Pretty cool game! The challenges are piss easy for the most part, but the games here are really cool and fun! I love Haggleman and the development of that series as it goes along, it really feels like it’s own weird thing that would’ve come out back then rather than an imitation of something else. Most of these have their own personality that separates them from their NES inspirations, actually, apart from the Galaga clone that kicks the game off. The small-scale but still rather meaty RPG was a very pleasant surprise, even if it comes with all the QoL gripes that are typical of RPGs from the era it’s imitating.

While I like all the games here, and think the metagame surrounding them adds a lot of charm to the experience, I can’t help feeling like this format, the way it depicts playing a video game inside a video game had the potential to be something seriously amazing with a bit more narrative meat. I love the glimpses of world building you get, the peeks into the dev studios and culture surrounding this alternate history version of the 8 bit era, and I would’ve adored to see that fleshed out more, maybe through talks of studio rivalries or personal touches from the in universe developers to be found within the games themselves.

At that point, though, maybe I’m asking a bit much from a DS game based on a game show I’ve never watched! I think the fact that it got my imagination running like that is a sign that it’s a worthwhile time though, and one I had a lot of fun with.