I'm really falling for DS now. I love the way that developers have just looked at the touch-screen component, shrugged their shoulders, rolled up their sleeves and said, "right, we're going to use this – it's daft, it doesn't belong in the sleek modern world of videogame hardware, but we're going to use it". And they have.
In the Blue Lagoon-style adventure, Lost In Blue, for example, you use the stylus to dig up shells and shake trees (you can also blow into the mic to start a fire), while point-and-click puzzler, Another Code, comes up with all sorts of innovative touch-screen tricks that you shouldn't hear about until you play the game. Then there's Pac-Pix and Yoshi's Touch and Go...
But this is the masterpiece – Trauma Centre: Under The Knife. Here you play a doctor performing a series of ever more complex operations, with the stylus taking on the role of your trusty scalpel. One day you're removing a tumour, the next you're bandaging something up - all presented as a series of puzzle-filled challenges. As these screenshots reveal, the other characters spend a lot of their time barking instructions at you. There's a great one with the nurse just screaming "Wha-what? How could something like this happen?!" Wonderful.
Trauma Centre: Under The Knife is out in October
