Yoshi Touch and Go, one of the first games released to make full use of the touchpad, is a blast to play. It's a side scroller that has you drawing clouds to guide Baby Mario around Shyguys, spiked balls and other flying menaces. If you can actually circle them and fling them at Mario, you'll even get some coins from it. The coins you collect in the first part of the stage will play an important part in the second half of the stage. For every 20 coins you collect, you'll get a different color Yoshi. Each Yoshi can have more eggs at one time, leaving him less and less reliant on having to eat fruit throughout the stage.

The second half of the stage uses some similar mechanics as the first. You'll still be able to cloud-circle enemies and turn them into coins or circle fruit and drag it to Yoshi. You'll also use the clouds to guide Yoshi along, drawing ramps and bridges to help him avoid the enemies thrown at him. Drawing a ramp that has an upward slope will make Yoshi a bit slower while a downward slope will speed him up a bit. There are a couple of additions to the controls in this mode, too. You now have the ability to tap the screen and throw an egg at the place on the screen you tapped. You can also tap Yoshi to make him jump - multiple taps will perform his classic flutter-jump move.

There's also a multiplayer mode. This mode is a simplified form of the side-scrolling game. You just race to 1000 feet and the first person to cross the line wins. There'll be a lot of spike balls in your way but you can destroy them with eggs. Combos will cause some of the spike balls to pop up on your opponent's screen, which adds another competitive element to the game.

The single-player modes all have the two-part theme that I've already mentioned. The first time you play, you will only have the Score and Marathon modes to play. The first will score you based on the amount of coins you pick up, enemies you kill and combos you obtain throughout the vertical and horizontal portions of the stage. The Marathon mode will put you through the vertical portion and then tell you to just keep going in the horizontal portion with your goal being to get as far as you can before dying.

After reaching a certain score in the two stages, you'll be challenged with two new modes: Time Attack and Challenge. Time attack challenges you to race through the stage as fast as possible while Challenge seems to be a cross-breed of all the modes. In Challenge, you have to collect coins to increase your timer to keep playing all while trying to get as far as you can.

All these modes of play were fun. I enjoyed the multiplayer most, though - playing with other people caused me to be called a murderer for popping up red spikeys on their screen. A bonus with this mode is the single cartridge requirement. You don't need each player to have their own copy of the game.

Single player, while fun, doesn't have much in the way of staying power. There's no story to follow, nothing special to collect and nothing to do other than try to get the top score. While this is how games were played back in the days of the NES, gaming as a whole has evolved. We now have the ability to have engaging stories and other fun bonuses in a game as opposed to a simple push for the highest score.

This game is an easy one to recommend if you want a simple game that is easy to pick up and play for 15 minutes and not have to worry about just shutting it off. It is easy to just turn on, run a race and be done with it. If you want something a bit more involved, however, you'll want to look elsewhere.