You know, a game like this doesn't have to be bad.

The unfortunate reality of the matter is that it will be bad. The gameplay will be awful, and as already seen, the graphics are abysmal.

In my opinion, the High School Musical films are sweet. They're cute. Definitely not the stuff Oscar dreams are made of, but again, they're just nice movies. Of course, that might not be your style, and there's nothing wrong with that. But the fact of the matter is that they're relatively wholesome (though I hate to use that word, as no doubt I'll get alot of Vanessa Hudgens comments) movies, very Disneyish, and sweet.

Their fans, mostly "tween" (I hate that word, too) girls, deserve better than this cash-in junk.

Because the real problem that you all have (or should have, because picking on a game because of it's subject matter is really sort of a lame thing to be doing, especially if you weren't ever planning on even picking up the game) with the game is how terrible the gameplay and graphics are. And I agree. I can't believe that Disney makes such horrible video games. They have to contract out to Squeenix to make anything half-decent.

My sister -did- enjoy the Hannah Montana game on the Wii. I watched for some of it, and it was an okay game. Pretty good for a Disney/movie/TV game, but not good enough.

The fans of these properties deserve better. I'm not saying that the High School Musical movies themselves are the epitome of quality movies, but they are good. And even if in your opinion they aren't, they are to their fans. And their fans deserve a gaming experience that matches the fun/entertainment experience of the film.

In a perfect world, every game should be a Halo 3 or a Super Mario Galaxy or an Uncharted: Drake's Fortune or a Gears of War or a God of War (I've actually never played H3, GoW or GoW, but I've heard they're good and stuff). In quality terms. And since Disney claims to be a perfect, magical company, don't you think that that claim should be applied to all aspects of the company, thus making quality games that, while still appealing to the tweeners (wow, I hate that word so much), would be really, really good games.

Well, I guess that this was more of a rant on cruddy games than anything else. But there you go. It'll be interesting to see how everyone responds.


Oh, and for the record: This was my first post on the Xbox Forums... I've owned an Xbox 360 since the end of 2006 but have never gotten Live until today. I've read these forums before and know how some people can act here. I'm also a proud owner of a PS3 and a Wii, and I have to say that at this moment in time, I like my PS3 best. But then, keep in mind that I've never experienced XBL, so that opinion may change. Either way, I'm glad to be a part of this community, as I've heard so many great things about you all.. of course, some not-so-great things as well, but the good far outweighs the bad in this case, it seems.

And, uh, I'm straight. And in my mid-late teens. So no Zac Efron is not my boyfriend (or girlfriend, depending on your own personal views of the guy), and no, I do not have Hannah Montana bedsheets. Nor do I own a Jonas Brothers toothbrush.

So now that that's all settled,

Your thoughts?

---

The roflcopter, it goes round and round.

Im not sure how much money they will make on 360 because no girls play it. I might rent it just for the "wow he actually played that" comments but hopefully sooner or later they stop the cash in movies.

I totally undertsand why you all are posting with silver gamer tags . It is ok I feel your emotionz .

---

Dojo is a 4 letter word . . .

No Girls play 360? Wut!?

---

Gaming News, Contests, Fun, Fun, Fun.
The Xbox Domain

 DiAGO77 wrote:

I totally undertsand why you all are posting with silver gamer tags . It is ok I feel your emotionz .

What? I'z gold, foo.

---

The roflcopter, it goes round and round.

There are girls that play 360 don't you know about gamerchix? Anyways I seriously think this game will suck so much it will make other games look like the best of videogames. The movies don't have a decent story that can be turned into a videogame. BTW I may not be gold but I put a lot of effort in this account anyways.

---

Whether you are gold, silver, brown or frikkin' pink, you are a member of Xbox LIVE and should be treat the same.-WadeoV2

 MEN The Sequel wrote:

Im not sure how much money they will make on 360 because no girls play it. I might rent it just for the "wow he actually played that" comments but hopefully sooner or later they stop the cash in movies.

lulz. Gamerchix must mean nothing to you.. Personally, If I was a women, I'd find that offensive but hey.. Im not.. Anyway, I have played with many female gamers, infact I played Vegas with one last night...

---

irishcontingent.org

Hehehe. Well I've seen a lot of the posts on this forum, as I've been watching it for some time. Most of them are just mindless hate rants about HSM, because it's something that falls outside the demographic of the posters. But as this is a more intelligent and lengthy rant about the quality of the game (though I can't tell if the OP actually even played it, or is just looking at youtube trailers) I feel somewhat compelled to give a decent response. Why? I worked on it!

This was my first game out of college, and so I take a bit of pride in it. I too love Left 4 Dead and Gears of War, but those top tier games are near impossible to get a job into until you've got a number of games already on your resume. But I digress...

