Affordable Space Adventures is a great touch screen reminder ...

When you start playing Affordable Space Adventures, your ship’s systems are largely down and you gradually put them back to use. You also do that with your Wii U’s GamePad. You’ll dust off the screen — when was the last time you touched that? — and start to get reacquainted with that interface you’ve owned for years and rarely used.

Affordable Space Adventures manages to make heavy use of the GamePad’s touch screen not feel like a mobile game, and it does so by limiting its ambitions. You’re not steering your ship by dragging, or pulling off any multi-touch gestures to get things working. No, the screen’s no more complicated than your average printer interface or interactive kiosk, providing buttons and segmented power level controls so you can do what you need to do. It adds to the feel of the game in a way, as it’s utilitarian and economical in the way the game’s Small Craft is supposed to be, but it also manages to be very usable in the clutch situations in which you’ll find yourself.

Seriously, when was the last time a game used that screen for anything other than off-TV play or some very simple menu access? Nintendo Land and Game & Wario had some interesting asymmetrical multiplayer, and games like Rayman Legends used touch controls from time to time, but these were generally variations on what was going on up on your TV rather than something wholly different. It’s also interesting to see an effort to juggle your attention between the two displays, something we really haven’t seen in a significant way since ZombiU. At this point, then, it’s not surprising that tapping the touch screen at all seems like a foreign concept.

It’s not too late for other developers to build a design around the touch controls of the Wii U. Or the tilt sensor! Or the microphone! Or the infrared port, even! The market is increasingly crowded on the indie side of things, and working with these underutilized system features is a surefire way to make a game stand out.

Of course, then it’s a pain to port it to other systems, and you’re stuck on a less-lucrative platform. Still, being a big fish in a little pond may still be better than getting lost in a sea of other titles.

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