Yoshi's Island DS [DS]

Yoshi's Island, the late Super Nintendo "sequel" to the seminal Super Mario World, is among Nintendo's most involving and beloved platformers. This DS incarnation has turned out surprisingly well -- it's a solid, if unambitious sequel to the Super Nintendo classic with just enough new wrinkles to keep it entertaining.

The game's core is virtually unchanged: Yoshi swallows enemies to lay eggs, which are thrown to defeat enemies and collect collectibles. The Yoshis themselves cannot readily die, either, instead failing if their infant charge is knocked off of their back and left unattended for too long.

This time around, Yoshi will be joined by not only Baby Mario, but also babies Peach, Donkey Kong, Wario and Bowser, each granting Yoshi a host of new abilities to navigate the game's 40 levels. For example, Donkey Kong can hoist Yoshi up vines, while Peach's tiny umbrella catches updrafts to soar to new heights. Yoshi can swap out babies as needed, courtesy of stork stations liberally sprinkled throughout. These heroic larvae gives the gameplay a lot of variety, not only letting players pick a favorite play style, but also opening the game up to a lot of exploration, replay, and some light puzzle solving.

The new babies allowed Artoon to make the levels a bit larger than those of the original game, but at the cost of the total number of levels. While this will likely result in more gametime for the obsessive completionist, for everyone else the game will probably feel Yoshi's Island DS is a bit on the short side. The new levels can get pretty challenging, too, but the game compensates by rewarding the player with a never-ending stream of lives. Fortunately, there's some decent variety here, punctuated by a number of great bosses.

The move to the DS has also vertically expanded the levels to fill both screens, a simple but interesting twist, giving the game's designers more real estate to fill with enemies, coins and secrets. Frustratingly, sometimes objects or enemies hide in the gap between the dual screens resulting in some cheap hits, but these moment don't happen often.

Yoshi's Island DS continues the original game's once-controversial art direction, setting the game in a scribbled pastel wonderland reminiscent of kids' drawings. It's a good looking game, and there's still nothing else that looks quite like it. The sound, on the other hand, has received a significant downgrade. The memorable, hummable tunes of the original are strangely nowhere to be found, often replaced by sleepy, amelodic music box tinklings. With everything else copied by rote, it's strange that Artoon would mess with the music, of all things.

Yoshi's Island DS is a bit too by-the-book to have the magic of the original, but it's still a good game and easy to recommend to fans of the first game and platformers in general. If you haven't beaten the original, though, start there.