Game Center CX: Arino’s Challenge, a Nintendo DS based on a popular Japanese TV show, might be made up entirely of fake retro games. But it has some clever ideas about classic game compilations that should henceforth be applied to the real thing.
Each one of the games in CX can be played by itself for as long as you like. If you didn’t know any better, you’d swear these games (running the gamut from shooter to RPG) had actually been released on the NES, so complete is the presentation. You can complete each one if you like.
In that sense, it’s quite similar to classic game compilations like Midway Arcade Treasures
&c. But these games set you adrift into a wide-open sea of back catalog titles with no direction or sense of progress. In a sense, you don’t really play these game collections to finish the games, you play around in them. It’s an interesting distinction, but it generally turns these compilation titles into novelty items. You can try to master
Asteroids, but it’s a very vague and unclear goal.
What CX does is to lay a linear gameplay framework over this collection of small games. You begin with a few challenges to complete in the first game: clear the fifth level, rack up 20,000 points, find the hidden warp gate. This rapid succession of quickly accomplishable mini-challenges adds a very addictive quality to the whole experience, making you stick with it and feel rewarded as you add notches to your checklist.
It didn’t take long before something became very clear to me: you could very easily create this sort of gameplay using actual classic games. Take Namco’s own titles. First, you have to eat a power pellet and all four ghosts in Pac-Man. Then you have to beat the first two levels and watch the cut scene. Then you have to clear 30,000 points. And then you move on to Galaga.
Suddenly, a novelty item becomes more like a modern-day video game, with a series of progressively difficult challenges that let you master the games in question in a gradual way, with enticing rewards well within reach. It adds value to the back catalog, because you’re no longer just recycling them. Hopefully Namco will take the Game Center CX formula and immediately start working on a Namco Bandai classics edition.