Yoshi Topsy-Turvy

Yoshi Topsy-Turvy (released in Europe as Yoshi's Universal Gravitation) is a platformer from Artoon, the studio behind Yoshi's Story, which experimented with an unusual control scheme on the Game Boy Advance. The game's cartridge contains a built-in tilt sensor, so by physically tilting the whole handheld the player affects gravity and the movement of platforms, balls, boulders and other objects directly within the game world, while the regular buttons control Yoshi himself, his walking and jumping through the levels. The game therefore demands a divided, focused attention between controlling the character and smoothly tilting the handheld, which at its best moments comes close to handling a physical toy.

The visual style bet on paper, cut-out scenery reminiscent of handmade craft work with scissors and glue, giving the game a distinctive, cozy, toy-like atmosphere unlike most other platformers on the GBA. The individual levels are built as a series of puzzles that directly make use of tilting – rolling objects along inclined platforms, balancing on the edge of a chasm, and precise timing of falls – so the game works more like a hybrid of a classic platformer and a physical spatial puzzle. The soundtrack is light and playful, complementing well the overall fairy-tale-like, handcrafted impression of the game's presentation.

Contemporary reception was fairly mixed: the tilt sensor was praised as a creative and refreshing idea, but its precision and sensitivity made the controls cumbersome for many players, tiring on the wrist, and at times even frustrating. Even so, the game remains an interesting historical stop in Nintendo's experimentation with alternative inputs directly on the GBA, alongside similarly minded titles like WarioWare: Twisted!, and for collectors it still represents an interesting curiosity today thanks to its built-in hardware right in the cartridge, which is fairly hard to fully replicate when playing on emulators today.