3. Yoshi's Island DS | DS | Platformer | 2006 | 5.45hrs | 4/10In 2006, Nintendo released Yoshi's Island DS for their Nintendo DS system. Like quite a few of their other primary IP platformers on the DS, Nintendo opted to contract third party developers to produce it. The studio in question this time was Artoon. Why Nintendo chose Artoon to produce a sequel to the best platformer Nintendo ever made, is a very vexing question indeed. Perhaps Artoon was the lowest bidder, I don't know. And for the longest time, I thought Yoshi's Island DS was just a port of the SNES Yoshi's Island to DS. Looking at the initial screenshots one could forgive my assumption. But no, this is no port. But I hesitate to say Yoshi's Island DS deserves the title "sequel". This is more like a ROM hack designed by a sixteen year old to troll fans of the original game.
Apparently while producing Yoshi's Island DS, Artoon decided on a simple formula; ape the original game's graphics, add some new babies into the mix, and amp the difficulty through the stratosphere. The new babies (Peach, Donkey Kong, Wario, and Baby Bowser) have their own special abilities allowing Yoshi to do new things. New things like ride on wind, climb up vines, or shoot fire, for example. Of course you won't know which baby you need to get past a level, until you die because you didn't pick the right baby the first time. But it's all window dressing really, because Artoon only cared about one thing while making this game; actively hating the player.
There are five worlds in Yoshi's Island DS. The first three are of reasonable difficulty. But when you hit the fourth world, the difficulty curve massively inclines. Should you make it to the fifth world, you're in for a torture fest the likes of which I've never seen in a Nintendo published platformer (aside from maybe SMB2 Japan). And folks, I've beaten very many Nintendo published platformers. The late game stages become so spike infested, you could swear Artoon handed level development off to Inti Creates. It's truly ridiculous! Also extremely disingenuous design compared to the original (well balanced) Yoshi's Island. Another issue is the levels are generally far too long for a portable game. And the camera, yes the camera, is junk. How do you screw up a camera in a 2D game? Play through the entirety of Yoshi's Island DS and you'll find out. (It has to do with a too wide dead zone between the dual screens, and bad player tracking.)
To say something positive... the graphics are okay, albeit completely ripped from the original game in aesthetic direction. The music isn't wonderful, but it doesn't overtly annoy. There's a fairly involved story told through cutscenes... about babies and storks if you care. The controls work fine I guess. And that's about it. I really tried to like Yoshi's Island DS, but in the end it's a sadism orgy by a developer who clearly didn't understand the magic of the original Yoshi's Island. This charmless soulless "sequel" sucks. I only forced myself to beat it out of spite (or self loathing?). All I can say in closing, is that there's a reason Yoshi is pointing his ass towards you on the cover art.
As to this game's difficulty, I'll defer you to a broader base of opinions than just my own:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=420705