You say the gameplay is awful, the graphics are awful, that the movies were of a high quality, so why isn't the game? Well the simple answer is because Disney Interactive wasn't paying for a high quality game, so our studio couldn only produce so much. They gave us less than a year to make the game from scratch using our own engine. And while a perfect world might consist of only Mario Galaxy and God of War quality games, those games also get something like 3 to 4 years to develop them. The time and money put into a game up front is a huge deciding factor on how well it can be made. If HSM3 had 3 years to be developed, it would've looked and played a lot better than it did. But then again...that would mean that the game would have had to be in development before the first movie even hit the Disney Channel, and it wasn't until well after the first film that the franchise really took off.

So why are the graphics considered awful? The game was made for the lowest common console, that being the PS2. We had to make the entire game around the one with the worst graphics. So by comparison the Xbox 360 will of course look worse. But there wasn't time for anything else. While the studio could've had all the models and textures ready about half way through the development time, you have to take into account that the studio is answering to Disney. Disney decides that someone's teeth don't look right, or that a nose is too round, and the entire face needs to be altered, rigged, skinned, etc. This process happens multiple times to each character, and eventually it gets to a "good enough" point for Disney and shortly afterwards the game is shipped. If there was lots of time to develop different models, rigs, textures and include next-gen features like bump mapping and occlusion lighting, then of course we would have. But there were only a handful of people working on a handful of characters that needed to work on every single platform. Given less than a year, and all the revisions required, there's only so much we can do.

Why is the gameplay horrible? Well I'd argue that it's not really that bad. In fact when I finally got my copy I actually had some (drunken) fun playing it for the first time on a dance pad. Sure there's things that could've been better. We all wished that the animation wasn't just a static video, and more involved with how well you actually play, but again it comes down to time. We had a new engine that had never been used on a published game before that was being developed side-by-side with the game. We had a multitude of features and mini-games that were initially going to be in the game, but as time goes on, the core of the game remains the focus, and smaller bits that are nothing more than "icing on the cake" fall away. Disney cuts out parts they don't think are up to snuff, the studio cuts out parts that are going to take too long to get right. Basically you have to work with what you've got. In addition, we had to make it work for multiple platforms and peripherals. It wasn't until a month or two before it was shipped that Disney decided to include a dance mat with PS2 and Xbox. Suddenly we had to alter the game to make it work with those. The Wii version had many seperate gameplay features that worked only with the Wii-Remotes. ***, the game actually was originally designed to be a Karaoke game, not a dancing game! The entire design and gameplay was developed and implimented as the game was being made, because we had no time for preproduction or research and development.

So why isn't the game up to the quality of the films? Well first of all, the films aren't even that high of quality. The first two were made-for-TV films, that starred no-name actors at the time. The third was made in about the same time frame as the game. Most movies have maybe a 2 year time frame from beginning to end, maybe a little less. HSM3 the movie was made in less than a year! The game, as I've mentioned, was made in less than a year. That's not much time for a game, and believe me, we worked a lot of over-time and came in on many weekends to make it as good as we could. And we didn't even have much to go on when it came to making the song/levels for the third game. We never saw any footage of the film until we went to see it in the theater with the rest of the 12 year old girls.

No one was under any illusions that we were going to be redefining the game-based-off-a-movie genre or the rhythm based genre in any way. We were making a game that would be sold in Target along with all the pillow cases, lunch boxes, pencil pouches, and underoos. To Disney Interactive, it's not a game that is being made for the sake of making quality games, it was a piece of merchandice to sell when the movie game out. You said, "Disney claims to be a perfect, magical company, don't you think that that claim should be applied to all aspects of the company, thus making quality games that, while still appealing to the tweeners (wow, I hate that word so much), would be really, really good games"  But really look at Disney. They only thing that is magically perfect is the huge feature animated films like Aladdin, and their Pixar association. We're talking about the company that made Cinderella 2, Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Camp Rock. When their movies are good, they can be absolutely fantastic. But when they're bad, they can be some of the most painfully horrible viewing experiences of your life. It's all about how much time and money they put into them. The HSM movies had a great choreographer, director and cast that pulled together and made a popular franchise. My studio was a bunch of people that tried their hardest to make a game under really constrained circumstances.

