Gear Ninjas and Dr. Kawashima's Antithesis

[Dr. BUGMAN]

Retro Game Challenge is one of those rare gems that manage to find their way stateside that you should probably check out. As the names suggests, you must complete set challenges in retro-styled games. All of which are composites of famous genres pieces from the Famicom era, and each a full-fledged game, requisite challenges aside. Cosmic Gate is a Galaga rip-off (a point driven home by the fact that this was published by Namco-Bandai). Rally King (and its "limited edition" product-sponsored sequel, Rally King SP. Which serves nothing more than a glorified B-Side) is a top down racer that most people don't like. Robot Ninja Haggle Man 1&2 are essentially Ninja-kun with Mappy/Bubble Bobble elements (by far my favorites of the lot). Star Prince is a paint-by-numbers 'shmup', which is always welcome. The meat of the game though is Guadia Quest (think Dragon Quest meets Megaten) and Haggle Man 3. I don't much care for Haggle Man 3, but it's a substantial enough Ninja Gaiden/Shinobi knock-off.

All in all, it helps set the tone of mid-to-late-eighties gaming, complete with the occasional game magazine that supplies enough tips & tricks to keep you from being stuck in a challenge that you can't stand. (Odds are that it'll be Rally King (SP))

The game is called Game Center CX in Japan, which is also the name of the show from which it is derived. It already has a sequel there, and this guy wants it enough that he's making home-made buttons to entice people into buying RGC thereby boosting the sales of the first in order to coax XSeed into localizing it.

[G.Silver]

I just bought part 2 over at Play Asia--they dropped the price to about $30 and there's a special going for 20% off most purchases if they're made with a Visa card. It's still in Japanese but I've pretty much given up on a US release for this.

[Esrever]

How hard do you think it'd be for a completely non-Japanese reader to navigate? I really liked the first one.

[G.Silver]

I'm thinking it might be hard! I had a look at GameFaqs right after posting that, and there aren't any guides up, but there are a lot of posts in the forum that ought to help people through the problem areas. I understand that there is a graphical adventure game with text/menu commands (like Monkey Island) in this one, so that could stop a lot of people right there.

[Protodude]

I've actually been playing the first one recently, and I'm currently on Gaudia Quest. Anyone else notice that the editors for the magazine are real editors from American game magazines (fucking Dave Halverson)?

[Dr. BUGMAN]

I figured they were Xseed employees. I was also surprised to find out GameFan was an actual magazine way back when.

The only other game in Japanese I fumbled through was Mother 3. Oh well, I imagine I'd spend most of my time playing Demon Returns and Triotos if it were to be localized, anyway.

[Arcade]

When it comes to videogames in languages I dont understand (like English) my favorites are 2-D plataformers, Beat em ups and fighting games.

[Senbei]

languages I dont understand (like English)

Ah.

[Dr. BUGMAN]

There's a boss in Gun Duel called Amorphallus. Heh.

[RocketPunch]

There's a boss in Gun Duel called Amorphallus. Heh.

[Dr. BUGMAN]

Amorphallus.

Upon further investigation, it seems to be a misspelling of amorphophallus, which is a flower, but named so because it looks like a dick. So heh. (no the boss isn't penis shaped)

Anyway, I just have to reach all the endings in the game now, but there are no guides for the second Dectective Arino game, so it's not going to happen any time soon.

The games this time are even better than the first batch. They are much more refined and challenging this time around (although Guadia Quest Saga is a lot less brutal as far as I can tell regardless of my Japanese illiteracy). Unfortunately, many of the games (mostly DR and SDR) suffer from more frame-rate drops than there were in RGC. Odd.

[Dr. BUGMAN]

$10!!!! Buy it if you haven't. BUY IT NOW.