Retro Game Challenge

How long does it take, roughly, for media to go from “outdated” to “nostalgic”? If the video game market is to be believed, we’d probably have to say about somewhere between fifteen and twenty years. The NES was released in 1985, hit its stride around 1988, and twenty years later, we have Nintendo and everyone else finally redistributing their old games legally through digital distribution. The timeline makes sense, of course. It’s about that long that kids have grown up, have some sense of disposable income, and want to recapture the spirit of youth, either for their own fulfillment, or for the joys of a new generation.

Still, there’s more to the phenomenon that just republishing old games. The passage of time has made the greater populace aware that, you know, just because a game is newer doesn’t mean it’s necessarily better. As such, we’re seeing developers go back and mine old properties for old ideas. To whit: many joked (or perhaps were serious) that the killer app for the Xbox 360 back in 2005 wasn’t Perfect Dark Zero or Kameo, like Microsoft would’ve had you believe, but was actually the $5 downloadable title Geometry Wars, whose roots lie heavily in the 1982 arcade shooter Robotron 2084.

Retro Game Challenge (NDS)

The concept of Retro Game Challenge (Game Center CX), published by Namco Bandai in Japan and XSeed in North America, and developed by indieszero, follows in a slightly similar school of thought. Both titles, released for the DS, are collections of retro-style games – none of them actually existed back in the 80s or 90s, but they’re all designed to make it seem like they did. The graphics, the sounds, and the controls are all styled like they were back in the day. The atmosphere is explicitly meant to remind games of the lazy summers they spent in front the TV, playing games all day with their friends, flipping through gaming magazines and trading secrets.

There’s more to the games than mere nostalgia though – each of the games in Retro Game Challenge benefits from over twenty years of hindsight, as well as technological improvements. As a result, they tend to avoid the pitfalls of so many old games, except for the ones they explicitly mean to replicate. It’s true that some are simply clones of existing titles, the kind that probably would’ve been scoffed as ripoffs had they been released years ago, but the genres they tackle are so sparsely populated nowadays that it’s more a cause for celebration than criticism. Even more interesting are the games that combine two or more mechanics from disparate classics – it’s fun to not only recognize the sources, but see how they work in tandem. One of the best examples is Ninja Haggleman 3 in the first title, essentially a mixture of Ninja Gaiden and Metroid. Had that been released fifteen years ago, it would’ve been Game of the Year material.

Still, for all of its occasional brilliance, it’s still a bit conceptually flawed. As much as we all love to think about the NES classics, the truth is that 95% of the things that came out were either forgettable or terrible. None of the games in the collection are bad, per se, but none of them would really stand up to, say, Super Mario Bros. or Contra. Part of this is because they’re too busy emulating older games to come up with anything truly original, but at least the results are usually refined, if not inspiring. Another factor is that the games simply aren’t very long. Most offer only a few levels at most, and can be beaten relatively quickly.

The Japanese release is a tie-in to a retro themed video game show called Game Center CX, a funny little show where a comedian named Shinya Arino is employed at a fictional corportation, also named Game Center CX, and force him to play through Famicom games. There’s usually a specific goal in mind – beat the game, get a certain score, etc. – and the hilariously dramatic music accompanies Arino’s efforts to conquer them. Some of them are classics, but many of them aren’t, and most of the fun comes from the amount of torture Arino and his crew put up with in order to conquer the trials and tribulations of retro gaming. These challenges are usually interspersed with other segments, where Arino and his crew interview Japanese developers or visit arcades. It’s a great show, and while there were efforts to release them on DVD in English, that seems to have fallen through the cracks.

In the game, Arino is portrayed as a maniacal, laughing polygonal face, reminiscent of Dr. Kawashima in Nintendo’s Brain Training game. He’s captured you, the player, and sent you back in time in order to play video games with his younger self. Each game has a series of four challenges – score a certain number of points, reach a certain level – that must be conquered before you can go on to the next. Once you’ve conquered the challenges, you unlock the “free play” for that game, so you can play from start to finish without being interrupted by the various goals.

This structure is both its greatest strength and weakness. If all titles had been presented at start, then most gamers would probably just test out all the different selections, feel a tingly bit of nostalgia for a bit, then either shelve the game or (worse) sell it back to the store. While this gives a reason to learn how the play to game and make them seem less disposable, it expects that the player is fan of all the genres presented. Some people just don’t like racing or puzzle games, and forcing them to play something they don’t want to, just so they can unlock something later on they DO, isn’t exactly the best game design philosophy.

Retro Game Challenge (NDS)

Still, the developers must’ve realized this conundrum, and thus built in cheat codes. At your disposal are several video game magazines, each containing tips and tricks straight from the developers, which can let you conquer most the challenges pretty easily. The second game even gives you the option to skip them completely, if you’ve tried enough times, and bother Arino enough to give you a free pass.

The magazines are more than just a tool, because they also add to the sense of nostalgia. In addition to the strategy guides, they’re full of random fun minutiae, like previews, editorials and sales rankings for other (non-existent) games in the Retro Game Challenge universe. In the Japanese version, the names and portraits are taken from various people in the Game Center CX show. In the North American version, they’re based on real life gaming journalists from magazines like Die Hard Game Fan and Electronic Gaming Monthly. They work under pseudonyms, but it’s usually pretty clear who they are actually are. (“Sock” for example, is clearly Dan Hsu from EGM.)

Retro Game Challenge (NDS)

There’s a pretty fun alternate universe of 8-bit gaming that Bandai/Namco invented for themselves, complete with fictional companies to go along with the fictional franchises. The game magazines help this, especially when they comment on the multiple delays of the fabled “Guadia Quest” series, mimicing the similar experiences with Dragon Quest in Japan. Still, as much as XSeed tried to make as much of this apparent to the English speaking audience, some of it is just a bit too faithful. While they redubbed Arino’s comments into English (using famed voice actor Yuri Lowenthal), they left in the Japanese-style living room and Famicom-style cartridges and systems. At the risk of deviating too much to its source material, these aspects probably should’ve been redrawn to more closer match the American NES experience.

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