I have a surprise for you: Looney Tunes: Cartoon Conductor is excellent. Yeah, excellent. And certainly one of the best music games I've ever played that didn't require its own plastic instrument. Although, come to think of it, I guess the stylus standing in for a baton is kind of like a plastic instrument…

Read the review after the jump. Go on, get in there. I know what you're thinking: "A review of a music game for kids? Furthermore, one that's just a rip-off of Elite Beat Agents? Why would I want to read that?" Trust me. Get in there.

First of all, consider the target market for the original Looney Tunes cartoons: you. Yeah, you. Mel Blanc and Tex Avery weren't targeting kids. There was a thirty-year run before Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, and Daffy Duck became kid stuff. you'd never know that from the typical videogame featuring them. But this is different. Collected here are classic bits of Looney Tunes imagery set to music that you know.

"But I don't know classical music," you might object. Well, that's where you're wrong. There isn't a single selection here where you won't go, 'Oh yeah, that song!' There are the building horns of Holst's "Mars" (you probably thought it was from Aliens), the trilling melody from Carmen (it's been in about a hundred million commercials), and the gothic coursing of Bach's "Toccata and Fugue" (imagine any movie with a villain at an organ). I'm sure I don't need to cite references for the unmistakable drives of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5and Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries". Heck, you even get the William Tell overture. Everyone knows that one as the Lone Ranger theme, although if you're really hip/pretentious, you'll recognize the two Rossini overtures from A Clockwork Orange. Congratulations on being old.

The point is that you everything in Cartoon Conductor will resonate somewhere in your head. Okay, maybe not the Telemann concerto. That's the obscure one. It must have been written by some local band or something, like the blue dot songs in Rock Band. But this recognition factor is half the battle in a rhythm game, and the reason publishers throw so much money at the music industry. They want songs you know. Cartoon Conductor is an instant success on that front.

But the music is only half of the equation. The gameplay is the other half of the equation, and here's the second reason to get Cartoon Conductor. Whereas Elite Beat Agents has you tapping the stylus on screen in time to the titular beats, Cartoon Conductor puts the emphasis on sliding the stylus, which emulates waving a baton. When you're ready to begin, you tap the podium with your baton three times to cue the orchestra while it's warming up. And then you slide the stylus in patterns to follow the numbers. Just as Guitar Hero plays on your tendency to air guitar to rock songs, Cartoon Conductor goes to the instinct to wave your hand to classic music, as deeply rooted as tapping your foot to something with a catchy beat.

The scoring is just like Elite Beat Agents, and the symbology is similar. Rings close in on numbered points to guide your timing, and you can't lift the stylus without breaking a sequence. The closer you time hitting the note, the more points you'll get for it. But the first order of business is not to mess up your multiplier by missing notes. Easy enough, particularly on the lowest skill level. After that, you have to get the timing down. The emphasis here is on tempo, so you have to listen carefully for which parts of the music Cartoon Conductor is following. The quality of the recordings is surprisingly good. But headphones will definitely help, as the game reminds you every time you boot it up.

The note charts are incredibly satisfying, particularly as you learn them. You're tracing lightning bolts for the "Ride of the Valkyries" and quick short snips for the Barber of Seville overture. There are crazy criss-crossing stars during the "Can Can", which is the "Green Grass and High Tides" of this game. Each song also has interludes where you tap falling notes as they reach the bottom of the touchscreen, much like a Guitar Hero track.

Something unique to Cartoon Conductor is the way the music plays only as well your "conducting". If you hit the notes, the music proceeds flawlessly. But when you miss notes, it will distort and play out of tune. Most music games can't do much more than simply drop out the sound when you miss notes. But here, messing up sounds like messing up.

The Looney Tunes stuff is almost beside the point, but it's a cute little diversion one screen over. It's a shame original footage couldn't somehow run on the top screen. That would have made this pretty much a perfect package. Instead, you get blocky 3D renditions of various characters chasing each other. There are plenty of spirited sound bites as you move around the menu and your score will determine an appropriate audience response as the curtain falls. Failure will result in a braying donkey. The DS even talks when you close it or open it. The extras stuff is pretty weak, and the unlockable remixes of the classical music sound horrible to me, but I imagine some folks might like them (paging Wendy Carlos).

But even with just the dozen classic music selections, each with three difficulty levels, this is a wonderful $20 package with plenty of love, music, and humor. Guitar Hero: On Tour, eat your heart out. And you too, Elite Beat Agents.