My girlfriend began her maternity leave from work on Friday and one of her leaving presents was Yoshi Touch and Go for the Nintendo DS. She loves it, single-mindedly playing it over and over again in a delicious cacophony of sparkling sound effects.

Though it looks like a platform game, Yoshi Touch and Go is not divided into many different levels, rather four different play modes: two with randomly-generated play areas, two with short pre-set ones. You have to protect Yoshi as he walks from left to right on the screen by drawing clouds (onto the touch screen) to provide walkways over hazards, fire eggs at them, or remove enemies or gather items by drawing rings around them. You’ll be trying to help Yoshi survive for as long as possible, trying to win as many coins as possible, trying to get him through as fast as you can, or a combination of all three – it’s all about getting the best score or time.

The exhilarating compulsiveness of the experience is probably down the amount of stuff that’s going on all the time and the breadth of options you have available to deal with them. It’s a delightfully stressful experience, and when things go wrong (there’s no health: get hit and you die) you know it’s always your fault.

It’s nicely appropriate for my girlfriend’s maternity leave, too – protecting a baby Mario and little Yoshi: all very maternal. Anyway, I could bang on about it for ages, and I (honesty!) have hardly even played it. I suspect it will be a while until I get a chance.

UPDATE: She has now played it so much that she says her vision continually seems to scroll right to left, like the backgrounds in the game.