Yoshi's Touch & Go [DS]

Where would Nintendo be without Yoshi? Without Yoshi's Safari, the Super Scope might never have become such a hit on the Super Nintendo. OK, so maybe that didn't work out so well. While the DS has already become more popular than the Super Scope, Yoshi's Touch and Go is far from a system seller.

In Touch and Go your job is to safely get Baby Mario back to the stork from which he's fallen. The game is divided into two parts, with the first featuring Baby Mario falling through the air. Three balloons attached to his diaper allow him to fall gently to the ground, but the air is full of floating bad dudes and obstacles intent on popping them.

To save Baby Mario, you must draw clouds on the screen, making soft, white bumpers to direct him away from bad guys and toward coins for points. You can also draw circles around baddies, trapping them into bubbles and earning more points. And, should you deposit your clouds poorly, a quick puff into the microphone blows them all away.

After falling for a few minutes, Baby Mario is met on the ground by a Yoshi. The greater the number of points you score while falling, the more powerful Yoshi will be when you meet. Once Mario is on board, Yoshi walks along at a steady pace, and it's up to you to ensure their safety. Since one hit now means game over, the pressure is on.

As Yoshi runs, you have to draw clouds across pits in the ground so that he doesn't fall, tap on the screen to throw eggs at opponents, draw rings around baddies and coins so that Yoshi can grab them, and tap on Yoshi himself to make him jump or hover.

Believe it or not, that's all there is to the game. There's no storyline, no themed levels, not even an ending. There are a few different game modes generally involving a quest for higher scores, and some other unlockables, but nothing more. The mechanics are clever and could have made for a deep platform game experience... but it was not to be.

Things aren't bad in the looks department, as this game shares its basic visual style with Super Mario World 2, but despite the superior hardware, Touch and Go actually features less eye-candy than its 10-year-old predecessor. Likewise, the audio is decent, but not revolutionary.

While this is a fun game, and certainly one that requires concentration and some deft stylus skills, most gamers will grow tired of it within a few hours. Unless you're a Yoshi fanatic or are the type of gamer willing to spend days questing for a higher score, this isn't a sound long-term investment.