Hands on with Disney's Jonas DS

How many games have a stress meter? Not many I reckon, but then again when you're the world famous Jonas brothers, the demands of the celebrity lifestyle can leave you frazzled. Those poor, poor dears.

Still top marks to developer Altron for its design choices in this DS game, which is based around you guiding Kevin, Joe, and Nick through various episodes of their Disney TV series.

I'd imagine there's a strong temptation to make these sort of tie-in games quickly and without too much thought, but playing the game at E3 suggests this one isn't (just) a cash-in.

There are 6 levels or episodes, each of which is split into two elements: wandering around the town where the Jonas' live, completing tasks and the like, before ending with you completing a guitar-based rhythm-action mini-game. All of the songs are new for the game and once you've unlocked them, you'll be able play them on request.

As with the Guitar Hero games, the rhythm-action part works as notes drop down the DS screen onto your guitar, spread across four columns. What you have to do is select the correct column using the D-pad - there's one column for each direction, up, down, left and right. Then with your stylus, you have to strum on the guitar's string area when the falling note passes through.

Surprisingly, it was difficult to get the hang of this, until a helpful Disney person pointed that you can hold down the D-pad while the notes are falling. It's the strum you have to time correctly. After this, things improved drastically.

In terms of the adventure part of the game, you start off in the brothers' house. Our first task was to fix the Stellavator, which was accomplished by finding and tapping on music speakers to fill up a power bar. To trigger this, you play a short version of the musical mini-game. You can then interact with the various pieces of equipment and get the Stellavator working again.

At any point in the game, you can switch between the three brothers. This links back to the stress meter as if any of the brothers gets too stressed, by being chased by fans and the like, you'll have to swap them. In this way, the stress meter works like a health meter in other games.

Of course, customising the brothers' outfits is another key part of action in terms of item collection and replayability. Indeed, you'll have to get certain items to access different parts of the game. As well as the firehouse location, you will be able to move around the town and enter familiar places such as the school.

We should also note at this point that the game with its cell-shaded graphics looked and played pretty well. Movement was controlled by the stylus, with your Jonas running to wherever you tapped the screen.

So far, all looking good then. The only thing that did confuse me was the characters weren't actually labelled as the Jonas brothers. For some reason I couldn't work out, the in-game characters were actually the Lucas brothers - some sort of bad alter-egos - who played in a band called Jonas. Presumably it will become clear in the future TV series.