I just wanted to let you know that Game Center CX 3 for the Nintendo 3DS is very bad.
If you have no idea what Game Center CX is, then you were in no danger of buying this Japan-only Nintendo 3DS game anyway. But in case you’re still reading, it’s a famous Japanese television program about a comedian named Shinya Arino who plays classic videogames, mostly badly.
It has spawned a series of videogames, the first of which was released in the U.S. under the name Retro Game Challenge. And it was pretty awesome: You played a series of games that were newly created, but designed to look and feel exactly like the retro games of the past. Shooters, platformers, even a retro RPG. The whole experience was trimmed with callbacks to the 80’s – each game had classic box art and a manual that you could read through, and you got more information about the new games by reading classic game magazines that hid tricks and tips.
As good as the first game was, the sequel was even better, with much more varied game types: It parodied Jordan Mechner’s Karateka, introduced a text adventure, and the RPG design was modeled after the Game Boy Color. It was one of the most brilliant games on the platform, and so of course even though every crappy shovelware piece of lazy trash from here to eternity was released on the Nintendo DS in America, nobody ever brought Game Center CX 2 out of Japan.
Five years later, the third game in the series finally emerges. The original developer indieszero has kept itself quite busy in the meantime, producing the music game Theatrhythm Final Fantasy for Square Enix and NES Remix for Nintendo, but it didn’t do this game. Instead, Bandai Namco contracted shooter developer G.rev to handle it, and it sure did made a dog’s breakfast of it.
Superficially, it looks like they nailed all the elements: Eight retro-styled games across a variety of genres. But the humor, the attention to detail, the passion of the two previous games is completely gone. There’s no heart in any of these games, none of the tangible love for the classics that popped out of every pixel in the last ones. They’re not charming parodies, they’re just by-the-numbers games with pixel art.