Disney High School Musical - Sing It!

The microphone is the whole point here. Buena Vista Games built this around the PlayStation 2's USB mic support, and the bundled hardware tells you who the audience was: fans of the Disney Channel film who wanted to sing its songs, not players hunting for leaderboard bragging rights.

The structure follows the karaoke template that SingStar had already made familiar on the console. Lyrics scroll on screen, a pitch indicator tracks how closely your voice matches the original melody, and a score rewards accuracy. The songs come from the High School Musical film, and the game leans on its footage and imagery to dress the performances. I won't claim more detail on modes than I can stand behind, but the core is singing along and being graded for it.

That grading is where a game like this lives or dies, and pitch detection of this era was forgiving but blunt. Children sing flat, sing loud and sing the wrong words, and a scoring system has to stay encouraging through all of it. A game aimed at a young audience gets away with generosity that a serious karaoke title could not.

As a piece of PS2 history it belongs to the late-generation scramble to turn licensed hits into microphone games. The console had the install base, the peripherals were cheap, and a film with a soundtrack this popular was an easy sell. Nobody was asking for innovation, and nobody got it.

Today it works only if you already like the songs. Without that affection there is little here to hold an adult for long, and the presentation is functional rather than inventive. With it, and a few friends willing to be embarrassed, it still does its small job. A tie-in this narrow in ambition is hard to criticise for missing a target it never aimed at.