DS Game Roundup Review

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Turn It Around

Remember the turn-table bit in Elite Beat Agents? It pops up every so often and the idea is to spin the disc really quickly to pick up some extra points. It's fairly irritating. You certainly wouldn't build an entire game around it. "Yes you would!" Quiet, Taito.

Another obscurity even by the standards set by Japanese obscurities elsewhere in this roundup, Turn It Around (or "Mawasunda", for those of you keeping track) is a collection of 25 mini-games that are controlled exclusively by performing rotations on the touch-screen. It's been comically translated, which is about 80% of its charm (look forward to baseball game "Pinch Hitter", and being declared a "Village Uncle" when you lose - hey, I said it was 80% of its charm, I didn't say it was funny), and by the time I'd played the first five games it really was a struggle to bother with the other 20.

That's saying something, since the 25 games are closer to WarioWare's "microgames" than the sort of thing you'd encounter in Feel the Magic/Rub Rabbits or something else with a bit of heft. Although each game lasts a good few seconds, the presentation and accompaniment is deliberately cheap and manic, and most of your stylus revolutions are meant to be swift, so expect a sore wrist.

Dull and uncontrollable, this duck race game is pretty typical.

Tasks, which can be taken on alone or fought over with a friend (for how long is another matter), call upon a range of rotational gestures, but you'd hardly claim it has depth. Some, like skateboarding, involve waiting for a prompt (in this case the boarder launching into the air) before rotating as quickly as possible; others, like baseball, involve waiting to perform a single rotational sweep when prompted; others still are simply about cramming in as many revolutions as possible.

Then there are the ones that have you rotate for a bit and then pause, repeating the process to deliver sushi to customers in a restaurant or reel in a marlin. Another example of that is "Umbrella Man", which is a 2D side-scrolling game where a chap with an umbrella above his head and pedals beneath his feet somehow takes flight with each of your rotations, and has to dodge his way over and under stony obstacles to stay ahead of a robot firing rockets. A bit like that Flash helicopter game everyone played for one afternoon and then forgot about, then, except virtually uncontrollable, with little to entice you back.

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