Retro Game Challenge 3DS coming to Japan in the winter

I'm not sure how many of you remember Retro Game Challenge, a weird nostalgia trip of a DS game released back in 2009, based upon the Japanese comedy show GameCenter CX. It didn't even sell 100,000 copies in the west.

Well a third game in the series is set to come out this winter in Japan, which means it's once again time to put your hands together and pray publisher Namco Bandai decide to take a gamble on a western release of this latest installment made by SHMUP developed G.rev.

For those of you who never played the original, it was an odd ode to the NES, casting you as a seven year old boy playing faux-NES games with the star of the TV show, Shinya Arino, who is also seven.

You started out with just one game, a Galaxion clone from memory, but after completing a few challenges in the game you'd start receiving fake issues of Famitsu, with articles on other clones of NES games that would be released. Some issues would even have glitches or cheats that were in the games.

Although none of the games were necessarily particularly interesting in of themselves, being slightly shoddy clones of existing NES games, Retro Game Challenge managed to really capture a moment in time and bring you into the days before the Internet, where it was you and a mate playing the same three minute loop of Joust or Balloon Fight a hundred times, because it was all you had.

Bandai Namco probably won't be bringing this new Retro Game Master for the 3DS over to the west, as they didn't with the second entry in the series, but it's a series worth taking a moment to remember.

Thanks for making me sad, Siliconera.