Games that show off what a brand new console can do, especially in the gimmick department, seem to have a good chance at landing on a 1001 Must Play Video Games list. I suppose it's to be expected, to some degree. A game doesn't have to be phenomenal to warrant playing it, and by most peoples accounts Yoshi Touch & Go sure isn't anything remarkable - but here it is, showing the world what the Nintendo DS can do.
What's this thin, pencil-like stick? What's a 'touch screen'? What are the laws of physics? Let's find out.
Fun Times
Yoshi Touch & Go is nice and simple. Baby Mario is slowly falling through the sky, having been dropped by the stork. You need to safely guide him back down to the floor by drawing clouds (using your stylus on a touch screen), which will nudge him to and fro, away from danger (hopefully) and into shiny rewards (again, hopefully).
Mere feet above the ground, the last balloon pops and Yoshi - coloured according to how well you did on the way down - dives in for the catch. And now you do a similar thing as before, only sideways. Nintendo and their radical thinking, eh?
Yoshi will, also slowly, stomp his way across the screen, where you'll need to draw clouds so that he avoids pits and spikey enemies, but also hurl eggs through the air, up into the second screen even, collecting coins and knocking out enemies.
Poking him causes him to jump, poking him harder causes him to jump higher, and poking him in the air prompts him to wiggle his little legs as fast as he can to propel him just a little further so that he clears a pit or avoids an enemy or whatever. You could have drawn another cloud ramp for him, which would probably be easier, but you didn't. Oh well.
The more points you get before the end of the level, the higher up the leaderboards you climb. At its heart, it is as simple as that.
Frustrations
But Yoshi Touch & Go isn't that simple, especially when emulating. My 'stylus' inputs are about as accurate as using my finger would be (assuming the DS did well with fingers), and the screen setup doesn't account for the gap in the two screens of a real DS, so my timing with all the clouds was often off.
If your timing is off, you end up frantically scribbling to keep up, and instead of drawing bubble-trapping clouds around enemies, you just draw blobs that Mario hopefully falls onto and comes off one side or the other safely. With a real DS, you could blow into the microphone to blow all your clouds away. I wonder if there's a button for that on the emulator...
The squished screens also threw off my angles for hurling eggs into the skies (though the screenshots show otherwise), and though I'd learned more about bubbles, and how trapping enemies in them turns them into coins, or how empty bubbles can be flung towards enemies to knock them out of the way a little, I was struggling to play effectively.
Despite it being a simple little game that I had no real problem with ignoring and concluding that the conditions weren't ideal for a good time, I did think to myself "Nah, surely there's a way of moving the screens away from each other."
Further Fun Times
Turns out, there is!
Not that it helped that much. I know, Baby Mario. I'm just as confused as to how you ended up there as I am. Let's just ignore the coins this time around, yeah?
The clouds made a bit more sense in my head, but egg chucking was still a bit all over the place. You can spam them to make sure you cover a wide area in an attempt to hit something, but you'll run out of eggs unless you find and eat some fruit, so don't go mental with them.
Making it to the end of the stage once more, has nudging the screens further apart done the trick for me?
Technically, yes. Excellent.
Final Word
I don't need to play Yoshi Touch & Go any more. The emulator does have microphone options, but I've got no microphone and I don't want to have to faff around with configuring extra buttons when my current set up 'just works' for the majority of games I have to chuck at it.
If I was desperate to play a game of Yoshi Touch & Go, I'd probably try and track it down on original hardware. It would make more sense in your hands with a stylus than it does on a PC with a mouse, and that is, of course, how we should all be playing it - Nintendo game or not.
But is anyone really desperate to play Yoshi Touch & Go? There's no plot here, save for 'Baby Mario falls, Yoshi safely returns him, the end'. There's a decent chunk of gameplay, I suppose, as you have to puzzle your way past obstacles, both static and dynamic, and have many options for dealing with them - avoid, trap, shoot...
If you really want to maximise the gameplay, there is definitely a game to be found here. It's just not an amazing one. It does show off how to use the stylus, in all fairness, but we probably could have learned how to do that in bigger games that offer us something other than drawing clouds.
Too harsh? Maybe. I can see how it would entertain for a short while. Anything longer than that is down to you.
Fun Facts
Originally intended to be a GameCube game. Well, that wouldn't exactly work as well, would it...
Yoshi Touch & Go, developed by Nintendo EAD Group No. 4, first released in 2005.
Version played: Nintendo DS, 2005, via emulation.