relive your glorious wasted youth
There’s a TV show in Japan called “Game Center CX”, in which a comedian named Shinya Arino plays old 8-bit video games while providing a humorous running commentary. Last year a tie-in game called “Game Center CX: Arino’s Challenge” was released for the DS, and unlike the thrown-together drivel that tie-in games usually are, it was absolutely brilliant. The premise of the game is that Arino has somehow become an evil wizard, and he sends you back into your own mid-1980s childhood, and forces you to hang out with himself as a child and play video games. The game’s main screen shows a little room with tatami mats on the floor, a bookshelf in the corner, and you and young Arino plopped in front of the TV playing 8-bit games. There are 8 games in all (well, 7 games and a marketing-tie-in remake), which range from shooters to sidescrollers to racers to an RPG, each of which is an original game that feels like an homage to NES games (but with better controls and other modern improvements), and each of which could easily stand on its own as a 200 point WiiWare or XBLA game.
You’re free to play any game you’ve unlocked as much as you want, but there’s a “meta-game” here; the evil wizard Arino challenges you to perform four specific tasks in each game, like getting to a certain level, or finding a hidden power-up. Once you’ve performed each game’s four tasks, you unlock the next game. The tricky part is that it’s often unclear exactly how to perform a task, and in these situations you have three resources at your disposal. First, you can talk to young Arino, although he primarily just offers encouragement (and exuberant commentary while you’re playing games, like shouting “SUGOII!!” when you get a 1-up, which really never gets old). Second, you can look in the game’s instruction book; each game includes an instruction book, which looks exactly like those “letterboxed” instruction books that came with NES games. And third, you can turn to your bookshelf of game magazines, which not only offer hints and even cheat codes, but also feature interviews with fictitious game designers, and previews of upcoming games.
I played this game earlier this year and enjoyed it immensely, and now I’m happy to see that it’s finally getting a US release in January under the title Retro Game Challenge. I look forward to playing it all over again with English translations of all of the game magazine articles, and I hope that the instruction manuals are filled with authentic NES-era Engrish. So, be sure to check it out when it comes out! It’s just like being 10-years-old again, playing video games in a dark room while all the other kids are outside in the sun, only without your mom shouting at you to go get some exercise. Ahh, youth…