Review: Nintendo SEGA presents Touch Darts (DS)
Score: 85
Touch? Did someone mention 'Touch'? You mean that, like Touch Golf (which I loved), this game is actually going to make the most of the DS's bottom touch-screen?
You bet. Like Touch Golf, Touch Darts is a bit of a winner....
Taking a cartoon view of a typical darts circuit (well, not that typical, you won't find beer, smoke and distended tummies here), you get to play 301 or 501 down darts at any of four difficulty levels, with a career spanning half a dozen differently themed venues. And each has been thoughtfully provided with atmospheric sounds (cheering/sneering/buzz, etc) and music (bar room piano, mainly).
The 'touch' bit is the really clever bit. As with Touch Golf, there's an intuitive link between how accurate your stylus stroke and where the dart actually goes. Even more impressively, there's no set way of 'throwing' - you can experiment with long steady strokes and short, fast strokes, to achieve similar ends. The accuracy of each dart depends on how straight a line you 'throw' with the stylus and the relationship between length and speed. The end result is a surprisingly natural throwing mechanism that knocks your average 'stop the moving bars to aim' system, as found in other computer darts implementations, into a cocked hat.
The cut scenes are a bit cheesy, but there are plenty of 3D animations to admire as you play the games and work your way round the darts circuit:
There's plenty of longevity here, partly because it'll take you ages to get through all the different levels (even if the lower skill levels are just for learning, with the computer opponents being rubbish) and partly because you can always play a friend as well, though sadly NOT over the DS's built-in Wi-Fi, the only real black mark against Touch Darts.
The best computer darts game ever? Quite possibly, and a great showcase for what the Nintendo DS Lite is capable of.