Party Night Diva

Celebrities are everywhere. They're on the covers of magazines and make headlines on 24-hour news channels. It was inevitable they would permeate gaming, too. You can find fame-tinged titles on any format you care to mention, including mobile phones.

Party Night Diva is Digital Chocolate's attempt to make you feel Paris Hilton (although not literally, we hope). It's a casual title that lets you attend Hollywood parties and sweet-talk the hottest stars into becoming your friends, filling your apartment with trendy furniture and propelling your fame level through the stardom stratosphere.

As you progress through the game you acquire star ratings, and these accumulate as you talk to various heart-throbs and beauties. Each time you succeed in charming one of them, you ascend another rung of the ladder, unlocking a new level of stardom that requires more verbal finesse, drink-mixing genius and fancy footwork to sufficiently impress.

Better individual performances fill up a rudimentary but functional star rating – score over three and you'll have made an acquaintance to drag back to your place for yet more partying. Your scores over the three mini-games that make up Party Night Diva are combined and, naturally, it gets more difficult to impress as you start encountering loftier folk who are ruthless when it comes to turning up their noses at you.

The first mini-game challenges you to pick a partner and dazzle them with conversational compatibility, by choosing topics that range from television and money to movie-making and music. Occasionally you'll even find someone interested in politics.

You select the topics from a list at the bottom of the screen and your choices are reflected in banks of pictures progressing upwards, with small circles appearing after your guesses: grey means that you've picked correct subjects but in the wrong order, and the elusive gold denotes a perfect selection. The better you do, the more the celeb likes you.

The second is the best game of the lot. You have to mix the perfect cocktail by deftly selecting four of each ingredient on a circular serving tray with the '5' key. This segment of Party Night Diva requires the most skill, especially as you progress through the ten levels offered, all of which are well-balanced on a smooth and manageable difficulty curve.

Like many Saturday night disasters, booze makes people want to dance. This introduces the third game: a musical affair where you need to press the '4', '6' and '8' keys in time to various beats in order to show off your moves. It's not too precise, though, as the biggest scores seem to come when you're furiously clicking anything because there's a deluge of beats approaching.

Cartoon-style graphics help the atmosphere. Like its brother Party Night Casanova, these exude a distinct style that's both endearing and accessible. Unfortunately, the characters are constructed from basic torsos and heads, with the colours changed, rather than being individually drawn.

As for the tunes, they're full of sassy, Sex and the City attitude, with several songs being used to differentiate between the various sections. But it does get repetitive after a while, so perhaps turning on silent mode to avoid a happy-slap on the way to work is the best option.

Still, overall Party Night Diva takes the popular party-game format and wraps it up in a Britney-beating night out (again, not literally we hope). The mini-games are all competent enough, and the pink, glittery graphics create a suitably entertaining distraction for those boring bus journeys when you wish you could climb the Tinseltown ladder for real.