In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of Game Center CX, the first two GCCX games are being remastered and packaged together for Switch: https://replaygccx12.bn-ent.net/ 🇯🇵 It'll be playable at TGS, and Arino's doing a segment for one of Namco's streaming blocks.
For the unaware, Game Center CX is a series primarily focused on comedian Shinya Arino challenging to beat vintage games within a time limit, long before the concept of streaming or lets-playing was a mainstream thing, and it's managed to not only weather the streaming age but actually increase in popularity over the last few years. There's been a couple of small attempts to officially release the series overseas—a sole licensed DVD and, before that, a strange hacked-up online version that Kotaku produced for all of five minutes—but the international following has and continues to be cultivated via fan-subs and online groups whose enthusiasm has long been (unofficially) acknowledged by the show's staff and cast, to the extent that one of the original prominent fan-subbers has illustrated several pieces of official GCCX merch.
Most if not all of the subbed episodes are on the Internet Archive; I typically recommend the Battletoads two-parter as a good intro episode (share your own in the comments if you like):
There have been three GCCX games released—two for the original DS, developed by indieszero (Final Fantasy Theatrhythm, NES Remix, etc) which people quite liked, and a third for the 3DS, developed by G.rev (Senko no Ronde, Border Down, Under Defeat, etc) which people did not like nearly as much—and they are all broadly themed around playing retro games in a manner not entirely dissimilar to the show, with the big hook being that these are all high-quality original games in the vein of the classics: the first game features not-Dragon Quest, not-Star Soldier, a series of ninja games that evolved from not-JaJaMaru-kun to not-Ninja Gaiden, etc. Some of the games, like the Portopia-esque ADV featured in the second games, will directly reference the show and its cast, but you don't need to have watched the show to enjoy or parse any of the content (and if it doesn't get localized, you can probably futz through most of the games/challenges without much trouble.)
(You may have played the first game without knowing it—XSEED published in the US as "Retro Game Challenge", with the GCCX-related content scrubbed out and, in some cases, replaced with parodies of US gaming magazines and whatnot. The second game saw no localisation whatsoever, but it's been fan-translated for a minute; I don't know that anyone's bothered with #3.)
There's no release date or price for this collection yet, just the info that they're being remastered as one game, and that there'll be a version with a special DVD. They are adding one extra retro game: a Technos-esque belt-scroller, and it looks like this:
I am absolutely unflinchingly not kidding around when I say Game Center CX for the Nintendo DS is the template I wish all retro game collections would base themselves off of. More than just presenting you with a menu full of games, it conveys the narrative of a time and place retro games existed in.
Instead of playing ten minutes of an Atari game and going, "this game is too simple to be fun," GCCX identifies this and hinges the entire gameplay loop around "challenges." It could be getting a high score in an arcade game, it could be pulling off a special trick, reaching a certain level, and so on. Doing this is never strictly about just doing it. There are friends you can chat with during gameplay for help, fake magazines to thumb through for information, if you get bored of a specific challenge you can head out to the store and try a demo station of an upcoming release, and often before you're completely done with one game, you get a new one, with new challenges. (Eventually, you will circle back around to that older game and finish it off, however)
It's never just about the games, it's about the culture of the era. And it rocks. Especially that second game. Most of the fake retro games in the first GCCX are a little too simple for my tastes, but GCCX2 is more robust in every sense of the word. And even after you finish the "story" and clear every game, you unlock a special Daily Challenge that lets you keep working towards more tiny goals in these games theoretically forever.
This remaster better come out in English. The first DS game did (as "Retro Game Challenge"), but I had to wait for a fan translation patch for the second game (which is excellent and maintains the tone of the translation for the first game). The third game never got translated by anyone, that I know of.
I would kill to have the whole thing properly localized.
How was NES remix in comparison? It sounds like this took the concept much further.
NES Remix was purely challenges: there's no meta-gimmick of flicking through fake magazines or manuals or what have you, nor the satisfaction of getting to play the full game at any point (excepting a "Super Luigi Bros." SMB that's mirror-flipped, or another version that runs at x2 speed). The big original gimmick, as suggested by the title, is that a lot of the challenges will alter the source game in some way—many of them just stick filters over the screen to mess with you or whatever, but others will insert characters from different games and so on.
NES Remix was originally released as two separate Wii U games, with the first being focused on black-box games and the second being focused on later-era games; Ultimate NES Remix for 3DS is not a complete compilation but a selection of the "better" games from both parts with a small amount of exclusive new content. That said, what qualifies as "better" in the context of this challenge format doesn't necessarily conform with the hegemony about which NES games do or don't "hold up", and I think a lot of the black-box games that were excised from the 3DS versions made for more interesting challenge fodder than the late-era games (and that #1 getting critically pinged along those lines was short-sighted, but who gives a shit).
