Game Center CX, also known as Retro Game Master, a Japanese TV show hosted by Shinya Arino, will be celebrating their 10th anniversary this year with a new Nintendo 3DS title called Game Center CX: Arino in District 3, which features more than 15 Famicom-style mini-games with quirky twists. Here’s a look at a few.
The first game shown is called Rumi and the Magic Broom, which is quite reminiscent of the original Mario Bros. arcade game. While brainstorming for ideas, Arino wanted to implement an idea he got from a mirror stage in Prince of Persia. This feature ended up being added to the wizard enemies that shoot control-changing waves. Getting hit by this attack will cause your controls to have a reversed effect.
For the next idea, Arino wanted to use the Nintendo 3DS microphone to use and have players blow into as an escape mechanism when things get dangerous.
This idea ended up being used for the side-scrolling shooter game, Wing Hero. In Wing Hero, when it looks like your airship is about to crash, simply blowing in the mic will create a gust of air in the game that boosts you higher up to avoid crashing.
Saurus Boy is something similar to Mega Man, as it gives you various dinosaur costumes to change into. Each costume has their own special abilities, which will be used to fight your way to the end of each stage.
The goal of Soma’s Treasure is to simply find all the coins in the stage before time runs out. The catch is, they’re actually hidden and it requires an ability to see them, but using the ability will lower your overall surrounding vision while it’s active.
If you mix Pong, Brick Breaker and throw in a dash of Super Dodge Ball, you get the competitive sports action game, Break Shoot. The goal of this game is to find a way to get the ball across the opponent’s side before they can get one past you.
Finally, we get a look at Noborou (or Let’s Climb,) which is an action puzzle game that requires you to continue climbing on the blocks that fall before the floors do. As you continue going higher, the blocks will fall at different rates, leaving you pretty limited to what you can do.
Namco Bandai will be releasing Game Center CX: Arino in District 3 in Japan on January 23 for Nintendo 3DS.
