Best game for the Nintendo DS
User Rating: 9.6 | Yoshi Touch & Go DS
Does innovation have to come at the expense of value? You wouldn't think the two should have to be mutually exclusive, but the way Nintendo's DS library is shaping up that would seem to be precisely the case. WarioWare Touched! was inventive and fun, but only about half as long as its GBA predecessor; Pokémon Dash was like a minigame stretched tortuously to a full-length product. And now completing Nintendo's trifecta of novelty over depth is Yoshi Touch & Go: It's incredibly fun, it's highly original, it's packed with charm, and it's guaranteed to leave gamers scratching their heads wondering, "Is this it?" The problem with Touch & Go isn't one of quality or creativity; on the contrary, it's a game very much in keeping with Nintendo's reputation for excellence. The visuals and overall feel of the adventure position the game as a true sequel to 1995's excellent Yoshi's Island on the Super NES, so we can finally, mercifully forget about Yoshi's Story on the N64. The characters, level design and even basic gameplay share much in common with the SNES classic. Once again, a careless stork has dropped Baby Mario en route to the cabbage patch (or wherever it is that Nintendo characters are born), and it falls to a troupe of Yoshi's to reunite child and courier once again. Where Touch & Go differs from the original is in the fact that not only do you not control Mario, you also have no direct control over Yoshi, either. Instead, you play a sort of "god" role, creating paths and capturing enemies with the DS stylus to ensure the heroes reach their goal safely. Your only ability to directly affect Yoshi comes by tapping him to make him jump and hover. It's not an entirely new gaming concept -- in fact, it closely resembles Nintendo's quirky early NES title Gumshoe, in which you protect and direct a wandering sleuth with the Zapper light gun. However, Touch & Go offers a much more satisfying experience than anything that has come before. The touch screen is extremely tactile compared to the mouse or light gun interface common to this sort of game, and it gives a real sense of immediacy to the action. Control boils down to four basic actions. Drawing a line with the stylus creates a path made of clouds which can serve as a bridge or ramp for Yoshi and Mario; drawing a circle around an enemy will trap it or turn it into a coin; tapping Yoshi will cause him to jump and hover; and tapping anywhere else on the screen will cause Yoshi to toss an egg in that direction, which is handy for snagging coins or knocking down enemies. This simple palette of commands makes for a deceptively fast-paced and challenging game: Because your characters are always on the move, keeping up with everything happening on the screen is a true test of skill. The graphics aren't quite as quirky as those in Yoshi's Island, but the scenery, foes and mechanics will be familiar to fans regardless. The references span everything from fruit-chucking monkeys climbing trees, to moles popping out of cave walls, to those annoyingly indestructible spiky guys, to Mario's ability to go it alone with an invincibility star power-up. Happily, Touch & Go comes out way ahead of its prequel in terms of sound. Since Yoshi suffers from one-hit deaths here, there's no "recapture Mario" countdown to deal with when you're hit -- which means no baby yowling an ear-splitting wail as you try to recover him. The more mundane mechanics, such as animation and responsiveness, are spot-on. It's an extremely polished game, and overall the content is excellent. Unfortunately, there's just not that much content to speak of. Touch & Go doesn't simply play a lot like Gumshoe... it also has depth reminiscent of a first-generation NES game. Which is to say, not much. There are just a few simple modes to the game -- the main one is a straightforward two-part affair which begins with Baby Mario descending through the sky which, for some reason, is lousy with monsters and floating cacti. The wee tyke has three balloons slowing his descent, and each enemy collision bursts one of them; the goal is simply to keep him safe by drawing cloud paths for him to slide along, protecting him long enough to reach the ground intact, collecting coins and bumping off bad guys as he goes. Once Mario touches down, Yoshi takes over for a horizontally-scrolling phase which is far more hectic and challenging. There's also an endless mode which simply tests how far you can travel on foot, swapping Mario like a relay baton from Yoshi to Yoshi every kilometer; a time attack stage in which you're trying to recover Baby Luigi from his captors; and a final unlockable mode in which you're shooting for both distance and time. Unfortunately, that's all there really is to Touch & Go -- a series of mini-game modes that challenge you to achieve the highest score possible. For instance, the standard quest mode is simply about completing both sections while collecting 300 coins; if you fall short, you try again. If you succeed, you try again and shoot to snag a few more coins than last time. There's no escalating difficulty, no new and different goals to strive for. And this is where the game falls short: Without any sort of structure or incentive in place, it's difficult to stay interested once you move beyond the initial novelty of the game. For all of it's innovation, and personality, Touch & Go feels incomplete. It seems like Nintendo had a bunch of great ideas for parts of a game, put them together, polished them up, and then forgot to connect them into a cohesive whole. Yoshi's Island was an amazing game, and Touch & Go feels more like a quick survey of its predecessor rather than a full-fledged sequel. It sits uncomfortably on the borderline between puzzle game and platformer, but it lacks the substance of the latter while failing to capture the "zen trance" feel of something like Tetris or Lumines. It's an incredibly fun game, and its obvious ties to one of the greatest 16-bit platformers of all time will warm the heart of anyone with good taste. With a little more variety and a bit of effort to bring the whole thing together, Nintendo could have had another classic on its hands; as it stands, Touch & Go is just another high-quality novelty for the DS.
