Everybody in my family enjoys playing video games, but of course, we each have our favorites. As a family we play games like
Shrek's Super Party and
Cranium Kabooki, my husband tends to stick with Star Wars and role-playing games, I enjoy card and puzzle games, my son loves his sports games and my daughter, being a typical nine year old girl has absolutely fallen in love with the
Hannah Montana Spotlight World Tour for Nintendo Wii.
The Wii system comes with remote controls, but many games, including this one, require the additional hardware purchase of a Nunchuk. After inserting the game, you are greeted by the characters from the Hannah Montana television show: Miley, Lilly, Jackson and Oliver.
Lilly then welcomes you and tells you to place the Nunchuk in your left hand the the Wii remote in your right hand and she will teach you some of the moves that you need for the game. As Hannah dances on stage to "The Best of Both Worlds", different symbols scroll across the bottom of the screen in one of three colors. Blue symbols indicate that you are to use your right hand (Wii remote), pink symbols are for your left hand (the Nunchuk) and green symbols mean that you should use both hands simultaneously.
As each symbol scrolls into a large star, you need to move accordingly. The gestures that correspond to the different symbols begin simply and get more complex as the game goes on. For example, an arrow pointing left means to move your hand to the left, a star means to point at your television, a heart means to touch your heart and a microphone means that you should use the remote or Nunchuk as if it were a microphone. Sometime these gestures are in green, meaning that you should do them with both hands.
More difficult gestures come later in the game such as when the picture of a guitar floats by and the Nunchuk is held out to the left and the remote is used as if to strum a guitar. Two arrows pointing to each other indicates that you should clap your hands, but the difficult part with this is that the remote and Nunchuk often get banged together and I worry that they may get broken if smacked together too hard.
The World Tour begins in New York, and as you complete the moves required on stage, you can move on to other venues in Rio, Rome, Tokyo, Paris and London. After finishing a concert in each city, you will get a souvenir to put in your dressing room, and as you progress through the game, you can shop for additional outfits. Hannah must check in with her father/manager every so often, and between shows, she can walk around and talk to her friends.
While you can join
Hannah Montana on her
Spotlight World Tour, there is no option to connect a microphone to sing along and there are really no dance moves involved. In fact, my daughter can lie in the recliner and still do most of the moves in the game.
While each song is played in its entirety and Hannah Montana dances and performs on stage, you are not active for the entire song. For more than half of most songs, you are simply standing, watching the television and waiting for more moves to scroll across the screen.
Within a few days, my daughter completed the World Tour, but she continues to play this game. She can practice all of the songs in the Free Dance section by choosing one of the cities on the tour. If a friend is over, they can have a Dance Party or a Dance Off. In the Dance Off, there is an imposter Hannah Montana so two players, perform on stage at the same time doing the same moves and the "real" Hannah Montana is the one who gets the most moves correct.
Even before we saw the
Best of Both Worlds movie, my entire family knew the words to all of the Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana songs thanks to my nine year old daughter. Knowing the words is not necessary to play this game as there is no singing involved, but any girl who would be interested in this game would most likely know the words anyway.
Since she is a big Mylie Cyrus/Hannah Montana fan, my daughter loves that fifteen popular songs are included in this game, such as "Nobody's Perfect", "Bigger Than Us", "Just Like You", "One in a Million", "You and Me Together" and "Old Blue Jeans." Since this is a musical game, it is good that the soundtrack and the voices sound just like the Hannah Montana characters we are accustomed to.
The graphics are good enough for a pre-teen game, with lots of bright colors and seamless movements, but the character's faces are not exact replicas of their human counterparts. In fact, my husband helped my daughter set up this game for the first time and when I walked into the room I asked who the girl on stage was and I was told it was Hannah Montana. The fact that the characters do not look exactly like the real thing does not bother my daughter (or her friends) at all and they have as much fun changing Hannah Montana's costumes they do performing the moves while she is on stage.
It took my nine year old daughter less than five minutes to understand how this game works, and we have had seven year olds over to play who were able to learn the basic moves in a matter of minutes as well. We recommend this
Hannah Montana Spotlight World Tour for Nintendo Wii for any fan of Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus. Even though the images are not exact copies of the characters they are supposed to fashioned after, the soundtrack is good and dancing to the variety of songs will keep any fan interested.
