On the surface, Retro Game Challenge is a DS compilation with a bizarre concept. You see, you've been sent back to your childhood by the nefarious game master who's running this horse-and-pony show, and he wants nothing more than for your younger self to be a video game playmate for his younger self. While you're palling around in the past, his disembodied head from the future barks out gaming challenges to complete. The only way to return to your present is to complete the challenges! If it sounds like a scenario straight out of a Japanese game show that's kind of because it is—Retro Game Challenge came out there as GameCenter CX more than a year ago, and is a spin-off of a similarly-named television show (wherein a masochistic comedian gets his ass handed to him by all manner of games).
But these aren't just any old games, they're games specially created to evoke memories of those mid-to-late 80s era titles you used to sink hours at a time into. There's a Galaga clone, a racing game that's RC Pro-Am meets Road Fighter, a sublimely bizarre mish-mash of Mappy and Rolling Thunder, and even a pretty fleshed-out incarnation of Dragon Quest. They're all relatively entertaining in their own right—though some of the early ones expectedly get a little long in the tooth as easily as the games they are aping did—and it's fun to go after the challenges that the game master barks at you from on high, even if the "challenge" isn't always there (if you've indeed been playing games since the 80s, anyway).
What makes it more than a collage of homage-games though is curiously what I was afraid the original Japanese game might lose in localization: charm. The game moves through eras of time, stopping off along the way for each new game release. As you go, new issues of GameFan (resembling its real-life namesake primarily in name only) magazine will pop up on your buddy's shelf, offering new codes and tricks, giving sneak peeks of unreleased titles, and featuring reader mail and silly little notes from the editors.
At first you somewhat sheepishly accept it, check the magazines, and keep playing. But as you go you notice it's taking hold of you a little bit—a code you read in a magazine a while ago still works in the sequel, you uncover new tips or secrets for the game you're currently playing. It all works because it's all within the game world, and the game meters it out carefully. You'll look forward to Guadia Quest because the mag's been hyping it for months and months (and reporting on its delays), and so when it arrives it's that much sweeter: you realize you've been getting hyped up for a laughably outdated JRPG rip-off by reading the news in virtual copies of GameFan—and when you finally pop that cart into the system you realize you're actually having fun playing it.
There's even another level of coolness that I am willing to bet the English version of the game benefits from that the original doesn't: Engrish. That's right, the localization team has gone to great (?) lengths to ensure that phrases such as "YOU SHOOTED 38 ASTEROIDS" or "TRY TO THE NEXT COURSE!" are all part of our 8-bit games too, just like we remember them. The RPG you'll unlock restricts your character names to four characters, and spell names to five, so just like the old days you'll be struggling to remember what the hell you're even casting. In addition, the GameFan magazines contain auspicious references to gaming journalists you may be familiar with ("Dan Sock" surely being a tongue-in-Hsu reference to another notable writer).
Your mother will yell from the kitchen for you to go get groceries (you can't, this is the exciting part), you'll have to figure out what to do when the game won't start (blow on the cartridge or... lick it?), and you'll find yourself involved in idle text-box chatter with your buddy about who uses cheat codes anyway, whether or not you read the manual when you buy a new game (all the manuals are included for easy perusal), and if there are hidden secrets in Guadia Quest (your buddy heard from a guy at school that you could throw weapons into the swamp and someone will come out and give you new ones, but he doesn't believe him).
Retro Game Challenge takes a disgustingly tired gaming idea (compilations) and turns it on its nostalgia-fattened head with its frankly unprecedented approach towards exploring the realm of rose-tinted glasses. Even if only a little, on a couple tiny screens, for a couple of days, you'll be sitting on the floor playing NES with your friend from the late 80s, looking up the codes in your magazines, trying to remember which issue had that secret in it, and wondering how much longer Guadia Quest is gonna be delayed. It's the ultimate meta-game, really: you're playing a game about being a kid who plays and looks forward to games. It's the closest anything's really come to replicating that experience, and for those of us who grew up with an NES controller in one hand and a magazine in the other, Retro Game Challenge is definitely a novel time.
But these aren't just any old games, they're games specially created to evoke memories of those mid-to-late 80s era titles you used to sink hours at a time into. There's a Galaga clone, a racing game that's RC Pro-Am meets Road Fighter, a sublimely bizarre mish-mash of Mappy and Rolling Thunder, and even a pretty fleshed-out incarnation of Dragon Quest. They're all relatively entertaining in their own right—though some of the early ones expectedly get a little long in the tooth as easily as the games they are aping did—and it's fun to go after the challenges that the game master barks at you from on high, even if the "challenge" isn't always there (if you've indeed been playing games since the 80s, anyway).
What makes it more than a collage of homage-games though is curiously what I was afraid the original Japanese game might lose in localization: charm. The game moves through eras of time, stopping off along the way for each new game release. As you go, new issues of GameFan (resembling its real-life namesake primarily in name only) magazine will pop up on your buddy's shelf, offering new codes and tricks, giving sneak peeks of unreleased titles, and featuring reader mail and silly little notes from the editors.
At first you somewhat sheepishly accept it, check the magazines, and keep playing. But as you go you notice it's taking hold of you a little bit—a code you read in a magazine a while ago still works in the sequel, you uncover new tips or secrets for the game you're currently playing. It all works because it's all within the game world, and the game meters it out carefully. You'll look forward to Guadia Quest because the mag's been hyping it for months and months (and reporting on its delays), and so when it arrives it's that much sweeter: you realize you've been getting hyped up for a laughably outdated JRPG rip-off by reading the news in virtual copies of GameFan—and when you finally pop that cart into the system you realize you're actually having fun playing it.
There's even another level of coolness that I am willing to bet the English version of the game benefits from that the original doesn't: Engrish. That's right, the localization team has gone to great (?) lengths to ensure that phrases such as "YOU SHOOTED 38 ASTEROIDS" or "TRY TO THE NEXT COURSE!" are all part of our 8-bit games too, just like we remember them. The RPG you'll unlock restricts your character names to four characters, and spell names to five, so just like the old days you'll be struggling to remember what the hell you're even casting. In addition, the GameFan magazines contain auspicious references to gaming journalists you may be familiar with ("Dan Sock" surely being a tongue-in-Hsu reference to another notable writer).
Your mother will yell from the kitchen for you to go get groceries (you can't, this is the exciting part), you'll have to figure out what to do when the game won't start (blow on the cartridge or... lick it?), and you'll find yourself involved in idle text-box chatter with your buddy about who uses cheat codes anyway, whether or not you read the manual when you buy a new game (all the manuals are included for easy perusal), and if there are hidden secrets in Guadia Quest (your buddy heard from a guy at school that you could throw weapons into the swamp and someone will come out and give you new ones, but he doesn't believe him).
Retro Game Challenge takes a disgustingly tired gaming idea (compilations) and turns it on its nostalgia-fattened head with its frankly unprecedented approach towards exploring the realm of rose-tinted glasses. Even if only a little, on a couple tiny screens, for a couple of days, you'll be sitting on the floor playing NES with your friend from the late 80s, looking up the codes in your magazines, trying to remember which issue had that secret in it, and wondering how much longer Guadia Quest is gonna be delayed. It's the ultimate meta-game, really: you're playing a game about being a kid who plays and looks forward to games. It's the closest anything's really come to replicating that experience, and for those of us who grew up with an NES controller in one hand and a magazine in the other, Retro Game Challenge is definitely a novel time.