Turn it Around Review

With every hit comes an imitator, and Nintendo’s WarioWare: Touched! went unignored by other companies. That game’s random strangeness was what kept it interesting, as well as ridiculous themes, scenarios, visuals, and sounds. It was a classic DS title, and one of (if not the) only early DS games I still own. Majesco and 505 Games attempted to base a game called Turn It Around on that concept, of spinning a circle constantly—and it didn’t work. In fact, it is a total failure of a game.

Turn It Around features 24 games, but none of them are different, so I won’t waste my time or your time describing them all to you. There are a large amount of games that ask you to spin the stylus on the bottom screen softly and carefully…and there are some that force you to spin it so quickly that you feel like you’re creating a drill hole in the plastic touch screen. None of the games are fun, although some of them are somewhat entertaining in concept due to their absolutely miserable absurdity. I had hopes for one of the Taito challenges, Arkanoid, but even it ended up being a miserable game where I wanted to stab the bottom screen with my stylus. Games that require these kinds of motions are not entertaining. Arkanoid at least let you use the d-pad to control the paddle.

The visual style is strange but the sprites and figures appear blurry and rigid on the screen. The bottom screen just looks absolutely ridiculous. 3D models are used but aren’t interesting in the slightest bit; the only entertainment visually comes from the zany themes. The sound effects and music are ridiculous, only as ridiculous as the incessant spinning you’ll be doing. After a while my arm hurt so bad that I had a headache and couldn’t be bothered to look at the terrible graphics or listen to the wacky, obnoxious music.

Honestly, the amount of muscle pain in my arm from spinning the stylus around is enough of a reason for me to slam this game and label it as unentertaining. In fact, it can be out-right miserable to play, and every minute I played it, I wanted to remove it from my DS. I would advertise the multiplayer features for notability reasons, but by no means will you find a gathering of friends enjoying the endless screen oblivion of cranking a stylus. This is the kind of game you skip, throw in a bargain bin, or Salvation Army Christmas Bin after buying it by mistake at the Bargain Bin.