Retro Game Challenge (DS)

Retro Game Challenge
Namco Bandai / XSEED Games

Anthony: Retro Game Challenge lured us in with the promise of playing a series of games deliberately designed to remember games from the 80s age of Arcade and NES games. The kicker was definitely the inclusion of “Guadia Quest”, a seemingly tongue-in-cheek knockoff of the original Dragon Warrior game. Although it certainly delivers on the promise of offering an array of old-school games with new-school programming, I’m not thoroughly convinced that this was a more meaningful effort than any number of the retro game bundles you can find these days.

Absurdly presented as though you’re a child who has been transported to the 80s to play a series of challenges in games developed throughout the decade, Retro Game Challenge gradually has you work through four specific goals in each game at a time. Eventually, the final goal becomes just to beat every game. The games included are Cosmic Gate (A space shooter akin to Galaga), Star Prince (an upgraded Cosmic Gate with scrolling scenery and bosses), Robot Ninja Haggleman 1 & 2 (a Mappy-like platformer somewhat akin to the original Mario Bros.), Robot Ninja Haggleman 3 (a platformer mix of Ninja Gaiden and Megaman X), Rally King and Rally King SP (overhead-view arcade racing games), and Guadia Quest (a Dragon Warrior II-esque RPG).

What’s good:
- At their cores, some of these games are quite entertaining. Personally, Star Prince and Haggleman gave me the most entertainment for my time, with the first being a frenetic and colorful shooter and the latter being a very creative platformer hybrid. Even if they’re not all gems, most players will find a game or two that are actually fun.
- The design aspect of this works well. Having an electronic “Manual” to each game as well as “GameFan Magazine” articles dedicated to each game is certainly a step above what most old-game bundles do.
- Because these old-school games also often come with a heaping helping of old-school hyper-difficulty, they very forgivingly added several cheats to each game, all viewable within the game itself by checking the Magazine section. It’s a little redundant to flip through multiple magazines to get each of the codes, but these were absolutely necessary as well. If they had expected you to finish Haggleman 2 & 3 or Star Prince without at least the “Continue” code, this very well could’ve been unplayable.

What’s neutral:
- I feel like they tried but fell a little short on giving the games an amusing old-school mockumentary design. The magazines and kids in the game get absurdly excited about any game coming out, games have engrish/deliberate typos, and references to things like turbo controllers and RPG game delays happen throughout. While cute and liable to induce a chuckle or two, the jokes wear off pretty fast. It isn’t ‘still’ funny later in the game that characters talk odd, or that the magazines have a joking Question and Answer section. As Lauren notes later with Guadia Quest especially, it seems like they didn’t find the right balance among tongue-in-cheek homage, overly corny jokes, and making the games interesting.
- The cheat code system is a little strange. Some games get some basic codes to help you survive or speed up the experience, while others have codes that completely break the game... codes like invincibility and removal of all enemies. Very few cheats have to be truly earned, so it does mean that some players will inevitably resort to cruising through certain games and/or being overly frustrated with others.

What’s bad:
- Given that these are not actual 80s games, the amount of repetition in the gaming is very disappointing to see. Of the lesser offenders, Haggleman 2 is mostly just a significantly harder version of Haggleman, and Haggleman 3’s stage bosses are all the same. The most egregious offender is the combination of Rally King and Rally King SP. These are basically the exact same game, except Rally King SP is a ‘rare’ version promoted by a Chicken Noodle company. Cute idea and all, except that you’re playing through challenges and beating two separate games that are basically the exact same experience. That’s all well and good if these were real games, but why would they waste the cart space and player’s time by designing two identical games?
- I know these are deliberately retro games, and to a certain extent, they’ve been given modern design free of glitches and such. That said, it’s still plagued by old-school design mechanics that, even if they’re intended as an homage to past games, kind of stink. In Haggleman 3, getting hit always sends you careening backwards, and because you never recover from this until you hit the ground, you will likely die numerous times from being struck in midair or next to a ledge. This includes being hit by objects that weren’t even on screen when you leap. Star Prince has no set pattern to enemies, so sometimes enemies will suddenly zoom onto the screen from various directions and kill you if you’re in the wrong spot. Haggleman 2 especially has very confined areas with enemies where you can be easily trapped and killed. Rally King and Rally King SP have no course maps and thus rely entirely on course memorization and luck. Guadia Quest is full of enemies with instant-kill moves. Part of the benefit in playing non-retro games is that the better designers can make games be difficult without being cheap.
- Most game collections allow you to play most or all of the available games at the outset. Because RGC “takes you through gaming history,” it also forces you to beat all of the current game’s challenges before even unlocking the next or being allowed to play the game normally. This means you will unfortunately be stuck trying to get through challenges in games you may not enjoy or may not be good at, just to be able to even see all that RGC offers. Yuck.
- While somewhat amusing at first, your partner constantly yelling “Oh man!” “Niiice.” “Aww, you missed it!” etc. throughout every single game eventually gets very irritating. Never mind that no child would sit through watching someone play a text-laden RPG and exclaim excitedly at the “action”.

