Hannah Montana: Music Jam Review

Nothing will make you lose credibility as a hardcore gamer faster than buying a Hannah Montana game. Hey, wait! Hear me out! Though this comes packaged in a girly presentation, hidden within is a rather spiffy music creation tool. It’s commendable that Disney would go to the effort of putting this in when last year’s Hannah Montana had nothing of the sort. Oh, but… I wouldn’t know anything about that game. I don’t! Please believe me…

So let’s get right to the good stuff. Hannah Montana: Music Jam features four instruments: rhythm guitar, bass guitar, lead guitar, and drums. Hmmmm. That’s just enough to start a band. And that’s essentially what the game wants you to do. You can link up with three other people (who have to have a copy of the game themselves) and record your jam sessions in one-minute intervals. Or you can go solo and record each instrument separately, overlapping them one by one. Unfortunately, the rhythm guitar track has to be recorded first. And once you’ve saved it, you can’t go back and edit it. You can re-record the other three instruments all you want, but the rhythm guitar is the glue that holds it all together and has to stay put. Kind of a bummer, really.

It’s apparent the rhythm guitar was the main focus, and it ends up being the best instrument of the lot. It sounds great and is easy to use. At its most basic level, you strum the guitar with the stylus. But you can also switch between electric and acoustic on the fly, cut off the sound with the L button, jiggle the whammy bar, and change the chords using the D-pad. If you’re left-handed, you can use the X, Y, A, and B buttons instead, but, for some stupid reason, none of the other options change sides. So it requires a bit if tricky handwork to pull some things off. This is no Jam Sessions, though, and you’re not going to see quite as many chords available. There are only a handful of chord sets to choose from, and you can only take three with you when you’re ready to record. To make up for this, Hannah Montana lets you pluck individual strings, something Jam Sessions omitted. Because all the strings are on screen at once, it can be difficult to hit the right ones, but I love having this option, anyway.

As for the other instruments, they are nice but not as fleshed-out. Lead guitar lets you bend strings to change the pitch and offers plenty of notes to be a good accompaniment to the rhythm guitar. Bass, however, has a mind of its own. While you can slap or strum the strings to produce different sounds, the notes it plays change depending on where the rhythm is. It’s a bit unpredictable. Then there’s the drum kit, which actually holds up really well. There are four drums and four cymbals, one of which is an adjustable hi-hat, and that’s enough to get some basic beats. The nice thing about the drum kit is that you can use buttons instead of tapping on the screen to play. But you may find that it requires a combination of the two to really get going. The volume of the drums is very quiet compared to the guitars, though. These are drums! They’re supposed to be loud!

All things told, Hannah Montana’s music creation mode is cool but is certainly not the end-all of DS music games. Each of these instruments could have had so much more added to them, and the recording process is frustrating in its restrictiveness. Nonetheless, I’ve had a lot of fun mixing my own songs. To get the most out of this game, though, you will probably want to hook your DS up to your computer and record the tracks that way instead of directly onto the game. But being able to store multiple recordings in-game is still a nice feature that Electroplankton should have been doing before it .

What about the rest of the game, though? It wouldn’t be fair to only look at the music portion. But once you’ve seen the adventure mode, you’ll wonder how such a neat music-maker managed to get stuck in the same game. The adventure mode is too, too sugary and girly. A la the show, you play as Miley who periodically changes into her superstar alter-ego, Hannah Montana. In this game, Hannah Montana’s popularity is threatened by an up-and-coming pop singer, Savannah Star. As you travel between your house, the mall, the beach, and other locations, you’ll have to do things that keep your fans and your friends happy (or at least, happier than Savannah Star keeps them). And what better way to do so than to play a bunch of dumb mini-games?

WarioWare created the notion of microgames, and Hannah Montana goes in the opposite direction. These are, like, long-games. Oh man, that’s hilarious! Seriously, though, these mini-games are not very exciting but drag on, like, forever. I need to stop saying that. One mini-game requires you to tap different poses for Hannah as the silhouettes of those poses slide by. It’s so boring and lasts for three minutes, if not more. Even on the hardest difficulty, it’s not much of a challenge. There are some music-related mini-games, however, that are marginally enjoyable. The drum games play out like Elite Beat Agents, and the rhythm guitar games are like a watered-down Guitar Hero. But, again, they aren’t very hard and only feature 3-4 songs. I would rather have seen the developers focus more on these music games and do away with the adventure altogether.

The last part of every chapter in the adventure mode is the music video contest. Here, you can pool all the unlocked poses, costumes, special effects, and backdrops together to create a music video that either plays one of the four pre-made songs or your own song. A nifty addition is the ability to upload these videos to the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. But before you pee your pants with excitement, this comes with one major caveat: you can’t use your own music. What’s up with that?! I was really excited at the prospect of being able to listen to other people’s creations. Why, oh why, would I even care about what poses they used in their video? A missed opportunity.

Final Comments

If you are at all interested in this game, I’m sure it is for the music creation side alone. At least, I really hope that is the case. But then, you are probably torn between getting Hannah Montana and getting Jam Sessions. The former’s guitar simulator isn’t as robust or as complete as Jam Sessions, but it does allow you to pluck individual strings and is accompanied by three other equally simple instruments. I guess it depends on how serious you are about having a guitar tool/toy at your disposal. If you are no guru and just want to fiddle around with making music on the go, Hannah Montana isn’t such a bad choice. If you’re going to buy it, though, just make sure you also have something like Touch the Dead in your collection so people know you are a well-rounded individual.