole of their short lives.

It has also reinforced the notion that a decent film doesn't necessarily equate to a decent game. And how.

You start off by having four games to choose from, each featuring a different character from the film. There's Singing, Dancing, Basketball and Scholastic Decathlon (which won't mean much unless you were educated in the US – think of it as a big school competition).

The selection of play options may seem diverse, but it's an expectation that's soon shattered when you realise three of them are essentially the same rhythm-based button-pushing affair. What's more, all are set to the same annoying song, which sounds like the sort of instrumental effort you got pre-loaded with your Casio keyboard when you were six (for those that are old enough to remember it, naturally).

First up, then, is Singing. This gives you four circles in each corner of the screen, with your character standing in the middle. The numbers '4', '6', '7' and '9' correspond to these corners and when a note floats into the screen and over a circle, you simply press the right key to 'sing' it.

Unlike most rhythm-action games, you don't have to keep pressing the button at the right time to the music – you just need to have it highlighted when the note passes through. As they don't do this in accordance to the tempo (and also because the circles are so near the corners of the screen you get about one second's notice the note is coming), it's actually for the best. It just makes for a stupefyingly dull game.

Unsurprisingly, Dancing is also a rhythm game, just one that uses the numbered keys that run vertically down the centre of the phone ('2', '5', '8' and '0') and a slightly different format. Again set to the same twee song, it emerges as the perfect demonstration of how easy it is to mash the wrong button playing a mobile game when the controls are badly thought out (although we'll concede that on some handsets this may prove less of a problem).

Scholastic Decathlon, meanwhile, is by far the most tedious of the four games. Which, believe us, is some achievement. Apparently it's meant to be a maths test, simulated by repeating the Dancing mechanic but replacing the four circles in each corner of the screen with equation symbols. And instead of pressing buttons as musical notes pass over them, you watch a sequence of highlighted symbols, memorise it, then repeat it.

The (slight) twist is that not only has this to be done in the right order, but also to the right rhythm. But seeing as the rhythm doesn't match the backing song (yes, that same irritating melody), that's quite tough to do right.

By comparison, Basketball stands out. It would be way too generous to say it's High School Musical's saving grace, though – it's just the best of a dismal bunch. In it, you simply score as many baskets as you can by stopping a bar on a meter in the right places. It's no different from what you get in every sports title ever made, then, except most sports titles have the rest of a game as well as the meter-stopping. Here, this is the game.

Plough, if you're able, through the four offerings and there is at least some reward for your pain – assuming you're the kind of High School Musical fan who thrives on the smallest of details (and may already possess a collection of anti-stalking restraining orders in your name).

Still, fulfill certain score-based criteria on the different stages (each game has ten stages and three difficulty levels), and you unlock a bit of trivia about one of the four main characters. For instance, did you know that, during filming, Gabriella's sweater didn't originally come with sparkles on it, prompting the costume designer to take it to someone and have the sparkles added on?

Probably not, and why would you? It's possibly the most pointless in-game bonus we've ever had to unlock. We're only hoping we can now forget it and don't end up regurgitating it at a party when we're next short of something to say to someone we fancy.

Because that happening would be the only thing that could make us dislike High School Musical more than we already do.