With the upcoming Alvin And The Chipmunks movie (starring Jason Lee -- Oh! How the mighty have fallen...) set for release real soon, a game (or multiple games) was deemed inevitable. Instead of reviewing the PS2 or Wii versions of the game (feel free to review it), I'll give you guys the scoop on the Nintendo DS game.
Gameplay
Brash Entertainment has given us its interpretation of what a rhythm game is all about. Notes fall down the screen and the gamer must hit each note once it falls to a certain point (your "Hit Zone") -- all in time with the music. Sound familiar? That's right! Brash Ent. have pretty much used the beatmania-style of gameplay for their game. That's not a negative thing at all, mind you. It adds a degree of familiarity for rhythm gamers and due to its target audience, helps increase exposure of music games. It's also important to add that the notes that fall (as well as the silhouettes) are *not* beatmania-style notes. Rather, they are in the form of a bird's eye-view of a vinyl record. I can only imagine they made the notes look this way for the retro aspects of the game.
I'm going to link to an image from IGN without permission here just to let you guys know what it looks like. If, for any reason, IGN tells me to remove the image (which is hosted through imageshack), I, or another moderator, will happily remove said image.
Original Image
IGN's review
Let me explain a few things: The top half of the screen (the non-playable half) simply shows a 3D-rendered animation of the boys rocking out to the tune you select. On the upper part of the lower screen is a green bar -- "your Rockometer. It tells you how well you are rockin'." And that blue record with a blue tail is a Hold Record. Basically, tap and hold down on the pad whilst that note scrolls and you've hit that note properly.
More about the notes
Your Rockometer drops whenever you miss a note and if it gets low, the black records turn red, indicating that you're about to fail the song unless you get your timing right. If you hit the notes correctly, your Rockometer refills and you (probably) won't fail.
And if you didn't think changing the note colour altogether was strange enough, they decided to add point multipliers.
- 2x => a black record on fire (not sure if Brash Ent. knows but lighting a vinyl record completely destroys it; *not* a good thing);
- 3x => a gold record on fire
- 4x => "Platinum flaming records are worth quadruple. That's four times the normal amount!" -- just in case you didn't know what "quadruple" meant...
Mini-Events/In-game challenges
What about those Elite Beat Agents/Ouendan-style circles with numbers? Simply put, this is one of four mini-events that occur within the song just to earn extra points, or in case the gamer is sick of smacking those records -- fair enough, really.
In the image shown above, the gamer just has to smack those circles in numerical order within a set time frame (depending on the song, you're looking at about 1 measure).
Another mini-event is where you drag a green dot along a "Melody Line", which is basically a line that increases or decreases in height.
Yet another mini-event is where you yell "Alvin!" This nets you "mega points!"
Lastly, there's the Scratch mini-event. All you have to do is slide the stylus along a scratch pad as fast as you can. It has its own gauge which you must fill for bonus points and if you have time left over, you can actually gain a few *extra* bonus points for scratching more than the gauge can handle.
Start to Finish
Throw in the cartridge and turn it on. We're greeted with about thirty seconds of company logos (20th Century Fox, Brash Entertainment, etc.) which can not be skipped with any button. Okay, not the best start but here's hoping the rest falls together quite nicely.
Next up is the title logo in a broadway-style visualisation and you select from one of three profiles. A handy note in the lower-left tells us that you can erase the data from any of the profiles by pressing the X-button. That's a plus.
You choose your own profile name and are then whisked away to the Main Menu. Here, you can choose any of the following options:
- Quick Play - The Free Mode of the game. Choose to play any song you've already played in Story Mode.
- Story Mode - Highlighted; Self-explanatory...
- Multi Player
- Options - Contains: Music Volume, Sound Volume, Credits, Clear Story Data, How To Play
Playing in the background is the first song you play in Story Mode. Now all you need to do is to choose Story Mode, then choose an overall difficulty:
- Easy - Highlighted; Poor little Theodore is the silhouette above "Easy"
- Medium - Simon
- Hard - Alvin
And the idea of Story Mode? Alvin and the Chipmunks are on their way from New York to L.A. to become famous within the music world. Not a bad concept and I'm sure it follows the movie to some degree. Well, we'll soon see about that--
Plusses- The music list is great. I wouldn't say fantastic, but it's worthy of a few plays. Tracks like Video Killed The Radio Star and All The Small Things make the game seem very promising. Not enough 80s stuff (it's Alvin and the Chipmunks. You'd think they'd include songs originating in '83, when the more recent cartoon series premiered, but no... Seems they've got more 90s stuff. And they should have included current hits into the mix, too).
- Menu layout. It just looks great.
