Alvin & The Chipmunks

Well, the Wi version, while providing a highly amusing set of tracks to listen to, failed pretty miserably to light our fires in the gameplay department. The good news is that the gameplay in this handheld version is a bit better. The Wii version suffered due to the poor placement of the beat zones making it hard to follow the action when you had to hit several marks simultaneously (or at least fairly close together). In this version, the zones are all in a line across the bottom of the screen with vinyl records raining down the screen to indicate when and where you need to tap your stylus on the screen. This is a far better solution and actually leads to levels that are vaguely enjoyable. The timing of the beats seems pretty tight too so you really feel you’re tapping along to the music. And speaking of the music, the tracks included are a cut-down version of the Wii's line-up. This is good in that the songs that are included are funny and pretty tightly covered and the quality of the playback on the DS is remarkably good. The downside is that, presumably due to memory limitations, the track list is severely limited, There are nine songs in total. Nine good ones, granted, but it’s still not enough. And this lack of content is reflected in the gameplay too. In story mode each venue the Chipmunks play at is accompanied by only one song so that’s just nine levels to complete to reach the end. There are three skill levels to conquer but even so after a single run through few will be tempted to try it again. There’s a multiplayer squeak-off included but even this isn’t enough to rescue a game that essentially fun, but painfully thin.