TouchMaster for Nintendo DS from Midway brings some of your favorite bar and arcade games home. You have probably seen the touch screen games at your local bars and restaurants that have puzzle, trivia, card, and other games, well now you can have those games in your pocket whenever you want to play them. Take your Nintendo DS and TouchMaster with you the next time you head out to the bar and save yourself some quarters in the process.
The games in TouchMaster are comprised of three different categories: cards, skill, and puzzle. Some of the different games you will find in the TouchMaster include Gem Slide, Hot Hoops, Mah Jongg Pairs, Solitaire, 5 Star General, Word Search, Trivia, and more. There are a total of 23 mini games in the TouchMaster game collection and all of them will keep you entertained for short periods of a time on your next road trip.
I said “short periods of time”, because that is the case. I never found myself playing any of the games for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time before wanting to move on to a different game. TouchMaster reminds me a lot of Clubhouse Games that is also available for Nintendo DS from Nintendo. In this case I think Clubhouse Games has a better selection of games to choose from and almost double as many. Now, if you already have Clubhouse Games and are looking for some more mini games and card games to play on the DS, then TouchMaster might be just the ticket.
TouchMaster is also not the most graphic intensive game collection. The graphics look decent for a collection of bar games, but don’t expect anything ground breaking here. All these games’ graphics could easily have been done on Game Boy Advance and maybe even the original Game Boy if you didn’t mind them in black and white.
The music is also very bar game styled and suit’s the type of games that make up TouchMaster. It is all synthesized upbeat music and nothing horrible, but you will forget it two minutes after you turn the system off. The games in TouchMaster really don’t need any music to be enjoyed anyways and you could easily play it on the train or bus with no sound effects and get the same thing out of it. The sound effects also match the music and don’t provide anything ground breaking, but what do you expect from a bunch of card and puzzle games?
The Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection is also supported by TouchMaster and it allows you to participate in tournaments and upload your high scores and daily rankings, but don’t expect to play online versus someone else like you can in Clubhouse games because you will be disappointed. You can play some of the games via the two-player wireless connection in the same room as long as each of you has the game. I am not sure why these games couldn’t be setup for download play, but they don’t offer that option unfortunately.
TouchMaster isn’t a bad game, but I wasn’t that thrilled with it either. It offers a decent amount of different choices, but none of the choices really stood out. It also seems to have too many card games that have you doing similar things. I know you can only do so many things with cards, but it felt like they were stretching it to try to make more games from the same concept. The music and sound effects are nothing to write home about, but neither of them really help or hurt the game.
Final Verdict
Basically, TouchMaster is a bunch of mini games that will keep you entertained for a few minutes here and there and I am not surprised that they were originally designed to suck down quarters at a bar. I think they would do that well, but once you have the option to play them over and over again for a longer period of time you realize that there is not a lot of depth to them.
Score
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