As I posted a few months ago, I’ve been interested in retro gaming and older games as of late. And, as I was financially unable to attend GDC — that bastion of what’s latest, greatest, and interesting in new games right now — I figured I might blog a bit about some of these older games.

A few Saturdays ago, Matt and I attended the Midwest Gaming Classic, down the road in Oconomowoc. It was a mixed affair, with a decent vendor room and a number of classic arcade machines to play around the place. There was a great “gaming museum” set up, with a series of classic gaming systems set up (old Pong machines, Magnavox Odysseys, and the more stranger bits of gaming arcana). Check out this bizarre Hello Kitty original Xbox from Singapore:

But, all in all, I suppose I wanted something where people talked about these old systems. The only talks at the event this year seemed to be about pinball, which is interesting enough but not something I’m dying to hear about. I love these old games, but after a point, simply buying game junk isn’t going to do it for me — I want to understand how people think about these old games, and what they mean. Perhaps I’m too much of an academic and not enough of a gamer. Matt and I stuck around a few hours, and then headed home with a pile of gaming stuff.

One of the nicest bits of the Midwest Gaming Classic was watching a random guy completely rock at Pac-Man Championship Edition (the recent Xbox 360 remake of the classic game). I’d tried my hand at it a few times, but couldn’t even seem to break the 200K mark — watching someone play for a few minutes completely changed how I approached the game, and helped fuel my (and Liz’s!) now raging obsession with the game. Here’s a video of someone getting over 500K points on the championship level:

Pretty great, huh? I’m struck with how fantastically the designers of this game balanced the original Pac-Man’s simple design elements, yet with a few tweaks gave it a lot of new life. Changing the role of the fruit from simply adding points to unlocking a new path of pellets was ingenious — now the patterns that need to be learned in the game are actually scaffolded for the player, building up in complexity as the time ticks down, and as the game speeds up. Stick with the video until the end to see how phenomenally tough it can get.

I suppose as a consequence, this has spilled over into an interest in all things Pac-Man this week — for this week’s GLS Game Jam, I suggested the theme of “Inspired by Pac-Man” and it was randomly chosen. Ryan and I whipped up a Pac-Man dice-based, tabletop game that was perhaps too literal a translation of the game, but was still fun to play around with.

At any rate, I’ll leave you with a recommendation for a recent game which, to my knowledge, is the first game that tries to model not just old game styles, but the experience of playing old games to some degree. Retro Game Challenge is a DS game in which you are transported back in time to the 1980s and are challenged to beat a number of games which are, in essence, riffs on old classic console games. Starting with a Galaga-like shooter and moving forward into other game genres, you need to reference cheats that come out of a Nintendo Power-like magazine within the game to beat a series of challenges (which, in many ways, feels a lot like hunting for achievements on the 360).

Michael Abbott’s review of Retro Game Challenge sold me on giving the game a shot:

Retro Game Challenge has shovelware written all over it. Another quick and dirty compilation of old school classics repackaged in a nondescript box with bad cover art. What’s worse, its 8-bit collection of retro games are all knock-offs: the Space Invaders/Galaga clone is called Cosmic Gate; Star Soldier is called Star Prince, etc. You could hardly be blamed for assuming Retro Game Challenge is yet another cheap, derivative attempt to cash in on NES-era nostalgia. If you saw this game on a shelf you’d walk right by it.

And that would be a very big mistake.

Retro Game Challenge is a wonderful mashup of games cleverly tied together by a sublimely wacky story in which you are transported back in time to the 1980s and forced to play video games by the vengeful Game Master Arino. You are transformed to a child, and your gaming companion is a friendly youthful version of Arino, unaware of the evil transformation that awaits him. Your only way back to the present is to overcome challenges Arino throws at you from an array of retro games, including 2D shooter, sidescroller, racing, and even a surprisingly deep RPG.

Here’s the trailer for the game:

A great review and a great game so far. Check it out!