January 31, 2005 - It's been nearly nine months since Nintendo debuted its Nintendo DS system on the show floor of the Electronic Entertainment Expo with an assortment of technology and concept demos showing off the system capabilities and creative ideas that the unit could pull off. One of the first of the batch of preliminary software was Balloon Trip, a cool concept spun out of the storyline of Yoshi's Island. What was Balloon Trip is now called Yoshi Touch & Go, and the Japanese version (Touch! Catch! Yoshi!) just hit shelves a week ago. Our copy landed on our desks shortly after, giving us much more time with the game design since we last saw it at CES and before it at Nintendo's press summit in October 2004.
Yoshi's Touch & Go is a spin-off game design that brings back a lot of elements and situations from one of, if not the finest 2D platformer ever created: Yoshi's Island. Players begin the game guiding a falling Baby Mario through hazardous airborne level creations, drawing soft, fluffy cloud paths that will, hopefully, force Baby Mario down a specific channel. The idea is to keep him out of harm's way, but also to have him collect coins on his trip down. After Baby Mario makes it safely to the ground, it's off to side-scrolling levels where Yoshi must carry him to the stork who will flutter off with Baby Mario. Players, again, draw cloud paths to guide the dinosaur, as well as create circles around enemies and tap on the screen to throw eggs at enemies for points.
As simple as the concept is, Yoshi's Touch & Go is one hell of a challenge. While it may be an easy feat getting Baby Mario down to the ground below, it's incredibly tough keeping track of his status on the upper screen while creating paths down below. Because what you create might not exactly work -- Baby Mario may get stuck in a little groove that will cause the cloud to vanish, which means he'll fall out of the strategically laid-out channel that you've created three steps ahead of him. The actual difficulty level between Baby Mario levels and Yoshi levels is like night and day...at least in the early stages. Guiding Yoshi through his side-scrolling hazards is a cakewalk in comparison, though it's just as difficult trying to score the highest amounts of points in the round. It also cleverly puts to use the system's capabilities; the touch screen and dual-screen functions become obvious as you play through the game, but it also uses the microphone similar to what Feel the Magic XY/XX and WarioWare Touched pulled off. If you don't like the path you've created for Baby Mario, you can simply "blow" into the microphone and wipe the clouds off-screen.
Yoshi Touch & Go also offers a surprisingly fun and addictive two player mode that only requires one copy of the game. In this challenge, it's an exclusive Yoshi level that takes place on one screen -- the upper screen displays exactly what's going on the other person's touch screen. In this multiplayer mayhem, it's a race to the end of the level; Yoshi runs faster on clouds than he does on the ground, which encourages players to keep the dragon airborne. Blasting eggs at spiky enemies will remove them from harm's way, but blasting three or more with one egg will send larger and stronger enemies to the other player's screen...sometimes right in their path. The game ends when either someone gets hit by a spiked enemy, falls off the screen, or actually finishes the race. There's only one "level" in multiplayer, but the enemy locations are randomly placed each time you play the game.
This game also gets one step closer to the appropriate way to handle the Nintendo DS "community," though we're still far off from the optimal solution. In Yoshi Touch & Go you can turn on an option that enables the game to seek out any PictoChat sessions in the area. If it senses one, a Pictochat face icon will pop up in the upper left corner of the lower screen. Tapping on it will bring up an option to quit the game and shut down the system so you can chat in PictoChat. It's a good step forward, but we still would like to be able to PictoChat within the game in order to tell "buddies" that we can start a multiplayer session with them.
The biggest concern when Nintendo revealed Balloon Trip and then Yoshi Touch & Go months later: How will the game hold up as its own game presentation? Can Nintendo sustain the concept with a fleshed out game design on the same level as other Mario and Yoshi platformers? After all, the idea is just as simple and basic as an unlockable mini-game in Super Mario 64 DS or WarioWare Touched!. Honestly, it isn't as fleshed out a Nintendo design. It's more harkens back to the game designs of the NES where the game continues ad infinitum (we think), and the only incentive to playing the game is to best your high score.
But after playing through the first few rounds of Yoshi Touch & Go, it's a presentation that works extraordinarily well on the Nintendo DS system. True, there's no real story or cutscenes to speak of, with the strength of the gameplay exclusively supporting the design. Though players can't enter their initials on a high score, they can pick from an assortment of character icons to mark their territory -- the game also keeps track of the date when the specific score was obtained based on the internal clock of the Nintendo DS system. It's one of the strongest original titles in the Nintendo DS line, by far, not just because it's a concept that could only work on the dual-screen, touch screen set up...but also because it actually does work. And it's fun as all get-out.
The US version of Yoshi Touch & Go hits shelves in March.
