Welcome to DS on DS. This is where I'm going to be taking a look at the Nintendo DS and all of it's games. And when I say all, I mean it. We will be going from Metroid Prime: Hunters to Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends. From Tetris DS to Barbie 12 Dancing Princesses. Yes, I said Barbie.

This week I am going to be taking a look at Hannah Montana The Movie.

Today sees the theatrical release of the Hannah Montana movie.  That means theaters everywhere will be filled with pre-teen girls and creepy old men.  Because of the movie being released, I figured I would sacrifice some of my brain cells and my DSi to review Hannah Montana The Movie.  And sacrificed I have.

Things start out with Miley being late to one of her concerts as Hannah.  Robbie Ray is mad, but Miley doesn't seem to care.  You are told to go to your trailer and change.  All you need to do is walk over to the arrow and press the giant butterfly in the middle of the touch screen to interact.  Then it's a simple task of picking some different clothes to put on.  After you do this, you then head to the stage to perform.  While you are on stage, there are five different areas that you can walk to so you can play a mini-game.  The first thing I chose to do is dance.  This plays much like a Quick Time Event, with different icons popping up on the top screen that you need to tap on the bottom screen.  Doing so results in the successful busting of a fresh move.  The drumming mini-game has you tapping the drums when they get a circle around them, the keyboard mini-game has you tapping the keys when the notes drop on them, the guitar mini-game has you strumming up or down, and with the singing mini-game you have to drag notes to the floating microphone.  These all seem to work well enough, but there is one major issue with them.  You see, when you play these games and perform the actions, such as tapping the keys on the keyboard, the game makes the instrument noise.  The main problem this would cause is the fact that it interferes with the song.  That would probably bug the people who actually listen to her music.

Speaking of her music, the songs that you hear in the game are fairly good quality sound wise.  It's actually almost as good as the quality of the music in Elite Beat Agents.  The actual quality of her music is up for debate.

After performing the song, you need to go back and do a wardrobe change, but this time you have to make a new design.  I thought I would be able to draw my own design here (and yes it would have been something bad), but instead I had to rapidly tap, scribble, and slice on the touch screen.  And there wasn't even anything there to perform those tasks on, you just kind of had to do it anywhere.  From there, you do another performance, and after that Robbie Ray decides that you need to remember where you came from so you get shipped off to her hometown in Tennessee.  Here you meet a cute boy, do some menial item fetching, unload some watermelon from crates, play some carnival games, and go shopping.

Other than the fact that this is a Hannah Montana game, one of the other big strikes this game has against it is the graphics.  It looks like a very early PlayStation One game.  All of the character models are very simple and very low in the polygon count.  The backgrounds look decent, but only to the point where you can usually tell what they are supposed to be.

One of the other things that I need to mention that is included on this game is called DGamer.  DGamer made it's debut with the Prince Caspian game on the DS, and is exclusive to the handheld system.  Well, unless you want to count the webpage.  DGamer is, for all intents and purposes, a chat room.  You can make an avatar and give them different items and outfits.  You will even unlock stuff when you play through the game.  You can also enter chat rooms, have a friend's list, and send private messages to friends.  While the chat is very censored, there are no friend codes limiting who you can chat with.  I was very surprised with the amount of things you can do in DGamer the first time I logged on through my DS.  It has been in pretty much every Disney Interactive game that has been released since Prince Caspian, and is a welcome feature.

Overall, the game itself is nothing special but if you are a pre-teen girl, and you like Hannah Montana, you would like this game no matter how bad it actually was.  If you are an adult male and you like this game, Chris Hansen will be stopping by your house shortly.

Final Score: 4/10