It's difficult to judge fairly a game made at the beginning of the DS
lifespan like this one, well not really, but this one in particular
actually, the biggest reason may be that the Nintendo DS strays too
much away from everything we had seen on handhelds before, it has a
wider field to explore in gaming and allows the possibility of new ways
for games to be played, and this game can be seen as a demo of what the
system could do, the innovation brought in playing video games and the
Nintendo DS system itself, as it when exhibited in stores could attract
possible consumers and all that since it's casual fun, easy and
charismatic, with Yoshi and Baby Mario playing an important role on
this, also pretty much accessible with anyone being able to at least
try to play, and with the DS not staying too much on the field of
classic video game console, even non-gamers would be interested.
As a game it is flawed, even more if judged by today standards with
more and more games using better and better the touch screen, this is
slow paced and gets boring easily, but could serve of a little fun,
even though my recommendation is that there's way more better games out
there.
You play in two different levels, in the Sky level and the Ground
level, pretty straight forward, you'll first find yourself falling down
from the sky, the Sky level, then after reaching the ground you'll play
only there until the end, a very short game. The game consists on
drawing cloud to advance, in Sky mode you draw the clouds while falling
and change the direction of Baby Mario, you can also circle enemies and
throw the coins they release to Baby Mario. In the Ground level you can
ride through the lower screen drawing clouds to stay high in the air,
kill enemies or trap them, you can also shoot eggs by just taping the
screen on certain directions.
The touch screen itself responds quite well, hardly you'll try to make
something and end up not achieving the desired results, maybe the whole
circling enemies in sky mode is the toughest move to perform, but a
circle is a circle, it won't always be perfect.
There's four types of game modes, Score Attack, Marathon, Time Attack
and Challenge. In Score Attack you will play both courses once and see
what sore you get, the more the best. In Marathon you face an non-stop
marathon to see until where you can go before you die in the game or
die in real life of boredom. Time Attack is a race against the clock,
and Challenge is also a race against the clock, but if your time runs
out you're dead.
It wasn't good even at the time, and time wasn't nice to Yoshi's Touch
and Go, as far as time goes, much better games come and with it more
motives of not picking this game up also come, maybe little children
would benefit more with Yoshi Touch and Go, but I wouldn't put my on
that.