Sadly, Retro Game Challenge is the latest in a series of games for us that we feel just missed the mark. I don’t want to get too philosophical here, but I think part of the problem inherent in this design is that retro games were great for the time because they were the best that designers could do. Those games were fun, but were almost always repetitive and often had design bugs and gameplay issues that would be obvious these days. But we bought games on box information alone, bought games we “heard were great” even though they weren’t, and there was no internet to tell us any better.

To deliberately program something new of that era is a risky feat. We have more design knowledge and less patient gamers; striking some gold mine of being both genuinely old-school and still fun to play by today’s standards is not easy. RGC was close, but forcing players to trudge through two identical games and a completely linear ‘release’ of each game really wears down the experience. Attempts to make it a funny tribute were noble, but the jokes wear out fast enough that you probably won’t care by time you beat it.

As a result, I don’t even know who to recommend the game to, unless the idea of this still sounds really entertaining to you. For the same cost or less, you can pick up one of a dozen or more Atari/Sega/Nintendo game collections, and I have trouble coming up with a good argument for why that’s not a better idea.

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Lauren: Dragon Warrior I for the NES was the defining game of my entire childhood. So, when I saw that Retro Game Challenge contained a very cute-looking parody of it, I was ready to buy the game based on that alone. Since the other games appealed more to Anthony, I waited patiently for him to unlock Guadia Quest.

It definitely looks like Dragon Warrior, from the area maps right down to the old-school font. Much like the olden days, you'll spend most of your time in GQ grinding away for money and experience. The big difference for me was the amount of time spent in dungeons rather than on the overworld map. There are also a -ton- of equipment upgrades to be found, to the point where your item bag will often overflow. You'll have goals such as "Get to the second town," "Get X amount of money," and "Get to X level," which are easy enough. The final goals of "beat X boss" and "beat the game" are certainly much more time-consuming than the previous three.

Battles play out in the classic turn-based format, where you can opt to attack, use magic, use an item, defend, or run away. You can also make a pact with an enemy in order to occasionally receive help from it in battle. But anyone familiar with older RPGs will understand that this will mostly translate into you simply pressing "A". A lot. Granted, boss battles and tougher enemies will have you using differing degrees of strategy, but the basic grind is as yawn-worthy as it's ever been. You'll also experience some unforgiving old-school-style brutality in the form of very strong enemy encounters, and few methods of revival for most of the game. Thankfully, GQ allows you to save anywhere, and that definitely came in handy after my many sudden wipeouts to normal enemies who like the Sleep spell.

But the charm of Guadia Quest comes in its self-awareness and references to old-school RPGs. The names of spells (such as "Imup" for Revive), NPC dialogue ("Don't you feel asleep?"), and monster names will certainly keep you chuckling. Unfortunately, the charm wore off after a few hours, and Guadia Quest goes on much longer than that. And the story became oddly "serious" - I know that they were simply trying to replicate old RPGs, but I was surprised to see that the humour almost completely disappeared after a while.

GQ will probably last you 10-15 hours - much longer than the other offerings of Retro Game Challenge. There are also some challenging sidequests available, though they're somewhat pointless by the time they're accessible. I know that the developers tried to create a throwback to old RPGs with GQ, but I could have gotten the point and enjoyed the game after about 5 hours. It really didn't need to drag on as long as it did in the form of dungeon-crawling and exp-grinding. Granted, I took a bit longer than most because I didn't realize I had a Warp spell all along. Tip for new players: you have a Warp spell.

If you loved older RPGs, you'll probably enjoy Guadia Quest. But be prepared to deal with some of the downsides of an old RPG as well, since, whether intentionally or not, they were included. If not, you'll just have to grind through most of it to get to Haggleman 3.