| Catch! Touch! Yoshi! review |
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Could this be the game that finally gives us a worthy sequel to Yoshi's Island, one of the greatest 2D platform games ever produced? Looking at pre-release shots of Catch! Touch! Yoshi! you could almost dare hope that it would be. Nintendo have gone back to the original Baby Mario child-care adventure for the looks and style of this fascinating, stylus-driven take on the platform genre. A fraction of the imagination and thought that went into Yoshi's Island would be more than enough to turn Catch! Touch! Yoshi! into a must have DS release. With Nintendo yet to crank out a bad DS game, signs are good.
Fire up a game, and everything seems to be in place. Baby Mario drops out of the sky in what appears to be a amnesiatic re-telling of the original game, with trademark over-sized 'M' cap and cuteness judged to perfection. Thrown straight into the thick of things, you immediately need to start drawing cloud lines to create platform-cushions and guide this pre-school hero safely to the ground. The player will quickly realise the emphasis is placed on coin collection, as keeping Mario out of harms way in itself is not a difficult task.
With both screens scrolling vertically downward, platforms drawn on the lower touch-screen scroll towards a falling Baby Mario on the upper screen, cleverly controlling the pace of his descent, and of the game itself. As well as guiding Mario towards curved coin layouts, there are a handful of stationary and moving enemies to avoid. Enemies can be dispatched by quickly drawing circles around them, turning their threat into bubbled coins that can be flung towards Mario for collection, by a deft flick of the stylus.
Continuing the trend of polished DS games, the stylus controls feel so natural here that anyone can pick this game up and understand how to play it within seconds. It really is testament to Nintendo's skill as a hardware and software developer, that such an unusual input system can be implemented so flawlessly, and with such great style. If you are party to the ever more tedious doubters over the merits of touch screen controls, this is the game to triumphantly throw in their faces with justified smugness.
The more logically minded may worry that a particularly bad platform design could trap Baby Mario floating amongst the clouds forever, but fear not. Left to his own devices, Mario will eventually force his way through the platforms in order to descend, and the quick witted gamer can blow into the mic and disperse any platforms currently clogging up the screens. With practice, you may also learn to judge how much length of platform can be drawn (there is a finite amount), and draw new platforms specifically to remove older ones. This tactic is handy for the score conscious, setting up a very slow sequence of platforms in order to scour the screen for as many coins and enemies as your greedy stylus can grab hold of.
'Yoshi! Thankyouverymuch!' Mario declares in a joyous cod-Italian baby babble, as the dinosaur champion collects this cocky plumber-to-be at the end of his descent. The gameplay now segues from what was a puzzle coin collecting game, into the platform game proper. With Yoshi in charge, we now have a few new controls to play with too. A single tap launches an egg in the direction of your aim, from Yoshi's limited supply, and tapping Yoshi makes him jump into the air, complete with familiar float-strain. Yoshi can also grab fruit placed in front of his noggin to stock up on eggs (but of course).
Yoshi's horizontally scrolling journey really ups the challenge, with a single enemy impact leading to instant dismissal. As with the falling Baby Mario, Yoshi is continuously moving, controlled indirectly by well-placed platforms. The wider range of controls will have you working hard to keep Yoshi on track, and the coin collection racking up ever higher. Now the upper screen is reserved mainly for coins and enemies for Yoshi to lob eggs at, while battling to keep platforms under his feet and enemies out of harms way. The level layout itself is quite sparse; the real platforming here comes from the player's own designs.
This is where the gameplay of Catch! Touch! Yoshi! really surprises. You may be expecting a retread of the original, with the twist of a new control scheme, but the practicalities of having the player draw most of the platforms mean that the game becomes something quite different. While Catch! Touch! Yoshi! bears many of the visual motifs of its 16-bit heritage, the game itself is an unusual platform score-attack hybrid, which doesn't even feature traditional levels. Instead, four game variants are provided, two available from the outset and two more to unlock, each focusing on a different aspect of gameplay.
All of which makes Catch! Touch! Yoshi! far more niche, once you get into the guts of the thing, than it really should have been. It's hard not to feel that the developers got a little carried away amusing themselves with this funky little score attack game, and as that deadline loomed, never got round to adding a more rounded platform game proper. That's not to say this is a bad game, far from it, but it is a game with questionable long term appeal.
There are many great things about Catch! Touch! Yoshi! The presentation, visual style, and audio design will not fail to delight, and the control scheme shows just how good Nintendo's hardware can be. As a score attack game, it also succeeds admirably, providing the most frantic arcade gameplay seen in a platform for years. However, there is a limit placed on the skills you can develop, where speed and multi-tasking are the only real requirements, after which there isn't much else to explore. A good game then, and a game, certainly for score chasers, that can be lots of fun. Those hoping to rekindle that Nintendo 2D platforming magic, though, may be left disappointed. |
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System: Nintendo DS
Genre: Platformer
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Players: 1-2
Version: Japan
Reviewed: Mar 2005
Writer: Richard Davies
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Pros:
- frenetic platform puzzling
- impeccable controls
- wonderful visual style
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Cons:
- limited gameplay, beyond freneticism
- little variety
- score attack only mindset
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