Recently I’ve been playing the addictive game Retro Game Challenge. Based off a long-running series in Japan called Game Center CX, Retro Game Challenge for us westerners follows the premise that you’ve been transported back in time by the vengeful and hapless gamer Arino to beat all the difficult games he was beset with in the 80s. This Mystery Science Theatre-esque setup is the flimsy excuse to basically have you play through a series of challenges through an anthology of classic 80s games.
Ah, but there’s a twist in this matter. In Retro Game Challenge, none of the classic games are actually real. The genius of Retro Game Challenge is that the developers have created loving homages to a number of classic titles for the Famicon/NES system. Cosmic Gate is based off Namco’s Galaga, Star Prince is Hudson’s Star Soldier, Rally King and its amusing adver-centric special edition to all the top-down racers of the era, Guadia Quest is Dragon Quest II, and the Haggleman series is a combination of Mega Man and Ninja Gaiden.
It’s clear that a lot of love and care has been put into both the creation and localization of Retro Game Challenge. Each game comes complete with a detailed manual and lovingly-rendered boxart. There are issues of classic game magazines complete with reviews, cheats, and editorials (and sly references to real game journalists). Even minor translation issues and bad engrish have been retained (Happy End!). And the games themselves are all more than decent, they all range from solid to outstanding in actual play quality. And the nicest aspect about Retro Game Challenge is the developers have carefully balanced the number of gameplay anachronisms that make these games quintessentially 80s while still retraining modern sensibilities about play.
This is most evident in Guadia Quest, a classic 8-bit RPG that screams Dragon Quest in every facet of its design. There’s still the need to deliberately choose to talk to people through menus, the battles are devoid of any animation, and you still have arbitrary item limits and random battle encounters. Yet the game itself comes complete with luxuries like having a journal so you can save anywhere at anytime, a spell that allows you to walk faster, and you level up in remarkably quick fashion. It’s nothing compared to modern RPGs from Japan, but these little additions allows players to remember a lot of the positive aspects of these old-school RPGs minus the frustration that generally accompanied them back in the day.
These tweaks in the retro game formula and other additions like Arino’s challenges allows Retro Game Challenge to remain fresh even after 20 or so years of game design evolution. I highly recommend anyone with a DS and nostalgia for NES games to pick up Retro Game Challenge as a refresher course on great retro games and a mini-lesson on the changes in game design since then. Plus, with a little luck we’ll see the localized sequel, Retro Game Challenge 2 in our near future.
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