High School Party

We're used to playing games that give us a sense of deja vu. Every game isn't going to create a brand new genre after all and taking someone else's idea then adding your own twist on it is a valid form of creation. After all, would we have had Lumines if it wasn't for Tetris? Would we have had S Club 7 if it wasn't for Steps, and would we have a whole selection of bagless vacuum cleaners to choose from if it wasn't for Mr Dyson? The list goes on, although this one doesn't because I can't think of any more examples.

It's one thing to enhance an existing idea, but clearly it's a whole different one to take an existing idea, slap a different label on it, and try to pass it off as something new. It happens in video games quite a lot in a way with game engines being reused instead of programmed from scratch, but still I struggle to think of a game that was exactly the same as another one just with a different skin slapped on it.

I did, at least. Now I have just such a game sitting on my phone. It's called High School Party, but - hang on - didn't Digital Chocolate release it last year under the name Crazy Penguin Catapult? We know there's a recession on, but we thought that meant companies were short on cash, not ideas.

Basically, if you copied our review of Crazy Penguin Catapult, pasted it into a Word document then used 'find and replace' to change the word 'penguin' to 'nerd' and 'polar bear' to 'jock' you'd have yourself a fairly decent summing up of High School Party.

Each of the its 27 levels is split into two sections. In the first bit you use a catapult (or the Nerdinator 3000) to launch a series of high school nerds into the air; in the second you dive bomb them back to earth trying to take out as many of the high school jocks scattered about as possible.

The idea is that the jocks are at a house party and obviously won't let the nerds in because - well, they're nerds. The nerds therefore have to gatecrash the party in the most literal sense. Each level is a new house party so the layout of the houses and the jocks differs. You don't have to knock down every jock in the house to pass the level, but you do need to hit a specified amount to move on.

The more you do get, though, the more stars you earn for that level and those stars can be regularly traded in for new abilities. So your invasions become ever more powerful with larger numbers of nerds, nerds that bounce more times and nerds that smash through roof tiles easier. To be honest, the concept made a bit more sense when it was penguins sliding around the ice rather than bouncing bespectacled high school students.

It was also a lengthier game when it had the penguins, because Crazy Penguin Catapult included a second strategy-based game on top of the penguin slinging. We're not sure why that didn't make it into High School Party because it was quite good. Perhaps high school jocks fighting nerds seemed a bit nonsensical, but then when you're in Nerdinator 3000 territory it seems a futile thing to worry about.

Ignoring the plagiary of one of its own stable mates, High School Party is an entertaining little game. Its timing and skill-based one-button gameplay works superbly on mobile phone and there's a whole load of replay value in trying to knock off every jock in every level and level up your nerds' abilities to the max.

Since it's essentially another game though, and with slightly less content, it seems only fair to award it a mark slightly lower than that game got. If we were going to pick between the two, we'd go for the penguins.