Catch! Touch! Yoshi! might well be the first real Nintendo DS game Most of the launch titles made poor use of the DS' unique features Most of the games were ports shoehorned into the DS hardware on short notice - not really a surprise given the single year from the DS' announcement to release Games like Ridge Racer and Mr. Driller were more fun played as a regular game with d-pad and buttons, and other softs like Zoo Keeper and Hitofude used the touchpad as a glorified mouse cursor In all of them the second screen was essentially irrelevant, offering little more than a place to tuck the player's score.

This waste of resources ends with CTY, I'm happy to say.

Catch! Touch! Yoshi is a wonderful extension to the Mario and Yoshi's Island family tree It's comprised of two modes, one where baby Mario falls and you must draw fluffy cloud ramps under him to both keep him from danger and direct him to coins, and a horizontal segment where Yoshi keeps on walking, Lemmings-style, while you create ramps, shoot eggs and make him jump The entire game is played with the stylus, the only button you need is Start, which pauses the action 

Both segments make excellent use of the second screen In the vertical segment baby mario stays on the top screen, so there's a very definite distance between what you draw and Mario's landing on it 

In the horizontal parts Yoshi is once again carrying our pal Mario on the bottom screen, and there are coins and bad guys, as well as fruits, on the top screen This makes things immediately more hectic if you want to achieve a decent score It's very easy to keep Yoshi and Mario safe, but looking back and forth at two screens and firing eggs into the sky and making ramps and prodding Yoshi over things.. It can get quite frantic in a hurry!

The controls are frighteningly simple, and this is where the DS really excels You draw lines to creat cloud bridges, tap the screen to place a target which Yoshi immediately launches an egg at, or encircle coins and/or baddies to trap them in a bubble which you can then flick towards Yoshi or Mario You can also clear all the cloud bridges by blowing on the screen (more specifically the microphone) The clouds will blow away accompanied by the sound of blowing wind.

Every game starts with the short vertical segment Baby Mario falls from a great height (clumsy stork) and the emergency response balloons deploy, slowing his fall While he's falling you must keep him away from prickly things and bad guys while guiding him towards coins He's suspended by three balloons, and as you might expect this translates into three hits: If baby Mario touches three Bad Things he'll fall and be carried off by something evil 

The meat of the game is in the horizontal part Once baby Mario's safely near the ground Yoshi catches him and the horizontal stage begins The controls are basically the same The player must keep Yoshi from falling to his death by drawing bridges and ramps for Yoshi to stand on Eggs are fired off in any direction at any target just like Yoshi's Island Hitting coins with an egg will collect them Hitting a Bad Thing will usually kill it - some will require extra shots, and some will refuse to die entirely 

Every Bad Thing you encircle or bop with an egg counts as a star Gather a hundred stars and a super-star is revealed Touch the super-star and Mario runs forward by himself at high speed, invulnerable, until the end of the stage In a game where distance travelled is how you're ultimately ranked, this is a quick way to rack up a decent score It's for this reason the game becomes very frantic - the player has to protect his charges while assaulting enemy hordes for maximum stars As in the vertical segment this star-gathering is complicated by the distance between the two screens and the inability to touch the top screen directly The player must aim his shots on the bottom screen and hope the angles are right.

There are five game modes, only the first two and multiplayer are unlocked to start Break the high score in one of these two modes and you'll get access to another mode The first two modes are Score Attack and Endless, the unlockables are Time Attack and Challenge Score Attack is a very short mode with a static level Practice makes perfect, and unlocking Time Attack won't take long Breaking the score barrier in Endless will require some serious effort Both the vertical and horizontal segments are randomly constructed so you'll be building skill and reflexes rather than memorizing the stage.

The game also supports PictoChat, so if you're playing and someone wants to scribble at you an icon will flash This can be disabled to save battery power (remember that having it enabled would require the wireless network be active, which draws more power).

This is an excellent looking game, and even though there's a very good chance some of the graphics were lifted from the SNES Yoshi's Island there's a lot of new stuff as well The colours are varied and vibrant, and you'd have to have a cold hard heart to not appreciate the crayon style 

Sounds are exceptional There are no low-bitrate samples here, everything is crisp and clear and in full stereo Hook your DS to a decent stereo and thrill to the surprising amount of clear bass The tunes are familiar to any Yoshi's Island fan, and you can rest safely: the annoying crying from the SNES Yoshi's Island has been removed.

This is the real deal This is what DS users have been waiting for It's fun, it looks great, it sounds great, it has multi-player love, and it's not a port with poorly implemented controls (Hello Ridge Racer We were just talking about you...)

If you have a DS I suggest you put this game on your want-list.

Lawrence.