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Yoshi's Touch and Go Preview
Written by Modojo Staff on Friday, February 18, 2005
Yoshi and Baby Mario are back in another adventure, this time wielding eggs as well as that nifty DS stylus...
With the Nintendo DS's touch screen capabilities, the sky's really the limit on what publishers can do. Personally, I'd love to see Nintendo release a game where we can design our own levels using the stylus. Sure, it may be a pipe dream, but thankfully, the soon-to-be-released Yoshi's Touch & Go sort of satisfies my creative urges.
Much like in Yoshi's Island for the SNES, the goal in Touch & Go is to, as Yoshi, protect baby Mario at any cost. You do this by drawing on the DS's touch screen, so you're able to do all sorts of cool things.
The demo that I played started out with Mario plummeting to his doom, and floating along were these Shy Guys, so to avoid leading him into harm's way I trapped the enemies by drawing circles around them and then sketched mini clouds for him to land on.
The free fall is really a set up for the main game, which is a lot more complex. Once Mario lands it becomes a typical side-scrolling platform game filled with enemies and traps, so as Yoshi and Co. move along the object is to basically draw a safe passage for them, so you can do stuff like create bridges over chasms and continue to trap enemies.
It's actually a lot different from what I'm used to because Yoshi cannot be controlled. All you're doing is drawing the whole time, so the game really makes great use of the unique abilities of the DS while at the same time distancing itself from the other platform games on the market, so it's typical but it isn't. Still, you'll see plenty of familiar faces, and just like in any Mario game, there are lots of coins to collect.
Touch & Go's visual style is very similar to Yoshi's Island. The developers used a lot of pastel colors and the game looks fabulous spread out across both screens. I also didn't notice any slow down in the demo, and I'm hoping that that's one particular thing that remains consistent throughout the entire experience.
It's been a while since I last played Yoshi's Touch & Go and I'm very curious as to how it's turned out. The game's already been released in Japan, and while I had an urge to import for quite some time, now that the American version will hit retail shelves mid March I'm going to wait. If you're looking for a great title that makes excellent use of the DS's features, I highly recommend Yoshi's Touch & Go.
