This is absolutely wrong! Games like Theme Park, Advance Wars, Age of Empires, Anno, Locks Quest, Ninjatown, Sim City Creator or Civilization Revolution would be impossible without the Touchscreen. Or what is with Hotel Dusk, Professor Layton, Another Code or LifeSigns? Or all these cool Music games? Or the Mario vs. Donkey Kong games? Or the Crazy Machine games? Or Puzzle Quest?
All these games would be impossible for the DS! Specially all the strategy games on a handheld was mindblowing back in time! Plus: The DS was the very first gaming device with Touchscreen. I think: Without the DS we would have no Smartphones today.
That might have been an overly reductive phrase. Also I liked the touch screen and many games for it (still very fond of Doodle Hex), and miss such things terribly when I am fighting a controller based menu or inventory on other systems. Compared however to the hype...
Advance Wars needed the touchscreen outside of the download play game? I don't begrudge it the touchscreen functionality but it was hardly essential (I certainly found it too fiddly to bother with most of the time) or game changing really.
Mario vs. Donkey Kong? You mean the GBA version was a figment of my imagination?
Age of empires amusingly went touch screen isometric despite being the one time poster child of real time strategy. Civilisation would have been fine without it, slightly more fiddly but fine. Also consider how many of the rest of those were available essentially unchanged on the 8 and 16 bit consoles, most of which did not have a mouse and other than the Amiga certainly did not have a mouse as standard.
Hotel Dusk? I recall playing Shadowgate on my NES. Played just fine. I liked my
PC mouse using devices more but it is far from impossible without it.
Ninjatown I can see not working as well without touch, however the gameplay style goes back to something like Rampart and while I did like its arcade trackball versions the one of the megadrive managed to be playable enough to sink many many hours into for me.
Tile matching games have been around since the 80s (and things like panel de pon, dr mario and which takes care of puzzle quest. I agree it maybe opened up a bit more for the real time elements (though puzzle bobble worked well enough on dpad systems)
As for no DS no touch screen phones then please. It is basically a way to do analogue inputs without having to have a massive stuck or silly psp nub. There had been pdas for years with such things (
https://www.macworld.com/article/1002442/buzzweird.html ), many of which had nice little games for them. Phones had seen such things since 2000 or so (see Ericsson R380) and possibly before. No doubt the DS was a bit of a shock to the system and devs of phones and whatnot almost certain analysed things very carefully but it was the easy and obvious way to increase screen size whilst retaining functionality.
