We knew that Namco Bandai's Game Center CX strongly exhibited the spirit of awesomeness, as a collection of fake retro games tied into a TV show about playing old games. Chris Kohler reports that the game is actually pretty great, and a lot more clever than even the premise of parody retro games.Basically, you're tasked with performing specific challenges in each game, and you need to go through the made-up instruction book included in each game's pause menu to figure out how to achieve those objectives. Furthermore, you can find secrets by looking through fake game magazines. The game simultaneously parodies the inscrutability of old games and accurately models real gameplay experiences. That's pretty cool!
Kohler recommends a localization for this game, and we'd like to agree. It sounds great, but the game requires rather a lot of Japanese reading. Since, as Kohler says, "you need not be at all familiar with the source material to understand the premise," it would probably be okay to bring it over without the license, or possibly as the only representative of the license. The retrogaming theme is enough context for us.
But those Japanese gamers who are familiar with the show get a clever bonus: a replica of host Shinya Arino's Bandai Namco business card, given to him at Bandai Namco's offices while playing The Quest of Ki. Everyone should get some kind of consolation prize for playing The Quest of Ki.
