 Review By: Siou Choy |
Developer: | Gorilla |
| Publisher: | THQ | |
| Genre: | Sports | |
| ESRB: | Everyone | |
| # Of Players: | 1-4 | |
| Online Play: | No | |
| Accessories: | Wi-Fi (local) |
Yipe stripes, this game bites! Anyone expecting some handheld analogue to the entertaining Wii Cheer had best take a step back and reconsider blowing their hard earned dollars on this stinker.
Take note of this first comparison. The closest kin to All Star Cheer Squad? The Bratz games for the DS, or perhaps even Zoey 101. Whoa, there. You heard that right. Still care to read on?
Whew, you’re a stubborn cuss, ain’t’cha? Well, OK, it’s your money…here’s the plot, such as it is. Like the aforementioned electronic gaming development disasters, you’ll be starting off your game as the new girl at a “cheerleading school”. Umm…is this a popular occupation? Do you rake in the bucks cheering at your local HS or college? Can you make an entrepreneurial success of yourself as a 40 year old cheerleader? Cheerleading school. Yeah, right.
OK, if you’re still reading, I guess there’s no hope – we’ll have to delve deeper into this particular morass of gaming “entertainment”. So, here’s the rest of the plot (are you ready?): you have to prove yourself to your teammates and the rest of the school. Oh, the existential profundity of it all…the depth, the characterization, the human drama…Question: what is the meaning of life? Postulative answer: “Gimme an F!”
Cheering is done by tapping “cheer beads” (presumably some bizarre cousin to your parents and grandparents’ “love beads”) as they enter circles on the screen. You have to time this correctly to earn points. Other “activities” include lifting weights to build strength by tapping the L & R triggers, trying to keep your balance on a ball by tapping the L & R triggers or tapping the screen by tapping the L & R triggers…oh, sorry, they changed it slightly…with the stylus, and various other activities where you have to tap the screen with the stylus as something moves into circle at the right time. Ummm…is anyone else sensing a lack of creativity and redundancy in design here? In any case, just looking at the activities involved and assuming this were some parallel to the real world in any given respect, you’d quickly discover that these activities are hardly the sort that would allow one to become a top notch cheerleader – in fact, they’re entirely unrelated, phony, and artificial. Way to design a game, guys.
Posted: 2009-04-30 20:14:55 PST