So think about that when you look at the glut of unheard of or based-off-a-movie games. The people who are making them are doing the best with what they're given, but when the purpose of the game is to be merchandise, rather than to create a quality game, there's only so much you can do. It doesn't hurt my feeling that so many people will hate on the game because it doesn't appeal to them. 2 years ago I would've done the same. But not every game can be a Mario Galaxy, and that isn't the fault of the people who make the games. A lot of it is up to the publishers, who are often business people not gamers or artists. They don't look at the game and ask how it might revolutionize game play or what kind of critical concensus it will get from IGN and Gamespot. All they see is a product, a toy, something that is going to be sold to kids. It's nothing more than merchandise to coincide with the release of the movie. But games like Mario Galaxy and Gears of War are the flagship titles for developers and publishers who are focused on making quality games. Think of it like the crappy glut of movies based on video games. Some exec in an office somewhere has a kid that likes Street Fighter. He decides if the game is popular, a movie will make some money. They make a crappy movie, people see it, are disappointed, the movie makes it's money back, and all the gamers wonder why it was made in the first place. The movie isn't doing the game justice. It's not trying to win oscars. It's not going to go down as a cinematic classic. It just made someone in an office some money, and it gave some industry people a job for a while. Games like HSM3 are the same thing but the other way around.

Ahh.... Nevermind.. Honestly.. Who would hope that this game would do good.

i absolutely hate high school musical all 3 movies sucked worse. hour of victory and Avatar Burning earth are better games. if i could i would burn every copy of this crap and fire the designers who made this game

 MEN The Sequel wrote:

Im not sure how much money they will make on 360 because no girls play it. I might rent it just for the "wow he actually played that" comments but hopefully sooner or later they stop the cash in movies.

So ... what does that make me?

---

It is my opinion, and therefore, it is fact. Nothing more, nothing less.

 Krugglemugg wrote:

Hehehe. Well I've seen a lot of the posts on this forum, as I've been watching it for some time. Most of them are just mindless hate rants about HSM, because it's something that falls outside the demographic of the posters. But as this is a more intelligent and lengthy rant about the quality of the game (though I can't tell if the OP actually even played it, or is just looking at youtube trailers) I feel somewhat compelled to give a decent response. Why? I worked on it!

This was my first game out of college, and so I take a bit of pride in it. I too love Left 4 Dead and Gears of War, but those top tier games are near impossible to get a job into until you've got a number of games already on your resume. But I digress...

You say the gameplay is awful, the graphics are awful, that the movies were of a high quality, so why isn't the game? Well the simple answer is because Disney Interactive wasn't paying for a high quality game, so our studio couldn only produce so much. They gave us less than a year to make the game from scratch using our own engine. And while a perfect world might consist of only Mario Galaxy and God of War quality games, those games also get something like 3 to 4 years to develop them. The time and money put into a game up front is a huge deciding factor on how well it can be made. If HSM3 had 3 years to be developed, it would've looked and played a lot better than it did. But then again...that would mean that the game would have had to be in development before the first movie even hit the Disney Channel, and it wasn't until well after the first film that the franchise really took off.

So why are the graphics considered awful? The game was made for the lowest common console, that being the PS2. We had to make the entire game around the one with the worst graphics. So by comparison the Xbox 360 will of course look worse. But there wasn't time for anything else. While the studio could've had all the models and textures ready about half way through the development time, you have to take into account that the studio is answering to Disney. Disney decides that someone's teeth don't look right, or that a nose is too round, and the entire face needs to be altered, rigged, skinned, etc. This process happens multiple times to each character, and eventually it gets to a "good enough" point for Disney and shortly afterwards the game is shipped. If there was lots of time to develop different models, rigs, textures and include next-gen features like bump mapping and occlusion lighting, then of course we would have. But there were only a handful of people working on a handful of characters that needed to work on every single platform. Given less than a year, and all the revisions required, there's only so much we can do.

Why is the gameplay horrible? Well I'd argue that it's not really that bad. In fact when I finally got my copy I actually had some (drunken) fun playing it for the first time on a dance pad. Sure there's things that could've been better. We all wished that the animation wasn't just a static video, and more involved with how well you actually play, but again it comes down to time. We had a new engine that had never been used on a published game before that was being developed side-by-side with the game. We had a multitude of features and mini-games that were initially going to be in the game, but as time goes on, the core of the game remains the focus, and smaller bits that are nothing more than "icing on the cake" fall away. Disney cuts out parts they don't think are up to snuff, the studio cuts out parts that are going to take too long to get right. Basically you have to work with what you've got. In addition, we had to make it work for multiple platforms and peripherals. It wasn't until a month or two before it was shipped that Disney decided to include a dance mat with PS2 and Xbox. Suddenly we had to alter the game to make it work with those. The Wii version had many seperate gameplay features that worked only with the Wii-Remotes. ***, the game actually was originally designed to be a Karaoke game, not a dancing game! The entire design and gameplay was developed and implimented as the game was being made, because we had no time for preproduction or research and development.

