Pop Superstar

All those aspirational popstar training programmes you see on TV may claim to give your average Joe a real chance at stardom, but the person who has gained the most from this televisual phenomenon is Simon Cowell: the man who can twist a bum note into a crushing verbal takedown with the louche flick of a wrist. Yet, these shows continue to reel in the fans.

Even if you're someone who shies away from the fateful Saturday evening slot (when these programmes generally seem to crop up), you might enjoy Pop Superstar. It has a keen enough wit to act as a satirical commentary of the whole popstar business, whilst still being a game where your core aim is to become an all-singing, all-dancing pop sensation.

Before you start exhibiting your skills, you get to customise your character. It's all largely cosmetic stuff but it's fairly comprehensive and you obviously do get to choose your gender, too. After this, you wake up on the sofa, dreaming happily of pop stardom, as your alcoholic mother jabs you about not missing the Pop Superstar (that's the in-game X Factor impersonator) auditions.

The action is viewed from an isometric top-down perspective that will be familiar to anyone who has played comparable lifestyle titles, such as Miami Nights. Whenever you come up next to an object or person that can be used or talked to, a little icon appears, and a tap of the '5' button will bring up a menu that has further icons to represent various actions and topics.

There's quite a lot of talking in Pop Superstar, and you can develop relationships with each of the game's characters by chatting about things that will interest them. Once you're getting on fairly well with someone, you can even try on romantic gestures, from a quick peck on the cheek to a full-blown 'make out' attempt.

However, Pop Superstar's social sim side is really an alternative to the using and combining of objects that features in most adventure games; and that's precisely what this is: an adventure game.

It's not that the social doesn't feature heavily. Virtually everything you do hinges on interaction, whether you're trying to coax your superstar rivals into duetting so that you can improve your singing or charming an enemy that you can elicit useful secrets from. It's just that whenever you're using your winning wit, you're always working towards a specific story-based goal, rather than a far-away aspiration of becoming the most successful smoothie in town or the most popular kid in school.

However, this works because the whole road to popstardom is itself a rather segmented journey. First you're a nobody who spends your evenings updating their MeandmyLife (Pop Superstar's version of MySpace) profile with your latest homebrew videos. Then you're a minor TV personality, roaming the halls of the popstar academy. Finally, you're in a different place altogether, gracing stages across the land.

To give the whole journey a sense of cohesion, there's a counter at the bottom of the screen that tells you how many votes you currently have from the Pop Superstar-watching public.

The interface seems to offer quite a lot of scope for this part of the game to be more involved. For example, there's a contacts section where all the characters who've given you their phone number are listed, although this isn't really used in the game in any functional way. Perhaps this'll be more used more in the sequel, Pop Superstar the Road to Ruin: A Tale of Shattered Innocence (we can but hope).

Either way, we're not too bothered. You see, while the day-to-day maintenance of a game like The Sims may not be a very developed feature, Pop Superstar manages to pull you along with its diverse locations, solid plot and enjoyably irreverent humour. One minute you're trying to pull a young female contestant just moments before you're due onstage at the local venue in order to calm your nerves, then the next you're at the popstar academy, listening in at the privacy booth for sordid secrets as your fellow contestants blab away to the camera.

The visuals don't fail to engage, either, fitting an impressive amount of wit and character into a fairly small number of pixels, thanks to some great little animations. Some of the best of these come into play when your character starts singing and/or dancing. (And even if you're just getting on the stage to sing, you still have to perform a simple rhythm game.)

Users of higher end phones also get a dancing mini-game, plus a couple of extra game chapters that follow on from where our Sony Ericsson K750i's game ended. But even the shorter version offers a reasonably lengthy experience.

Pop Superstar, then, is a jolly, funny and polished adventure game that manages to recreate the modern day 'pauper to popstar' tale in convincing fashion. But it's its star feature – the razor sharp dialogue – that ensures the story is as much fun as the game itself, effectively creating a very likeable, very diverting package.

Pop Superstar

Whether you've ever dreamt of miming on Top of the Pops or enjoyed an evening deriding the latest no-hopers on X Factor, Pop Superstar should be right up your alley
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