Retro Game Challenge

"Do you really like 8-Bit gaming?"

Retro Game Challenge is a collection of 8 NES-style games, each inspired by an actual game. Each game is its own, having an ending and everything, but because of the compilation-style packaging, is shorter than you might expect. The story has you complete challenges in each game, ranging from simple (one can be beaten in about two seconds), to longer, such as beating a certain boss in Guadia Quest, the RPG in RGC. The challenges are redundant, which gets more and more frustrating the more complex the game is. For instance, in Cosmic Gate, a carbon copy of Space Invaders, there are separate challenges for getting to a certain level and getting a certain score. These aren't so bad, but whenever you complete a challenge, the game stops instantly, effectively erasing any progress you might have made, such as a high score.

Each game has 4 challenges associated with it, making for a total of 32 challenges, plus the final, extra one, which is simply to beat all the games. Unlocking the next game depends on you completing all of that game's challenges, which usually doesn't take too long, anywhere from 20 minutes to a few hours. The challenges are given to you one by one, so you can't choose which one to work at. In between challenges, Arino, the modern-day game master who sends you back to the 80s to play his childhood games, taunts you and issues your next challenge. This proves to be one of many minor annoyances; Arino's talks usually take no more than 30 seconds, but when you factor in the time his younger self talks to you (you play with his younger self as part of being in the 80s), it becomes an annoyance, especially since the challenges are typically completed so quickly.

Minor annoyances aside, RGC is still a decent game. I consider myself to like so-called "retro" gaming, but I still found the compilation to be rather lacking. Of the 8 games, 6 are original games, and two are 'upgraded' versions of games. This seems incredibly lazy, for one, because while remakes are generally accepted in the real world, there is typically some (long) passage of time before they come out, versus half an hour in the fake world of RGC. It doesn't help that the two games that are remakes are of, in my opinion, the dullest games; a racing game and a Mario Hotel style game.

Assigning this game a collective score is rather difficult, as it's made up from 8 complete games, and that the developers knowingly release games that emulate those of 20 years ago. This game is clearly meant for a small audience, and it's great to see such a gesture, but then you start to realize that the games you played in your childhood perhaps weren't that great.

Cosmic Gate is the first game available to you, and it's a exact copy of "invasion from the top of the screen" arcade shooters such as Space Invaders. There's really not too much to criticize here, although the enemies do have an annoying habit of hovering at the bottom of the screen, and since you can only move horizontally, this causes quite a few cheap deaths. In between the normal stages of shooting your insect foes, there are asteroid stages, in which asteroids that look suspiciously like golf balls rain from the top of the screen, begging to be shot. These are like bonus stages, in that they greatly increase your score and its nearly impossible to get killed in them.

Haggle Man is the second game unlocked, and it plays differently from any 8-bit era game I can remember. You play as the eponymous Haggle Man in horizontally-centered stages full of lettered and colored doors. Enemies can be defeated by either jumping on them or opening a nearby door. Doors switch colors after being opened, and opening a red door will open up all other red doors on the screen. Haggle Man can also shoot gears which travel just a few spaces away from him before disappearing. These gears cannot kill enemies, only stun them to make their defeat easier.

There are 8 stages, which repeat after the fake ending, for a total of...still 8 stages. The latter are the same, but recolored and with enemies from later levels, whose only strengths are more health and invulnerability to the gears. I wasn't impressed with the presentation either, and while I am by no means expecting fantastic displays from a 20 year "old" game, I do expect more than a washed out palette.

Haggle Man 2 plays exactly the same as the first one, so the challenges essentially repeat themselves.

Rally King-the racing game. I never understood what people found so amusing in racing games, since they boiled down to holding down a button and moving the joystick (in this case D-Pad) accordingly. Rally King makes no attempt to differentiate itself from the rest of the genre and is incredibly boring because of this. There are a few 'advanced' techniques, such as drifting, which relies a lot on luck, both in its execution and in it not running you straight into a wall. Your car doesn't like turns at all, and should you run into anything, it will both spin out and be bumped back quite a bit, two punishments that seem redundant.

Rally King is made all the more unforgiveable because of its bastard spawn, Rally King 2, nothing more than a palette-swapped version of the original, whose track layouts claimed to have changed.