So why isn't the game up to the quality of the films? Well first of all, the films aren't even that high of quality. The first two were made-for-TV films, that starred no-name actors at the time. The third was made in about the same time frame as the game. Most movies have maybe a 2 year time frame from beginning to end, maybe a little less. HSM3 the movie was made in less than a year! The game, as I've mentioned, was made in less than a year. That's not much time for a game, and believe me, we worked a lot of over-time and came in on many weekends to make it as good as we could. And we didn't even have much to go on when it came to making the song/levels for the third game. We never saw any footage of the film until we went to see it in the theater with the rest of the 12 year old girls.

No one was under any illusions that we were going to be redefining the game-based-off-a-movie genre or the rhythm based genre in any way. We were making a game that would be sold in Target along with all the pillow cases, lunch boxes, pencil pouches, and underoos. To Disney Interactive, it's not a game that is being made for the sake of making quality games, it was a piece of merchandice to sell when the movie game out. You said, "Disney claims to be a perfect, magical company, don't you think that that claim should be applied to all aspects of the company, thus making quality games that, while still appealing to the tweeners (wow, I hate that word so much), would be really, really good games"  But really look at Disney. They only thing that is magically perfect is the huge feature animated films like Aladdin, and their Pixar association. We're talking about the company that made Cinderella 2, Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Camp Rock. When their movies are good, they can be absolutely fantastic. But when they're bad, they can be some of the most painfully horrible viewing experiences of your life. It's all about how much time and money they put into them. The HSM movies had a great choreographer, director and cast that pulled together and made a popular franchise. My studio was a bunch of people that tried their hardest to make a game under really constrained circumstances.

So think about that when you look at the glut of unheard of or based-off-a-movie games. The people who are making them are doing the best with what they're given, but when the purpose of the game is to be merchandise, rather than to create a quality game, there's only so much you can do. It doesn't hurt my feeling that so many people will hate on the game because it doesn't appeal to them. 2 years ago I would've done the same. But not every game can be a Mario Galaxy, and that isn't the fault of the people who make the games. A lot of it is up to the publishers, who are often business people not gamers or artists. They don't look at the game and ask how it might revolutionize game play or what kind of critical concensus it will get from IGN and Gamespot. All they see is a product, a toy, something that is going to be sold to kids. It's nothing more than merchandise to coincide with the release of the movie. But games like Mario Galaxy and Gears of War are the flagship titles for developers and publishers who are focused on making quality games. Think of it like the crappy glut of movies based on video games. Some exec in an office somewhere has a kid that likes Street Fighter. He decides if the game is popular, a movie will make some money. They make a crappy movie, people see it, are disappointed, the movie makes it's money back, and all the gamers wonder why it was made in the first place. The movie isn't doing the game justice. It's not trying to win oscars. It's not going to go down as a cinematic classic. It just made someone in an office some money, and it gave some industry people a job for a while. Games like HSM3 are the same thing but the other way around.

longest post ever wow.
i can't believe this is gona be a game was just scrolling down game forums and saw this was here.

---

Love to tell da truth but i'm such a good liar

who would honestly waste 60$ on this trash? if i was forced to buy it i would buy it for 10$ maybe 15$. but not 60$

Holy wall of text batman.

---

If you're trying to make an intelligent point, use correct grammar or I'll call you out on it.
I <3 Sierra

i read the first word of that first post.....and was like, "no"

---

Greg Salas ---statistically, the nations top receiver

 baseballplyrmvp wrote:

i read the first word of that first post.....and was like, "no"

This game is going to be great, everyone knows that, no reason to post a wall of text why.

---

If you're trying to make an intelligent point, use correct grammar or I'll call you out on it.
I <3 Sierra

i know....i'm super de duper excited for the sequal to come out. 

---

Greg Salas ---statistically, the nations top receiver

 baseballplyrmvp wrote:

i know....i'm super de duper excited for the sequal to come out. 

I wuv sequalz

---

If you're trying to make an intelligent point, use correct grammar or I'll call you out on it.
I <3 Sierra

how IS the movie a 'fun good experience' its more like 2 hours of grief and the games are rubbish because the graphics are bad, the gameplay is bad, the story is bad, the whole idea is bad...in a way the game matches the movie cos they are both an expierience of grief. .............fans, please give up and move on to halo and all the other good games you may not of eard of

 RaDiiiATiONz 95 wrote:

how IS the movie a 'fun good experience' its more like 2 hours of grief and the games are rubbish because the graphics are bad, the gameplay is bad, the story is bad, the whole idea is bad...in a way the game matches the movie cos they are both an expierience of grief. .............fans, please give up and move on to halo and all the other good games you may not of eard of

The movie was great, period. If you had a problem with it then you're either totally insensitive, totally stupid, or totally disgusting.

---

The roflcopter, it goes round and round.

Movies suck, or at least to me.

---

Whether you are gold, silver, brown or frikkin' pink, you are a member of Xbox LIVE and should be treat the same.-WadeoV2