It's amazing the things we find ourselves engaged in, despite our very best intentions. Take TouchMaster 2. Upon booting it up, and selecting my avatar from the adorable selections, I started browsing through the games, thinking that I'd just putter around with it while dinner cooked. I found the Speed Demon game where you use the stylus to guide your car through traffic and over jumps in an overhead Spy Hunter style viewpoint and started driving. Several trophies and one burned dinner later, my car exploded, having hit one too many tractor trailers. I had spent a lot longer on that one game than I had expected and therein lays the charm of TouchMaster 2. At first glance, many of the games contained within it don't seem very exciting, but once they get their hooks in you, be prepared to write off your life in ten minute chunks.

Unfortunately, not all of the mini games share the same addictive appeal, however with twenty games at your disposal, there's bound to be some that you don't find particularly interesting. The game certainly has more hits than misses, including a variant on Rampage where your marauding ape only destroys levels of a building containing words that you've unscrambled, the aforementioned Speed Demon and Dice King, the Tetris/Yahtzee mash-up. Even the bowling game is a nice diversion, made all the more engaging by the inclusion of trophies for strike count and high score.

Speaking of trophies, they really do help extend the longevity of the games, simply by being there. Every game has three trophies associated with it, usually for things like high score, number of bonus rounds played or shortest time to completion. As you play, trophies are awarded to you on the fly fostering a "just one more game" kind of mentality to see what trophies are just around the bend. Based on how many trophies you get, you're awarded Wizard Points, which, when summed up across all of the games you've played gives you a total grade for your TouchMaster experience. What a Wizard has to do with the game is beyond me but I don't know why King Kong would pause his destruction for jumbled words either.

The games that do miss tend to be more traditional ones such as Picture Slide, where you work to assemble a jumbled up picture by sliding tiles around, Speed Solitaire which is just, well Solitaire done fast and View Finder, a compare the picture game which must have been designed with Superman in mind as no mere mortal, bereft of super vision would be able to tell the differences between some of these pictures. And yes, you do get penalized for just randomly tapping on the picture, hoping to stumble across the differences. I tried. Multiple times.

The games are a lot more complicated this time around, and employ various stylus control methods over the blatant tap fest used with the game's predecessor. Unfortunately these advanced methods come at a price, namely completely sucking out for the first attempt at a game. Oh sure, you can always refer to the manual over and over again, but I'm a busy man and these bulldogs aren't going to shoot paintballs at themselves. Relying on the instructions presented with the game gives you a vague idea of what to do, but I could tell you to come out of your house and take a left to walk to China, but that doesn't mean you'd get there.

The game looks about as well as you'd expect from a collection of 20 minigames more commonly found at your local bar. You won't be using this game to show off the graphical prowess of your DS, but it's not completely bereft of charm. The various icons you can apply to your profile are all sorts of cute and the more character oriented games such as Beaned! and Catwalk Caper have their own barebones kind of charm to them. Any of your friends who complain about the workmanlike graphics will no doubt be silenced by the ability to send any of the 20 games to them over the DS's ad-hoc wireless connection. Should they decide to drag their cheap ass over to the store and pick up their own copy, you can compete with each over, again over the wireless connection, to see who can be the Scavenger master.

TouchMaster 2 hits on all of the bullet points needed for a successful mini game collection. Good number of games? Check. Most games are engaging? Check. Awards for doing well in the games? Check. Ability to send games to other people or play games against other people? Check. The game isn't going to bowl you over with its presentation or provide a casual games revolution, but it will give you plenty of fun games to goof around with, and possibly an excuse to get take-out for dinner.

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