As the father of two elementary-school aged children, I’ll be the first to admit I probably watch a little too much Disney Channel. The problem is that you eventually end up getting as excited for a new Hannah Montana show as your kids do. Remembering last August when High School Musical 2 debuted, we made it quite the family night. Of course, at the time there was no thought that the movie would be on at least three guhzillion times subsequent to that initial showing, and for some reason you stop what you’re doing and watch it each and every time. Your kids have that effect on you.

Having that background sure does help you appreciate the latest Nintendo DS game, High School Musical 2: Work This Out. If you haven’t seen the movie, you’ll be left with a really bad mini-game adventure. If you have seen the movie, you’ll appreciate the fact that this game is just as redundant as the movie. In fact, it’s easily the worst game I’ve played to date on the Nintendo DS. It’s that bad.

The game follows the events of the second movie to a point; you’re at the Lava Springs resort and you take on the role of many of the different characters in the movie. This is done through a process called: checking the events board, seeing a photo of the new character you’ll be playing with some text description and then morphing into that character. Yes, it’s that stupid.

But wait, it gets even worse: the events board rarely has any events on it; instead it has things like “someone found music sheets in the dining room,” and of course one person cannot handle such an enormous task of picking up three sheets of music, so you’ll have to go help them. The mini games almost all follow the same routine: “find Sharpay’s golf balls scattered throughout the resort,” or “make a sandwich but only pick up the food with the beat of the music,” and “grab the basketballs but only to the beat of the music.” It’s basically two or three minigames with different variations on the same concept.

What’s even worse is that it’s painfully easy and takes a long time to complete. In the early levels you’ll have to get a target score of 800 and while you’re already at 2000 points, you are still only halfway to finishing the minigame. It is patently stupid. In later levels, the score challenge may go up and you’ll have different ways to achieve your goal, but it’s still the same boring game.

Each “day” you play a few minigames, have to attend to a crisis “Help, I lost my clothes in the pool,” and then have to “practice” a dance routine for the big show. At the end of the day you do the whole routine, which is one of the songs from the movie. To dance, you play a game similar to Elite Beat Agents. Sounds okay but it’s implemented very poorly; sometimes taps aren’t even registered and the dancer doesn’t even dance to the music or your tapping. Once you “beat” (using that term loosely since it is insanely easy), the song, it becomes unlocked for your listening pleasure.

The programmers made a poor decision when deciding on the audio: on the plus side, the entire HSM 2 soundtrack is in the game. You don’t need to buy the album, aren’t you excited? Making the songs unlockable doesn’t seem like a bad thing, but having the background music comprised of only songs you’ve unlocked is terrible. On day one, you get to hear “You Are The Music In Me,” the Troy & Gabriella way, and then the SAME song by Sharpay. After those two play you hear them AGAIN. And AGAIN. And AGAIN. You will be driven completely insane and it’s only day one! It takes a very long time to unlock all the songs, and by then you’ll probably have no use to see this game ever in your Nintendo DS.

The graphics are horrible, even by DS standards. While the backgrounds are nice, the game is shown in a ¾ view perspective from the top down, so you’ll be able to recognize Sharpay by seeing the “blond blob.” It’s obvious not a lot of work when into this game when I was walking around trying to perform some inane task as Troy Bolton, and while in the golf locker room, I ran into Troy Bolton. Apparently it was too much work to have the game check to see if you were already playing as that character.

With all this being said, it’s obvious that the target demographic wasn’t men in their 30s, but instead it’s for kids. I let my two kids have at it. The first thing out of my daughter’s mouth was “is there any way I can get the songs to stop playing?” and the answer is NO! There’s a jukebox in the game, but if you hit ‘stop’ it only stays stopped on the juke box screen. Once you start the game up again, it’s the same music.

HSM 2 had an interesting premise going for it; the Lava Springs Resort is laid out well. Apparently all of the cartridge’s memory went towards the audio because there is no plot, there is no fun gameplay and the game is just too redundant to enjoy at all, even for the diehard HSM fans. Stay away from this game—you have been warned. .