The DS-athon continues apace with
Retro Game Challenge, suggested by our very own Vaeran! He typed up a pretty good summary of it on the previous page, I’ll just let him do the talking:
I'll go to bat for Retro Game Challenge, a.k.a. GameCenter CX: Arino no Chousenjou. (It's based on the long-running Japanese TV series GameCenter CX, but you don't need to know anything about the show to enjoy the game.) This beat UFO 50 to the punch by 15 years insofar as it is a collection of bite-sized faux-Famicom games with clever little twists and modern design sensibilities. At first you are issued micro challenges for each game ("Beat the first level," "Get 10,000 points," etc.) but eventually they open up so you can play them all in full. The game follows a loose 1980s timeline, and as time advances new games are "released," as are mini magazines that contain hints and codes for the games. It's all extremely charming and there really isn't a dud among the games included.
Thanks, Past Vaeran. With that taken care of, I can move on to talking about the games themselves:
Cosmic Gate – A Galaga-style shoot-em-up. You can have a maximum of two shots onscreen at once by default, but by shooting down certain flashing enemies you can acquire a third shot that pierces multiple targets. If you wait for the full enemy formation in a given level to fly in before you start shooting, more flashing enemies will appear, and shooting
them will spawn a warp gate that lets you skip forward a few levels. There are ~64~ stages in all, so this is rather important for shorter playthroughs.
Robot Ninja Haggle Man – An action-platformer whose inspiration I’m honestly not sure of, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless. Each level is divided into a few different floors that wrap around horizontally, and you need to defeat all the enemies and then the boss to move on to the next one. You can jump on enemies to defeat them or throw shurikens to stun them first, but the coolest mechanic revolves around doors – there are a bunch of doors of three different colors scattered throughout the levels, and entering one also causes every door of the same color to open, which defeats all nearby enemies at once (doing this is how you rack up big combos for score). Holding Up on the d-pad will keep the door open, and you can actually reveal the level boss hiding behind a door this way and defeat it early; additionally, entering three doors in reverse alphabetical order (they’re labeled with letters) will restore you to full health if you take a hit. It’s a neat set of mechanics!
Rally King – An overhead-view racing game. There are four different courses with two laps each; you have to place in at least eighth (out of twenty racers) to move on to the next course, with the overall goal of placing first in the racing tournament. You can hold the accelerate button during the starting countdown for a boost, and if you let go of the accelerator for a second and steer your car the right way, you get a drift boost. This is probably my least favorite game in the collection; it’s simultaneously stiff and slippery to control in that frustrating way that old racing games tend to be.
Star Prince – A vertically-scrolling shmup. You’re encouraged to shoot various background objects for score, and to collect one of a handful of power-ups: B (shoots projectiles behind you in addition to in front), P (a diagonal spread shot), M (fires missiles in front of you that explode after a brief delay), and S (dramatically boosts your shot speed; the best one in my experience, especially for bosses, which it absolutely shreds). These power-ups don’t stack – collecting multiple of the same one just gives you a point bonus – but you can also shoot them to destroy onscreen enemies. You also have a shield mechanic; by holding down the shield button and absorbing a few enemy bullets (but, crucially,
not lasers), you shoot out a barrage of bullets, which is one of the only ways you have of destroying targets not directly in front of you.
Robot Ninja Haggle Man 2 – Very similar to the first game, but much harder, and with a lot more levels. Something I didn’t mention about the first game is that in addition to the power-ups you can find – bigger shurikens, faster running speed, etc. – you can collect three colored scrolls to summon one of Haggle Man’s friends for a screen-wide attack. That mechanic returns here, but now you can choose when to activate it, instead of it happening automatically. The levels are also bigger vertically, although they still wrap around horizontally.
Rally King SP – A “special edition” of Rally King obtained through a GameFan Magazine contest, featuring appearances from Larry T. Bird (GameFan’s mascot) and ads for Cup o’ Chicken Noodle throughout. A couple of the courses have been palette-swapped to take place at different times of day, and I think they might have more road hazards to avoid, but otherwise this is largely the same game as Rally King.
Guadia Quest – A whole-ass Dragon Quest-style RPG (albeit a heavily condensed one). There are some neat mechanics here, one that’s pretty cool and one I’m more ambivalent on. For the former – in addition to standard enemies, there are also Guadia monsters that you can form a pact with; doing this powers up the enemy, but if you defeat them in this state you’ll recruit them into your party. They act autonomously, and have different abilities depending on which Guadia you’ve recruited; you can only have one at a time, but it’s generally safe to replace your current Guadia with new ones as you encounter them. For the latter: each weapon has eight different marks that it cycles through randomly whenever you attack an enemy. It’s effectively a way to visualize how effective that weapon is in battle – triangles are standard hits, bulls-eyes are critical hits, X marks are misses, and stars are the absolute optimal, highest-damage outcome. This also has the side effect of making basic attacks take several text boxes to resolve instead of one or two, which is annoying if you’re not using the auto-battle function in a given fight.
Robot Ninja Haggle Man 3 – This one is vastly different than the first two, being much closer to Ninja Gaiden in look and feel, although instead of linear levels, each of the game’s three missions are their own mini-Metroidvanias. There are shops scattered around the levels where you can buy various Gears that enhance your abilities – rapid-firing your shurikens, higher jump height, discounts at shops, etc. – and you’ll be swapping those gears around a lot, both depending on what you need equipped to progress and because you can only have three on at a time. You also have full-on subweapons now that have limited ammo, instead of one-time use scrolls, although you can still find those hidden around the levels that act how they did in earlier games. This and Guadia Quest are my favorites in the collection; they feel the most fleshed-out.
I think I would have liked a little more variety in the selection of games – I don’t think we needed two nearly-identical racing games here – but overall this was cute and fun! I’m glad Retro Game Challenge walked so that UFO 50 could run. Thanks for suggesting it, Vaeran!
Miscellaneous details:
-The game has an opening Star Wars-style text crawl that’s narrated by Paul St. Peter, which is the only appearance he makes in the game.
-There are a couple amusing subplots that run through the issues of GameFan Magazine – the magazine goes through a succession of editors-in-chief, and Guadia Quest is repeatedly delayed for nebulous reasons.
-Rally King has cheat codes that make your car invincible, a level select, and one that just straight-up removes the other racers from the game, if you want to make it trivially easy for yourself (and I would not blame you if you did).
-The ending credits feature a shmup minigame where you shoot at Shinya Arino's head (an Andross-esque version of Arino is the arbiter of the various challenges, don't worry about it it makes sense). Afterwards you can sit at the end screen, and Arino will occasionally say something to the effect of "there's nothing to see here, go away"; this can apparently continue for up to thirty minutes if you let it.
