PixlBit

If you have fond memories of lazy Saturdays taking turns with a friend’s Game & Watch, the possibilities for recreating those experiences have been pretty sparse in the last decade. Today, the primary way to get your hands on LCD-style games is through Nintendo’s own Game & Watch collections for the DS and, strangely, in this summer’s Deadlight on XBLA. Outside of those cases, though, the LCD game is essentially dead.  Or so it seemed, until Retro Pocket swooped onto DSiWare and packed several Saturday afternoons’ worth of LCD-style games into a package that will have some peering over the top of their sunglasses to take in something so rad.

As a periodic fan of LCD games, I was unsure if I would enjoy a collection of eight new games that had no nostalgia boost to help them along.  My first impression of the Retro Pocket collection was a little rocky, since the first game in the menu, Fireman, didn’t do anything for me.  My initial session with it lasted so long that I just quit.  There seemed to be no real challenge and I eventually just got bored.  As I tried other games, though, I found that Fireman -- especially on its Game A setting -- is by far the least fun of all.

Some games in the collection have this problem where the difficulty is so low that playing becomes rote repetition.  Fortunately, each one has a tougher Game B option to choose.  A balance of challenge, game length, and frantic reaction time is what a good LCD game needs to get right.  With the varied game settings (an LCD game tradition), most every game in the collection has a difficulty level available that is right for every player.

Most of the games rely on classic situations where lots of things are being thrown your way and you must dodge, defend, or catch them to survive.  To give some examples, in Postman you must deliver pieces of mail to three mail boxes while dogs blip around and try to bite your ankles and in Kung Fu Hero you must defend a maiden who is having bottles (I think) thrown at her that must be kicked away at the last second.  The games that deviate from these tried and true motivations still have a similar frantic vibe as you rescue baby penguins in Whale Escape or separate drops of fuel by color in Fuel Drop.

Each game does a pretty good job of achieving that LCD look -- a somewhat muted color background and the LCD outlines hovering in front to show all possible positions that moving objects may take.  Sometimes those colors are a bit less muted than they would have been on a real LCD game of yore, and in one case -- Fuel Drop -- some of the moving LCDs are white, which as far as I know wasn’t possible in the early ‘80s.  That’s alright though, the spirit remains (in fact, Fuel Drop is probably my favorite of the set) and every game reaches a level of quality that ye olde game designers would be proud of, despite qualms over difficulty on a few entries.

The only other disappointment with Retro Pocket is that the dual-screen potential of the DS is completely overlooked.  Every game takes part on the bottom screen, with the top being filled with a squiggling title screen for the game you’re playing.  This is somewhat distracting and a missed opportunity since some classic Game & Watch installments used two screens -- the proto-DS, if you will.

Even though every game in the Retro Pocket compilation isn’t perfect, and there are a few minor missteps, I can’t find anything to get really broken up about.  The only significant issue with this collection is the limited appeal that this style of game has in the modern era. For those that have any nostalgia for playing a friend’s kid-goo covered Tiger Electronics LCD game, Retro Pocket is an affordable way to relive those memories and try to master a fresh version of a lost genre.