Yoshi Touch & Go (DS)

Yoshi Touch & Go was developed at a time when touchscreen gaming was just hitting the scene and needed to prove itself, with the game actually an evolution of the Balloon Trip tech demo that was meant to show off the potential of the DS’s touch screen. As was the folly of many early DS titles, the game committed wholly to its touch screen based controls when some supplementary button presses could have simplified the controls and made for a more consistent and varied experience. In fact, the general design of Yoshi Touch & Go seems to be eschewing a few of the concepts the Yoshi series had become attached to deliberately, such as structured levels and consistent progression through them. This is because Yoshi Touch & Go is a member of an odd breed: the score-focused platformer.

To that end, Yoshi Touch & Go doesn’t really set up much of a story, instead borrowing the plot of the original Yoshi’s Island for what motivation the game gives the player outside achieving high scores. Babies Mario and Luigi were en route with the stork to be delivered to their parents when Baby Luigi is kidnapped, Baby Mario falling into the unexpected care of colorful friendly dinosaurs known as Yoshis. The Yoshis set off to track down Luigi’s kidnapper to ensure both babies get to their parents, but the modes focus more on the way they present their core challenge rather than this carried over narrative.

There are two main styles of play to be found in Yoshi Touch & Go, the first and less common one being the sky stages where Baby Mario is falling through a perilous sky filled with spiky creatures, flying foes, and plenty of coins and stars to collect to build up points. As Baby Mario plummets down to the ground, it’s on the player to try and guide him to a safer route to the earth below, drawing cloud platforms with the stylus that Baby Mario will slide down on his descent. Despite the hazards and coins being placed randomly on each play, there is still a set design to it to avoid being complete chaos, but it also ends up hamstringing the design as well, as these safe yet somewhat random designs all essentially tell you how to overcome them. The coin layouts are easy to follow and there’s little reason to deviate from them as they are the safest routes most the time, and since you can draw the cloud platforms pretty easily, you can guide Baby Mario through them with ease and earn a decent score doing so. Some enemies do move around and might try to fly at Baby Mario to hurt him, but there are some easy ways to protect him here as well. Enemies can’t pass through the cloud bridges, and the coin paths you guide Baby Mario through can contain stars that will turn Baby Mario invincible for a short period, with the baby already able to take three hits when he’s vulnerable so it’s not likely you will lose these stages after learning the controls. The last method of protection is universal to all modes, the ability to draw a circle around enemies with your stylus, turning them into coins that can then be collected. Now and again you might encounter an area crammed with moving enemies that could threaten your success a bit, but the game seems to realize this is the easier portion of the game and has it as the beginning of its modes rather than one it expects you to repeat over and over for points. It’s mostly the lead-in to the main form of play, those being the ground stages.

While the sky stages are a vertical drop, the ground stages are an automatic horizontal walk through randomly generated stages, Yoshi strolling along with Baby Mario on his back. Stroll does feel like the best word for it, because Yoshi proceeds forward at a slow pace you don’t control that, while it does guarantee that you won’t really be caught unaware by any hazards in your path, makes this gameplay style slower than it needs to be, and it makes up the bulk of the gameplay since every mode will continue sending you through ground stages until you either die or otherwise are stopped by the mode’s conditions like a timer or finite content. You can make Yoshi move marginally faster if you get him to walk on the clouds you draw, but the clouds are partly why the ground stages end up feeling a bit dull. The enemies in these stages are either walking along the ground, static in the air, or will head towards you with a bit of lead-in so you can respond to them. It’s far too easy to just keep Yoshi moving on the cloud bridge and circling any enemies who have any hope of hitting you to transform them into coins, making sure your cloud bridges are over any of the less mobile enemies. If you do want to get a good score though you will have to engage with the level rather than just survive it, and there are coins to be found here just like in the air stages. Yoshi isn’t completely defenseless if you can’t circle a foe or build a bridge over them, the dinosaur able to throw eggs at foes if you tap them, although he’ll need to eat fruits to replenish his ammo. The tapping can be a bit of an issue though because of the fact all your moves are tied to the touch screen. To make Yoshi jump, you tap him, and to make him flutter in the air for a bit more height, you can tap him over and over. If you aren’t spot on though, then you might accidentally hurl an egg or build a cloud bridge, which makes jumping a less optimal option than just letting Yoshi stroll along his safe cloud bridges. Imprecise variety or slow safety is not really the best set of choices.

