By the way, the game I hinted at (and was writing a nice long article about) before I took my forum break is getting a US release in three weeks. It's going to be called Retro Game Challenge over here and it's basically a collection of eight BRAND NEW 8-Bit NES games wrapped around a sweet meta-game of growing up in that era.

For instance, the game takes place in different years of the NES/Famicom's lifespan and each new game is representative of what was out at that time, starting with a simple arcade style Galaxian clone in 1983 to full blown Mega Man/Ninja Gaiden style games in 1988. You also have a subscription to gaming magazine and the magazines have previews of upcoming games, cheat codes for the games you already have and interviews with the games pretend creators and companies.

You progress in the game by completing a series of challenges for each game. For instance, it could be simply "Pass Stage 5" or "Make it to Stage 2 Without Getting Hit" or "Reach 100,000 Points" (sort of like achievement, hur). Once a set number of challenges are completed, you're warped to the next year with a new game (and you can access any previous games and play them whenever you want).

The top screen is the game screen, all of the game (as far as I could tell) adhere very strictly to the graphical and audio limitations of the NES/Famicom other than using the DS screen resolution. The bottom screen has your character and their friend (the child version of the host of the game show this game was based off of) actually playing the game. If you do cool things in the game, your friend will cheer or make comments or he'll make fun of you for sucking, etc.