Disney Sing It - High School Musical 3 - Senior Year

By late 2008 the PlayStation 2 had become the machine you bought for the family room rather than the enthusiast's shelf, and karaoke discs were one of the few genres still treating it as a first-class platform. That is the context for this one: a microphone game aimed squarely at kids who had worn out the first two High School Musical soundtracks and now had a third film to sing along with.

The mechanics are the standard ones the genre settled on years earlier. Lyrics scroll across the lower part of the screen, a pitch bar shows the note you are meant to hit and where your voice actually landed, and holding the line steady builds your score. Zoe Mode, a studio that spent much of the sixth and seventh generations on music and party software, knew this template well enough not to fiddle with it. What the developers did add matters more than it sounds: proper duet handling, so two singers on two microphones get separate lines and separate scoring rather than fighting over one melody. Half the appeal of the source material is call-and-response between Troy and Gabriella, and the game would have been pointless without it.

The setlist is the reason anyone picked it up. Senior Year material sits alongside tracks from the earlier films, which means the songs a nine-year-old already knew by heart were on the disc rather than locked behind a sequel. Presentation leans hard on the movie's look and colour palette, and on PS2 hardware it is flat and bright rather than detailed.

Judged as a game, it is thin. There is no career, no real progression, nothing to hold an adult for more than an evening. Judged as what it actually is, a licensed karaoke box for a specific audience at a specific moment, it does the job cleanly and gets out of the way. Its shelf life was always going to be tied to how long the songs stayed in a household's head, and that clock ran out fast.