There are, in essence, six modes to Yoshi Touch & Go. Score Attack is a limited mode where you do one sky stage and one ground stage, and while not the hardest, its score oriented nature and short run time makes it perhaps the least likely mode to wear out its welcome, especially since to get better scores, you have to take the risks that other modes don’t force out of you. Marathon is the game’s endless mode, and after a Baby Mario falling stage, it’s endless Yoshi stages from then on until you die. The game will throw a few new backgrounds and enemies with new attacks at you over the course of the marathon, but nothing really shifts the gameplay away from the safe and slow methods here since longevity is prioritized over acquiring coins or eliminating enemies. There is the smallest of mercies for people wanting to see the different types of random stages the game lays out here, that being that you can continue from after the Baby Mario game, but not from the between level trade offs where one Yoshi hands the baby to a different colored Yoshi who can hold more eggs in reserve.

Time Attack could almost be said to be the game’s story despite being less substantial than Marathon, if only because it has a clear conclusion. After the sky stage, the ground stage’s goal is to catch up with some flying enemies called Toadies who are carrying away Baby Luigi. Nail them quickly enough with your eggs and you win the mode, your speed being your score in this mode. The fact the game controls the movement speed is felt heavily here, and while Baby Mario’s drop to start things is pretty easy to influence in that you want to keep him away from obstacles without halting his fall too often, Yoshi drags things down again, his pace only really able to be increased by making him walk on the clouds. The chase isn’t quite so thrilling when Yoshi’s just strutting along like there isn’t a baby in danger. Challenge carries over the time-focused approach to the game but mixes it with the forward movement that Marathon asks of you. By eliminating enemies in this mode, you gain more time on the clock, the goal here being to get as far as possible before the timer runs out. This mode is a bit more demanding than most, because the game fills the bottom screen with spiky enemies that must be eliminated to make a path for Yoshi, meaning you’ll have to manage egg use or get pretty good at timing your circles around them. Its reliance on just crowding the touch screen with the same enemies does mean the challenge is consistent rather than evolving, so it relies more on Score Attack’s focus on quick, familiar design rather than slow advancement.

The VS. Battle mode is the game’s multiplayer option, which for some reason emphasizes speed despite your limited control over it. Advancing over pits and past the familiar spiky foes, it’s a race to either get to the end first or have your opponent die before you, the only way you can really interfere with each other player being you can add a few spiky enemies to the other player’s side if you eliminate a few on your screen with a single egg throw. It’s a bit bare-bones in a game that already feels a bit bare-bones in general, but the final mode, your reward for getting high scores in the four single player modes, is the least interesting. Balloons will drift across the screen, and you pop them with your stylus. That’s your reward for toughing it out in modes that ask you to play for a long time to beat the built-in scores. Two of the regular modes aren’t even unlocked until you score well enough in the others, so Yoshi Touch & Go is certainly trying to stretch its thin content out a bit more to hide that there’s very little going on in it.

THE VERDICT: Yoshi Touch & Go’s biggest draw is also it’s biggest flaw. The touch screen controls, even when they aren’t being finicky, limited the game’s design and made it a bit too simple to make progress in, allowing the issues with slow movement and easily avoided opposition come to light. The cloud bridges you can draw on screen make Baby Mario’s segments incredibly safe and remove some of the risk from Yoshi’s stages, and even when the game does throw some enemies at you that are meant to get around it, you can just circle them or even seal them off with more cloud bridges. A few modes like Score Attack and Time Attack force you out of the effective comfort zone to try and gain points, but too much of the game is leisurely strolls through random levels, making going for the high scores not all that exciting.

And so, I give Yoshi Touch & Go for the Nintendo DS…

A BAD rating. Yoshi Touch & Go evolved from a tech demo and it unfortunately shows, as even before I knew of Balloon Trip I could tell that it was designed mostly as a showcase of then-new technology. You are meant to likely be impressed that you’re able to interact with the game world by drawing on a video screen, but the effect of it wasn’t considered too closely, with a lot of the difficulty sapped if you’re familiar with the control scheme. Once you know how to play, there’s little to force you out of your comfort zone of cloud bridges and enemy circling, and the modes that do threaten to are short and low on variety. It shows off the hardware, but it doesn’t push itself to be a substantial gaming experience, leading to repetitive design and a slow pace.

Yoshi Touch & Go might be a good way to introduce children to DS touch screen gaming, but its limited offerings mean that it’s not worth much as a game for more experienced players. Even high score chasers might find it a bit too slow to get invested in. Due to the limited content, it’s likely most players will touch on this game very shortly before going onto something more substantial.