January 24, 2005

New Game: Catch! Touch! Yoshi! (JP)

Title: Catch! Touch! Yoshi!
Platform: Nintendo DS (JP)
Publisher: Nintendo

Where: (I'd better not say -- I don't want this guy to stop selling early) :)
When: January 24
How Much: 4,480 yen (4,704 yen w/tax)

How strange. I just finished dinner and was heading to the coffee shop to grab a drink when I noticed a sign outside one of my local game stores advertising Biohazard 4 -- which goes on sale this Thursday in Japan -- for sale today. Sometimes you can find new games a day early in Japan, but to find a store breaking a game's street date by three full days is pretty much unheard of. Intrigued, I went inside to survey the scene, and sure enough, there it was: Biohazard 4, along with the limited edition bonus DVD (which is apparently a lot better than the crappy US bonus DVD), on sale at the front counter. Even better, right next to it was this game -- Catch! Touch! Yoshi!, aka Yoshi Touch & Go in the west -- also on sale.

I already own the US Resident Evil 4 so I didn't care all that much about that one, but Catch! Touch! Yoshi! is one of the few DS games I've been really interested in, so naturally I had to pick it up. In all my years of buying games in Japan, I've never seen anything go on sale this early -- I wasn't about to pass up the opportunity.

I'm busy with other stuff today (like winning 300,000 coins from a slot machine at the Casino Ship in Dragon Quest V, OMG), but I did manage to squeeze in about 10 minutes of playtime before writing this up. Early impressions are definitely positive; the game controls very nicely, and the gameplay seems simple and fun so far. In the first part of the stage, you draw platforms to navigate Baby Mario to the surface without losing all of his balloons. You draw circles around enemies to turn them into coins which you can then drag into Mario's path, and you basically try to pick up as many coins as you can on the way down. Once you're down, Yoshi nabs Mario and it turns into an auto-scrolling side-scroller, with a similar goal of guiding Yoshi through the stage. Here you make paths and encircle enemies as well, but you can also jump (tap Yoshi), hover (tap him again mid-jump) and hurl eggs anywhere on the screen (simply tap the screen in the direction you want to throw). Yoshi has a limited number of eggs (my stock was 25 last I checked), but you can replenish them by eating pieces of fruit scattered along the way.

I haven't read the manual yet, but it seems like the two main gameplay modes are "Score Attack," where you gather points from beating enemies and collecting coins to go for a high score, and "Endless," where the goal is to get as far as you can without losing a life (think Mr. Driller). I'm not sure how you progress from stage to stage in either mode -- after finishing the first stage in Score Attack, my only option was to replay it or go back to the title screen -- but I suppose we'll figure that out soon enough. I'll try to play some more tonight after work if I can pull myself away from Dragon Quest V for a little while. :)

EDIT: Quick update, courtesy of JonnyRam: according to the manual, to open up the "Time Attack" and "Challenge" modes, you need to top the high score charts in Score Attack and Endless modes, respectively. Thanks, Jonny!

Posted by john tv at January 24, 2005 07:02 PM