Yoshi's Island DS -- Initial Impression.

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island is the best game in the Mario series. It was an absolutely perfect game. It was released in 1995 on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It suffered the same fate as Ristar, although not as bad. It was lost in the waning of the generation as everyone eagerly looked ahead to the looming 32-Bit systems. The game featured an absolutely beautiful graphic style of a game seemingly drawn by a child with a Crayon. It had great music from Koji Kondo. It controlled like a dream. It was deep for a Mario game. Much more so than Super Mario World before it. And the challenge was set higher. Much higher for the completionists. It oozed that old Nintendo charm. It was Nintendo at its best on a system where they had been forced to rise to the occasion. At first I was thrilled with the announcement of Yoshi's Island 2 as it was originally known. It was on the Nintendo DS, and there wasn't even going to be any touch aspects in there to potentially mess it all up! Then it became known that it wasn't actually being developed by Nintendo, but by Artoon of Blinx: The Time Sweeper fame. At first my heart sank. They're going to ruin it! But then I got to thinking. It's Nintendo. They're still iron-fisted and protective of their intellectual properties aren't they? They won't let it out if it's not worthy, right? And Blinx wasn't even a bad game. It was actually decent enough. And wait, isn't Artoon run by Naoto Ohshima? Yes, it is. He created Sonic didn't he? Yes, he did. And Yoshi's Island DS isn't a 3D game like Blinx, it's 2D. None of the problems with Blinx should even come into play here. He should know what he's doing with 2D shouldn't he? I mean he was instrumental in the creation of some of the best 2D platforming games around. So here I am hopeful all over again. I have played through the first world of Yoshi's Island DS. That's eight stages and two bosses. I can tell right away that the game is gorgeous, using the same artistic style of the Super Nintendo original. The game initially sounds great. The music is as bright and cheerful as the graphics. The controls are dead solid perfect. The initial stages have some decent challenge in getting a perfect score. There have been complaints by some people that the space between the screen is a distraction and a blind spot. I haven't had any issues dealing with it thus far. We'll have to see how that plays out. Right now it seems as though I'm in for a great game.