While I wasn't there at the dawn of home consoles, I'm old enough to remember a time where multiplayer gaming always took place in the same room, game magazines were always worth a read, and a game was played over and over and over because it was the only one you had available.
I'm glad those days are over, in some respects, but there's much to be said and remembered about those good old days, and Nintendo DS title Retro Game Challenge is here to show you what it was like. Scrambling over the carpet to get a new game from the shelf, your friend encouraging you to do better from the sidelines...
This was how it was, and how the Demon Arino will have it be until you complete his challenges.
Fun Times
I had no idea what Retro Game Challenge would be when I launched it up in the emulator. I thought, which a whole bunch of publisher logos at the start, that it was a collection of golden oldies that have been brought together for players to battle through once more.
I'm not quite right, but not quite wrong either. A Star Wars-inspired text scroll makes its way up the DS screens towards a familiar face. I don't know who he is, but I have seen him before. The Internet likes him, or some sections of it do, at least.
A bit of research later and I discover that he is Shinya Arino of GameCenter CX, a comedian who is issued challenges to complete old games in strict time limits, and has been doing so for some 24 seasons now, stretching back over the last two decades. And now he's here, in a game with a similar format.
Going slightly mad at his failures, he's digitized himself into a Nintendo DS game to challenge/haunt the rest of us with devious retro game challenges. He has turned us back into a kid and dumped us back into the 1980s to play alongside his younger self, and won't turn us back until we've proven ourselves capable.
I think I may be stuck here, then...
Little Arino seems to be a bit of a lonely child, but he sure is eager to play games with us, and rather happier if he watches us play instead. Sat in front of a CRT hooked up to a Famicom, he wants us to play his new game, Cosmic Gate, which I was a little sad to learn doesn't actually exist.
The games in Retro Game Challenge are clearly inspired by games of the era we've been whisked back to, but this isn't quite GameCenter CX on a DS cartridge, more the flavour of it.
Still, now that I know a bit more about what's going on, I'm looking forward to trying it out. Our first challenge is to make it to the end of Stage 05. Let's go.
Is it too much to ask the Nintendo DS to also show a tiny version of gameplay on the CRT on the bottom screen? Probably, but if you want to swap screens you have the option to do so. As games back in the 1980s didn't have a hundred buttons to make use of, Cosmic Gate handles much as you'd expect: left, right, shoot. Avoid being shot, destroy all of your Insektor opponents to advance, and Stage 05 will be in sight in no time at all.
I am that, little Arino. These lines aren't voiced, but you can occasionally hear him shout "Dude!" and other hip phrases in response to your actions, which adds to the charm of seeing two kids just having fun, even if they do look awfully out of proportion.
So far, though, Retro Game Challenge is looking like a hidden gem. If only it was on the GameBoy Advance.
I did indeed. What's next? A racer? Platformer? We're in the 1980s, so it's probably another space shooter. They were everywhere. Oh, no, it's still Cosmic Gate. We've got four challenges per game before we can move on. Rightoh.
Yeah, how do you make warp gates appear? I'm going to need to know that, and we all know I'm not the type of person to dive in and find out through trial and error. Luckily, little Arino is an avid reader of video game magazines, in that he has one, but with an eye on getting more.
What do magazines - and even the game manuals - have in store for us? Tips, tricks, cheats, and write-ups on warp gates. Aww, yeah.
The third challenge is to destroy a large asteroid, which is simple enough, and the final challenge is to score 200,000 points.
By now, we should have a solid grasp on how the game plays, and we've plenty of reading material to learn what the most efficient point scoring methods are, so this will be a challenge, yes, but still manageable. The Demon Arino even says we can cheat, but I'll only resort to that if I need to...
Frustrations
I didn't know how to get points very efficiently, but I was pretty good at staying alive. Until I wasn't. Losing lives will reset your ship after the longest short while I can recall, and losing them all will, of course, bring your game to an end.
If I could just cling onto what few I had left...
I couldn't. Mistakes lead to sloppy play, sloppy play leads to mistakes, mistakes led to lost lives, and some 55,000 points shy of my target I hit the Game Over.
The challenge is right there for a second, third, fourth attempt, with magazines and manuals on hand to help you through tricky points but, well, my life wasn't back in the comfort of a 1980s childhood. It was in 2020, and even when there's nothing much to do in the outdoors in 2020, and I still spend time gaming in front of a TV, I had to leave this one alone for a while - determined to come back another day, though.
Final Word
I think the reason for that desire to come back is the form that Retro Game Challenge takes. This isn't a faceless list of challenges to be ticked off so that you unlock another game with another set of challenges. This is a battle to overcome gaming challenges so that I am returned to my adult self in the present by a demonic digitized comedian who doesn't even have his own younger self as a supporter.
This game is equal parts charming, challenging, and some kind of encyclopedic. The games within may not exist, but the idea of gaming was exactly this: friends in front of a TV, magazines at the ready, urging each other on to greater and greater heights.
Retro Game Challenge is a lovely reminder of what a great many of us did, and it does a better job of showing that than a release of a dinky Nintendo SNES ever could. It's a shame the games aren't the real deal, but the idea is fabulous.
I'm probably going to have another stab at this sometime soon, and then see what happens with it after. If anything, I might end up looking into GameCenter CX and enjoying that, who knows?
Whether a fan of that show or not, Retro Game Challenge is worth a look.
Fun Facts
A couple of sequels have emerged, but poor sales in the West led to the decision to not localize them, so fan translations or learning Japanese are your only options for playing them.
Retro Game Challenge, developed by indieszero, first released in 2007.
Version played: Nintendo DS, 2009, via emulation.