Touchmaster Hands-on

April 26th, 2007, 23:31 Posted By: wraggster

The Nintendo DS system is not only excelling at moving handheld gaming forward in the industry, it's also doing a fine job approaching the market as a way to get people who might not play videogames a chance to find out why Little Timmy's completely addicted to his portable systems. Nintendo approached the whole "non-gaming" demographic early on and hit a home run, and now other publishers have been pouncing on the touch-screen focused system to bring more non-gamer friendly designs to market.

And no game has been "non-gamer friendly" as Midway's casual Touchmaster series. You've seen them sitting at the end of bars in clubs and pubs all over the country, and chances are, if you're over 21 of course, you've drunkenly dumped a handful of quarters to play a few of the games in its library. Midway's taken many of the successful items from its Touchmaster machines and converted them for play on the Nintendo DS. And considering each game's "touch sensitive" design, it's not a surprise that these games are hitting the Nintendo handheld.

Midway will release Touchmaster on the portable this June, but the company let us tinker around with what appears to be a near-final build of the game. For better or worse, each of the near two dozen games look, sound, and play extremely close to the version programmed on the larger bar-top version, just scaled down for play with the Nintendo DS stylus instead of the finger. In this collection, you get simple, easy to understand games like Wordsearch, Trivia, stand-alone classics like Solitaire and Shanghai-style Mahjongg, renamed classics like Pond Kings (Checkers) and Five Star Generals (Yahtzee)...even a rendition of Wheel of Fortune in the form of a game called "Wordz." Then you've got puzzle games like Crystal Balls and Mahki where you'll have to tap spheres or tiles in strategic places to remove them from play.

Full article

There are 0 comments - Join In and Discuss Here