Every game has an instruction manual that reads just like the booklets of yesteryear, down to the developer’s message thanking the player for buying the game. But Retro Game Challenge has a lot of fun examining the culture of games during the period it focuses on as well. We have a ton of those on the handheld already. If it were just a collection of retro-style games, I would not be wasting your time with this review. But these challenges will take you nearly halfway through the RPG and can require a few hours, throwing the general pace of the experience off. An auto-attack mode where the AI takes actions that actually make sense, keeping the party healed and using attack spells occasionally, is a godsend. And, to be fair, the game is designed to be highly player-friendly. This is no doubt heightened by my general lack of patience with RPGs. It’s the first time while playing that I found the game to be a little bit tedious. While I appreciate the need to include the genre within Retro Game Challenge, it feels like a bit of a misstep. The only exception to this is the RPG in the package, “Guardia Quest.” It is clearly inspired by the gameplay of the Dragon Quest series and does require a fair bit of grinding to complete its later challenges. So, if by chance there is a game that you don’t particularly enjoy playing, freedom is almost always right around the corner. The challenges (and by extension, the forced play time) of each game tend to be rather short. In fact, that’s something of the modus operandi here. On the other hand, “Rally King” is a somewhat pedestrian racing title, but it scores major points for two reasons: it winds up being a rather funny statement on product-sponsored videogames, and you don’t really have to play it for very long to complete its challenges. “Robot Ninja Haggle Man,” a series of platforming games with puzzle elements, has some really solid gameplay and intruiging strategy. Some are much stronger than others, of course. Racing, shmups and even an RPG get tossed into the mix. Many genres are represented across the eight titles. Some of them appear to be outright clones of classic games (particularly “Cosmic Gate,” which plays almost exactly like Galaxian), but they all have interesting gameplay twists that make them feel fresh and new. In Freeplay, you may play any title you have finished challenges for without interruption and view statistics relevant to the individual game. Completing Arino’s challenges in a game unlocks the next game as well as opening up Freeplay mode. The games in Retro Game Challenge are all indicative of games from the time period and are presented in a chronological order that shows them becoming more complex as you travel later into the decade. Once trapped in the past, the player’s only escape is to accomplish the challenges set forth by the digital Arino in some of his favorite games his youth. The persona resides in every cartridge of Retro Game Challenge and sends players back to the 1980s to play games with Arino as a child. This anger manifested in a digital version of Arino being born. This version of Arino does not have the same sort of skill at games as his live-action counterpart, and became vengeful and angry towards talented players. The premise revolves around Arino, a character based on the host of the popular Japanese videogame show Game Center CX. Retro Game Challenge is a love letter to those of us who grew up playing videogames in the 8-bit era. Join Colette and myself as we take a look at Retro Game Challenge. But is it just another collection of minigames on a system that already suffers from a glut of such content, or something more? Game Center CX, the television show on which it is based, is very clearly a product of that country, and its crossover appeal could be very limited. It was something of a surprise to me when I heard that Retro Game Challenge was going to have a release outside of Japan.
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