Retro Game Challenge

February 20,2009 - With a lot of the retro love covering remakes, compilations, and the big three’s digital download services, it’s nice to see someone taking a bit of a different approach to the nostalgia love fest. Retro Game Challenge for the DS celebrates the 80’s when the NES was the king for a lot of children, but will you want to return to your youth for this game?

Retro Game Challenge is based on a Japanese show about retro games, but has been retrofitted to be more interesting as a game. You’ve been turned into a kid and sent back to the 80’s to stay with a kid named Arino, the child version of the retro game master that has sent you back in time, and the only way back is to relive the mid-80’s by completing challenges for the big, new releases to beat Game Master Arino at his own game and return to the present. Though everything’s been localized by XSeed Games to be more approachable for us, it’s easy to see that this game has more of a Japanese nostalgic tilt, from the Famicom that you play games with to the Japanese living room that you and little Arino hang out in to take on these challenges.

The way that Retro Game Challenge progresses is that you’re required to beat the four challenges that Game Master Arino puts in front of you for the current game so time will advance to the next big game’s release. Instead of having all four challenges at once, you complete one challenge to get the next until you’ve accomplished all of four tasks and can move on to the next game. After that, the games you’ve completed are unlocked for free play for any further enjoyment you can have without any required challenges to beat. It would’ve been nice to be able to beat multiple challenges in one run, sort of like the achievements system that the Xbox 360 and PS3 have, but it at least gives you a better chance to learn the games and get better for the tougher challenges that come later.

To add to the experience that Retro Game Challenge offers, little Arino also buys issues of GameFan magazine that offer info, cheats, and nostalgic enjoyment of a time when magazines were your sole source of news and information about the hottest games out there. The cool thing is that the new localization features references to EGM and GameFan in each issue of GameFan that little Arino brings home for you to browse. Unless specified in the challenges, you’re allowed to utilize the cheats to make them easier to accomplish since it embraces the codes that kids passed around to each other on ways to get more continues, special bonuses, and more depending on what the game has to offer.

The games themselves in Retro Game Challenge definitely aren’t going to be the actual games that were released back then, but knockoffs that offer similar experiences. The first game is a Galaga knockoff while others emulate Final Fantasy, Star Soldier, Ninja Gaiden, and others. The main issue with the games offered is that a few of the games are sequels, making this eight games feel more like five when they don’t change that much. The games are quite a bit of fun with a few that are interesting enough to be played in free play after you beat all of the challenges, which is good since a good number of the challenges aren’t all that hard to get through without much frustration. The RPG is a little bit of an oddity compared to the rest of the games being fairly simple concepts since you do end up having to spend more time on beat its challenges to make for a bit of a lull near the end as you head for the final stretch of games.

Retro Game Challenge definitely does a good job of capturing the retro vibe of the 80’s and the games that came out at that point. The main issue is that the visuals are far to detailed to have really been NES games, which something like Mega Man 9 captured perfectly last year, though it’s not much of a problem here when it helps made the games a bit more pleasing to the eye. When not playing games, the bottom screen covers what you and Arino are doing in front of the screen, which isn’t much more than what you’d expect. Arino shouts out excited remarks when you pull off cool moves or start to play terribly to add to the atmosphere that many kids had when playing games with friends.

Though you may not be able to become a kid again for real, Retro Game Challenge does a nice job of replicating that experience with retro knock-offs and magazines to add to the 80’s atmosphere that can’t be done as well with compilations and remakes. The $30 price tag is a bit steep to ask for the game based on how much there really is to this game, but anyone looking for a blast from the past would do themselves a service to pick this up at some point to relive their childhood once more. The sequel is about to be released in Japan, so if you’d like to see it be localized for release in North America a little sooner than 15 months from now, do pick up a copy sooner rather than later.

Games, News, Reviews, Media and More