Star Prince is the redeeming factor of RGC. A vertically-scrolling shmup that is incredibly easy and colorful. In this game only, you can use the Y button to auto fire, which as any shmup player knows, makes the game almost boring to play. Your ship can be powered up by hitting certain monuments which release one of four power ups, the typical spread shot, backward shot, missile, and...some blue thing that fires even more rapidly. Should you not want to collect the upgrade, you can continue shooting at it to destroy all bullets and enemies on the screen. Your ship also has a force field which originally only covers the front part, but when any upgrade is picked up, covers the entire ship. This force field essentially breaks the game since it can't be weakened, and by absorbing three enemy bullets, which activates a counter attack that destroys everything around you. While Star Prince is disappointingly easy for the shmup genre, it is fun to just hold down Y and watch your score exponentially increase. Part of what makes it so enjoyable is how bright it is--some of the areas look like Zeal Palace in Chrono Trigger, and the palette's brightness more than makes up for Haggle Man.

Guadia Quest reminds us of how far the RPG genre has come in 20 years. It plays exactly, and I mean exactly like Dragon Quest, right down to the menus. The only reasonably unique aspect it has are the titular Guadias, which are enemies you encounter and can make a Pact with. After you make a pact with them, you must defeat them (they're about the strength of an average mini-boss), and then they join your party, attacking whenever they feel like it. While their attacks are welcome when you're lower-leveled, they become nothing more than a side-stander later on. Guadia has a lot of the problems old RPGs have, which is forgivable as its understandably copying that style. For instance, at the equipment shop, there's no way to tell which armor/weapon is for which person, which gets old very quickly. For reasons I can't fathom, the Inn restores only your health, while a man in the first town and only the first town raises fallen allies. This makes it tedious to restore fallen party members if it weren't for the fact that you can warp back to the first town via an item and through magic. Guadia has a few modern day aspects to it that make it more bearable: there's an auto-fight function, which I usually frown upon in RPGs, but good lord, if it weren't there I'd be in the funny farm; the windows and font change colors according to how much health your characters have, which is a nice prompt to start busting out the healing magic; and you can warp anywhere you can enter from on the world map. This last feature is a life-saver, because the battles are almost painfully dull. I had to stop playing because one dungeon was too large and disorienting and the battles were far too many--the kicker? There's a spell to avoid battles, which didn't work in the dungeon.

Haggle Man 3 is significantly different from its lackluster brethren. It plays something like Super Mario Bros. 2, which is a welcome addition to the low-action games featured in RGC. It's a little more difficult, which is a nice change of pace from the far too easy games which preceded it. It brings up, however, unpleasant memories of NES action games, enemies that followed you just out of your attacking range, Castlevania's favorite instant Crow/Medusa Head just as you had to make a jump, and of course, enemies dropping items in walls. It's a nice ending to an otherwise boring collection of games.

RGC makes you realize just how much you actually enjoy NES gaming. There are a number of references to 80s gaming culture, like the Power Glove, multiple translation errors, and The Wizard, but they lack charm. You get monthly magazines which give cheats to the games and hint at upcoming ones, but since they are only displayed on one screen, reading them is a pain in the ass, and not worth it anyway. While it is up to the player whether or not to use the cheats, the fact that the game gives them to you is a little patronizing, especially when they effectively make you win instantly. Hell, for just about every game you can bypass the game over screen, making death no more than a momentary inconvenience. This is very disappointing, since it takes the pride of finally seeing the credits. Games are meant to kill you, there's no need to turn it into some Harrison Bergeron type society where all it takes is patience to see the end of a game.

One of the most annoying facets of RGC is how long it takes to play a game. You're stopped every time you complete a challenge, which usually don't take long at all to complete, Bad Arino taunts you, and then Young Arino starts yapping off about something no one really cares about. While playing the game, Young Arino reminds you of why gaming is a solitary form of entertainment. If you miss a power up, he says some annoying thing, or if you do some outstanding attack/manouvre, he'll express his astonishment. Luckily, the game's music sucks anyway, so it's not a loss to have to shut the bastard up.

RGC was disappointing for me, the games were too easy or boring, and they weren't quite enough to hold my interest. There are flaws with them because they try too hard to be like games of years past. If you sincerely enjoy 8 Bit gaming, at least give this game a try, because while it is easy and mediocre, it doesn't take too long to beat, besides, you still get 8 games for the price of one, and it doesn't hurt to have something you can shove into your DS and play, it's just that other games do it better, unless you're specifically looking for outdated technology, in which case there are far better arcade compilation packs.

Final Score: 5/10.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 03/16/09

Game Release: Retro Game Challenge (US, 02/10/09)