No, seriously... That's all I can think of (at the time of writing, I'm only 20% into Story Mode) for positives in this game.
Minuses
I tend to consider myself a bit of a rhythm game Nazi. I'm very open to a lot of things but when a new rhythm game comes out, I *have* to be very critical. AatC is no exception. And, instead of bullet points, I'm going to number the minuses in this game, just to give you an idea.
- Menu navigation - I liked the layout, right? But navigating through the menu is pretty silly. You have to use the D-pad to scroll through the list and you only use the stylus on highlighted options -- which you can just as easily use the A-button.
- Script - It's a reasonable script, that's for sure. But the one thing that drags it down immensely is the use of recent phrases or slang being incorporated into it. I don't remember Dave *ever* being so hip as to use the term "Rockin'". More importantly, since when the hell has Theodore ever been the type to say "Oh, snap!"?
- Volume - A big problem I find with rhythm games these days is they can't seem to get the music levels right. Even on full volume, you can only just recognise the song -- and that's because of the vocals being so high-pitched. Yes, I know there's not much the DS can do about high volume, but Brash should have made an effort to increase instrument volume levels. At the very least, this game can NOT be played in public without headphones -- and decent-quality headphones, at that!
- Vocals - A HUGE turn-off for me. The vocals are done completely by Alvin and the Chipmunks -- that high-pitched, screechy kind of voice. It was quirky and fun at the start (Video Killed The Radio Star sounds absolutely brilliant) but after seven-or-so songs, it very quickly loses its appeal.
- Animation - One of the things Brash Ent. tried so hard to do was to create fun 3D animations. You can tell a lot of work has been put into each animation of the chipmunks playing their hearts out to entertain their audience but by the end of it, it destroys the processing power like crazy. Everything seems to slow down when it really shouldn't. Which brings me to my next point...
- TIMING. I know, I know! This should be the FIRST point since it's the MOST IMPORTANT point of topic for a rhythm game. One of the things I loved about Ouendan was its strict and essentially perfect timing. This is completely different. On a couple of songs, you need to hit the notes a little earlier than the beat but on most songs, you need to hit the notes a considerable amount of time after the beat. I'm absolutely sure that the animated notes don't help the timing (too much going on on-screen is bound to slow processing (see previous note)) and Brash should have ensured that they make the play screen use as little resources as possible. This means that basically NO SONG IS ON TIME. In terms of strict timing, it's horribly off. And not by a little bit, either. I'm talking GAMBOL (IIDX) multiplied by 100. That's a big deal.
- Responsiveness - In most cases, the records you hit will disappear. In some cases, and mostly happening when you're supposed to hit a Hold Note, there is no recognition of your action. Yep, the game thinks you missed the note and you break your combo. Not good. At all.
- Consistency. If you're going to make a song's notes off-time by playing it early, make sure all the songs in the list have that same offset. Otherwise, it's just incredibly sloppy. Also, we've all seen the poster promoting the movie where Alvin is hiding in his oversized hoodie. I don't think I've seen that hoodie in this game -- and there's barely a rap/hip-hop song -- so I'm wondering why he even has the hoodie in the first place.
- Mini-events. For the most part, they're well-rounded ideas. But in practise, it's just nasty. I received many a look when I yelled out "ALVIN!" into the microphone. But it's all in fun, right? Oh yeah... one last thing...
- You can say or yell absolutely anything into the microphone. Dr. Kawashita's Brain Age game is great in that it differentiates between a few syllables, but AatC has it *way* off. I yelled expletives, grunted, belched and even rubbed the area over the microphone and I still got bonus points. Granted, it's not supposed to be so fantastic as to recognise every syllable, but some sort of recognition would be most welcome and well-received, I'm sure.
One final thing that confuses me is who Brash Ent. believes their target audience is. Between the songs (generally) from the 90s, the script written by some new-age homeboy thugs and cute animation reminiscent of the actual cartoon (and not the movie)... I just have no idea who they thought their specific target audience is. And whilst having a
general target audience is a nice idea, it very rarely works.
All-in-all, Alvin and the Chipmunks is the epitome of why relatively new (at least, in terms of rhythm gaming) companies shouldn't go near the genre -- or, at the very least, that they should ensure their games are properly QCed by people who can hold a beat. Let this be a lesson to rhythm game makers: the best QCers of the genre are the ones who play it. And, being a timer (in other fields, not just rhythm gaming), you absolutely need to ensure that everything is triple-checked before releasing, otherwise your product -- and, more importantly, your brand -- will be ridiculed.
Give the game a shot, but in a month, it'll probably be in the "Never again" pile.
3/10.
Alvin And The Chipmunks (NDS) 
