The Biasphere

Skambu (gaming profile | personal site)

Joined: Sat Oct 11, 2008 11:56 pm EDT
31 Game Reviews

Retro Game Challenge is one of those rare games that comes along and catches everyone by surprise. I heard nothing about it until it was released, and when it got great reviews I knew I had to check it out.

The basic idea of the game is that you're in the past playing old games, though the games aren't actually old, they're just made to look old. The 'Game Master' Arino sets you 4 challenges for each game you play. To progress in the game, you just have to pass the challenges that he sets you.

The game sounds simple enough, right? Well there's loads of little features that indies zero, (the developers of the game) add in to give you the full experience of playing a game from the 80's. You can read the game Manual, play with a turbo controller, and there's even grammatical mistakes that the developers put in the games on purpose! For example: "You shooted 30 Asteroids!". It's pretty awesome that they recognize how bad the translations were back in the 80's NES/Famicom era, and that they decided to put these translation mistakes into the game.

You can read magazines that are set at the time of the games release. There's loads of stuff you can read about in the magazine aswell, you can get cheat codes, read reviews, read previews of upcoming games, look at the top-selling games or read the amusing fan mail! I know that it's really immature, but I laughed for quite a while at the names. Examples include I. P. Freely, Mike Rotch, Jacques Strap, Oliver Clothesoff and Ben Dover. Oh man, that's awesome.

Included in the game, there's RPGs, racers, platformers and shoot em ups. The only game that I can think of that's really flawed is Guadia Quest. The whole game is basically just a grinding RPG. The best game of them all would be Star Prince. It's a side-on shoot em up game, that's got loads of nice features. You can upgrade your ship by finding upgrades throughout the levels, you can make a shield by holding the shoot button and the bosses are also designed well.

I'm really happy that Japanese companies are finally deciding to bring these games over to English-speaking countries. There's hundreds of awesome games that we can't experience just because they were never brought here, it's really sad. Retro Game Challenge bucks that trend, and I respect it for that.

BUY IT, BORROW IT OR BREAK IT?
Buy It. It'll give you hours of fun and is a great game to play in short and long bursts. You can try finish a whole game in one sitting, or you can just try finish one challenge. It's great for everyone!

Retro Game Challenge for the Nintendo DS receives a 9/10.

New Comment:

You must be logged in to comment!

Interact:

Was this review well written?

Please login or sign up to have full access to these features.