21. Touchmaster (Midway, DS, 2007)

Touchmaster is a compilation of 23 touch-based minigames for the DS and is about as casual/shovelware as things get. It's actually based on / mostly taken from a series of touchscreen games developed by Midway (also called Touchmaster). Usually found in bars, the original Touchmasters kind of looked like microwaves, and used small CRT touchscreens.

The games in Touchmaster are divided up into 3 categories: Card, Skill, and Puzzle. I found that puzzle was by far the most interesting catergory

I poked around in a handful of the games before growing tired, here are some that made enough of an impression for me to remember:

Artifact is an alien themes 2 player vs. logic game that is all about building chain reactions and is actually kind of fun.

Crystal Balls is an OK color/number based one-player puzzle game where you're matching balls to remove them from the screen.

There was another puzzle game called Gem Slide that involved sliding colored gems around to form chains. It was somewhat engaging at first, but quickly became fairly difficult.

There was also a straightforward but inconsistently challenging trivia game that had everything from questions about Al Bundy's profession to obscure sports stats.

It seems like these games must have been directly ported form the arcade, because the average playtime on any of them is only a couple to a few minutes, which means that they all feel pretty shallow.

1/5, I found Touchmaster in the GameStop DS bargain bin for about $3 and I think I overspent.