Nintendo’s current systems, the DS and the Wii, have both seen their share of minigame compilations. From Nintendo’s own WarioWare series to third-party offerings like Rayman Raving Rabbids, there are plenty of options for those who prefer their gaming experiences presented in bite-sized chunks. Still, plenty of games of this style continue to be released each month. Some are fun time-wasters that keep you coming back for more; others seem like simple attempts to cash in on a popular trend. Now Majesco (who has seen resounding success with the formula from the Cooking Mama series) brings us Turn It Around for DS, a wacky Japanese collection of minigames, which all have little in common with each other save the control style.

You see, every minigame in Turn It Around (there are 24 total) is controlled with something called (for a never-adequately-described reason) the MawasunderPAD. The MawasunderPAD is essentially a circle on the touchscreen that you spin. Spinning the pad (either delicately to precisely move some onscreen element, or as quickly as possible, depending on the minigame) is where your influence over in-game events begins and ends. In some cases, this works well; solving a puzzle made of concentric circles by spinning, for example, feels very natural, as does getting a plane’s propeller up to speed. Other times, like when you are tasked with hypnotizing progressively-larger dragonflies (like I said, this game is very bizarre in a distinctly Japanese way--picture Feel The Magic and you’re thinking along the right lines), controlling the gameplay with a spinning motion feels arbitrary. In all cases, though, the spinning mechanism is flawed. At times it lags behind your input, like the game can’t keep up with how fast you’re spinning; usually, this happens during the minigames where your spinning speed is the only determining factor in whether or not you succeed. Also, while the MawasunderPAD does take up the middle two-thirds of the touchscreen, you lose control of the game if your stylus strays outside the circle’s border. This can very easily contribute to your failure during some of the more frantic minigames.

Really, though, this game’s problem doesn’t lie in its control issues. Rather, the problem with Turn It Around is a simple lack of content. The entire game consists of 24 minigames, none of which take more than a minute to complete. Sure, you can play them at your choice of difficulty levels, but you’re still looking at less than an hour’s worth of gameplay, total. At first, I thought I had done something wrong when I got the end of the main single-player mode in less than a half hour and it merely brought me back to the main menu screen. In reality, though, there’s simply not that much to do here.

Technically, the game is solid. Graphics are reminiscent of the WarioWare games, with each minigame presented with a unique 2D or 3D look, all of them steeped in Japanese strangeness. All of them are linked together by a pair of sibling superheroes who proclaim your success or failure after each minigame, then assign you a ranking based on how well you did (my personal favorite pronounced that I was the “Village Uncle” and that I could fiddle with the town’s traffic lights, if I so chose). Music, similarly, varies from minigame to minigame, and ranges from nonexistent to gratingly saccharine to actually pretty good.

Since Turn It Around is licensed by Taito, some of their classic arcade titles make appearances here. There’s a spinning-based version of Arkanoid, Space Invaders gets a mention, and there is a game derived from the Puzzle Bobble/Bust-A-Move series, although it plays differently. These retro touches helped, and Arkanoid is probably the most fun minigame here, although as there’s just one stage, it gets old pretty quick.

Normally, multiplayer in a game like this is a highlight, but such is not the case with Turn It Around. Sure, the game’s multiplayer is fun, considerably more so than the single-player mode. Getting to actually play it might be kind of difficult, though, because the developers decided to require multiple copies of the game for any kind of multiplayer action. Were this not the case, I might recommend Turn It Around for some simple party fun, but as is, it’s not really viable.

Turn It Around is not a terrible game, just a simple, sort of bland one. It probably would have been popular as an arcade game; with so many game choices, there would always be something new to try, short play-through time wouldn’t matter in the arcade, and it probably would have controlled better with some sort of physical turning knob. As it stands, though, there’s little here to recommend as a DS title. What’s done here has been done better elsewhere, plenty of times.

Gameplay: 5.4
Spinning the stylus around your DS touchscreen represents the extent of this title’s gameplay. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun for a while, but you can only make circular hand motions for so long before getting bored, and a hand cramp.

Graphics: 6.5
Each minigame’s graphical style is different, and most of them are pretty interesting, in an insane Japanese way. None of them are gonna blow anyone away, though.

Sound: 5.8
Since the music gets played in 45 second spurts, no one song plays long enough for it to really distinguish itself in your memory. Some are terrible and some are pretty good, so overall I guess it’s a wash.

Difficulty: Easy
There’s only about a half-hour’s worth of gameplay here, and that’s taking into account the fact that the instructions for some are obtuse enough that you might fail before you figure out exactly what you’re supposed to be doing.

Concept: 6.3
Minigame compilations are pretty trendy right now, so no real brainchild there. Controlling them all by spinning is somewhat novel, I suppose, but not super compelling.

Multiplayer: 6.7
As fun as the multiplayer element of the game is, it doesn’t really matter if you never get to access it. Make it a 7.2 if you’ve got a friend with their own copy of the game.

Overall: 5.7
There’s nothing terribly wrong with Turn It Around. But with so many similar games that have more content and more gameplay variety, it’s hard to find a reason to recommend it.