Retro Game Challenge is a seriously awesome game. Anyone with the least bit of interest in the glory days of NES gaming in the 80's should really go out and snag a copy. From start to finish it's a really well-done product that deserves your support as much (or more!) than any other game that's ever sponsored this site.
In Retro Game Challenge, you've been sent back in time to the 80's, where you play video games alongside some kid named Arino who isn't very good at them. You were sent back in time by the god-like Game Master Arino, a vengeful presence inside your DS that is the result of Arino's ever-frustrated desire to master all games.
The video games you must play to escape the 80s in Retro Game Challenge aren't games that ever existed, nor are they off-brand clones of existing games. They're all cleverly constructed, superbly playable games that evoke 80s greats without being too similar to them. There are eight games in total included in Retro Game Challenge, and below is my ranking of the bestest five.
5. Star Prince
Star Prince is inspired by tons of greatest 8-bit top-down vertically scrolling shooting games. You'll see power-up capsules from Zanac, graphic designs right out of Star Force, and a lot of mechanics incorporated wholesale from the Star Soldier series. Star Prince sports better music than just about any of the games I've mentioned above, IMHO, and unusually bright and intricate level designs.
Star Prince also allows for an an absolutely fabulous joke involving Arino going out and buying a new controller that features a turbo button. Then you can get steady streams of fire by holding down Y instead of tapping B, and the difference in the way the game plays... well, it makes me wish the actual turbo controllers I bought had worked half so well!
4. Cosmic Gate
At first blush, Cosmic Gate is a pretty standard Galaxian-or-Galaga clone, but this game really shines once you start unlocking the issues of Gamefan Magazine that Arino buys for you in Retro Game Challenge. Back in the 80's, a game magazine existed to be an efficient delivery vehicle for game tips and secrets, and RGC's issues of Gamefan Magazine are no exception. Cosmic Gate's cheats and tricks are an absolute testament to the wonderfully bizarre things gamers trained themselves to do in order to get through a game faster.
Remember the insane double shot trick from Galaxian, where you'd let a boss enemy steal one of your lives and then kill it to get a second ship back? In Cosmic Gate basically all of the cheats are that crazy, and there's a ton of them. Hit a flashing enemy with your first shot to open a warp! Open warps in prime numbered levels to open up super-warps! Fire 64 consecutive shots that don't hit anything in the first level to warp to the end of the game! I can't believe this sort of thing is just now striking me as pretty strange.
3. Haggleman
For a game supposedly full of nothing more than parodies of old games, Haggleman is shockingly original. In Gamefan Magazine Haggleman is presented as a parody of Super Mario Bros., even sharing the game's Japanese release date and legendary high sales figures... but it's not the carbon-copy Mario clone that littered shelves in the 80's. Instead it's an action title that revolves around a clever mechanic where your ninja hides behind doors, and opens and closes doors remotely to kill enemies.
Haggleman also contains one of the best localization jokes in a game loaded with amazingly funny localization jokes. See, our little robot ninja hero's Japanese name was Haguruman, a portmanteau of "man" and the Japanese word "haguru", which means "gear". Only a very rushed, poor, or lazy translator could decide that the "haguru" in the character's name should be turned into the English name "haggle"... but game localization in the 80's was so awful that this kind of thing happened all the time. So, of course, XSEED did it on purpose, even though leaving it "correct" would've been easier, just to make someone like me laugh.
2. Guadia Quest 
It's not hard to spot what Guadia Quest is: a parody of the Dragon Quest series, specifically Dragon Quest II and its actual conga line party of three people. It also features an homage to Megami Tensei's core mechanic of pacting with monsters, and also shares that game's Japanese release date. Guadia Quest makes most of the 8-bit RPG jokes you'd would expect, but what's really impressive about it is the gameplay. This is a game deeper and longer than a lot of standalone DS RPGs, complete with secret equipment and optional bosses, and astonishingly well-designed.
Guadia Quest doesn't offer any features so modern it disrupts the illusion, but it does offer a ton of the sorts of features you always wish you had in an 8-bit RPG. Your fighter/mage character is really good at both, and your blasty mage has a satisfyingly huge MP pool. Your main character is loaded with great utility spells-- you can warp directly to and from dungeons to towns, and double your party's onscreen walking screen to cut down on encounters and get places faster. Honestly, if 8-bit FF had given you a spell like that, the game would've been roughly half as long and twice as fun.
1. Haggleman 3
Haggleman 3 is seriously one of the greatest 8-bit games that never existed. The game goes from being a cutesy action-platformer with a huggable protagonist to a hard-edged cinema-heavy game full of battles against furious birds who want you to die. Yeah, it's a spot-on parody of Ninja Gaiden, but it's even more than that: it's the version of Ninja Gaiden you wished existed already, the one that was challenging without being so hard you quit in rage the hundredth time a dog murdered you.
What makes Haggleman 3 so compelling, though, is that it looks toward the future and incorporates a lot of the light RPG-style customization elements that first started popping up in the likes of Castlevania III. Haggleman 3 is so polished it's more on par with the likes of a Mega Man X or a Symphony of the Night, at least in terms of gameplay. Searching the world for super-power Gears to equip to the taller, edgier Haggleman makes mapping out the non-linear levels a joy. The only thing I could like better than Haggleman 3 would be a 16-bit Haggleman 4 loaded with huge sprites and lots of gratutious Mode 7 effects.
Incidentally, yeah: there are eight games in Retro Game Challenge, so three I didn't care for all that much. I didn't mind playing them for the game-required parts, but I doubt I ever spend time with them in Freeplay mode.
The first Rally King was a tedious enough racer that going through basically the same thing over again in Rally King SP didn't sit well with me. It doesn't help that Rally King SP is a parody of a type of Famicom game that never really existed in the US, the "branded remake" where some noodle company edited logo sprites into the game and then gave it away as a promotion.
Then there's Haggleman 2, which is a spot-on parody of what made the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 (known as the Lost Levels over here) a disappointment. The gameplay is essentially identical to the first Haggleman's, but all of the levels are so much larger (in the name of "challenge") that clearing them is a tedious pain in the butt, and a lot of the basic charm of the game is lost.
That said, I'm kind of curious what your bottom three and top five games might be in your own Retro Game Challenge runs. I know a lot of people who aren't into RPGs can't stand Guadia Quest, though otherwise everyone seems to love Haggleman 3's gear-hunting. I also know that I've seen precious few Rally King fans.
