After playing through the Game Center CX games, I didn’t want to be done. Luckily, this gem eventually emerged in my search: a 1997 Japan-exclusive Playstation 1 game presenting a set of nostalgically-made homages to very early arcade games. We’re talking late 70s, early 80s.
The opening cinema, a short animation of a young boy entering a dingy arcade before zooming into the cocktail machine’s circuit boards populated by gnomes, belies the barebones presentation of the rest of the game. It’s partly done to more effectively evoke the old-timey technology during play, but ends up feeling cheap.
As for the games, the selection feels overly limited. Five of the twelve games (Computer Block, World Travel, Feudal Lord Block, Dancing Zoo, and Delta) are block-breaker variants, albeit with different themes. The first is very basic, with simulated cellophane strips for colour, while the others have block layouts patterned around world monuments or Japanese historical depictions, an animal theme, and flashy (for the (simulated) time) vector graphics. The paddle can be controlled by D-pad, analogue stick, or even shoulder buttons, but none ends up feeling quite right, they’re all too sensitive.
The next four are more varied, with the Lunar Lander-type Mystery Planet, the submarine shooter Sea Fighter, circus-themed shooter Carnival Hunt, and the character-based maze game Dragon Walker. These are the highlight of the package but even then their deliberately primitive feel kept me from engaging too strongly with any of them (acknowledging that I am much too young to be the target audience here).
Rounding out the package are three recreations of physical shooting gallery-type games. Gunfighter is an old west shootout, Wiwi Jungle has you murdering wild animals, and Tank is a grim depiction of the realities of mechanised warfare. You know, for kids! They all play very similarly (shoot targets that move across or pop up) but moving a cursor around the screen is not as satisfying as the real games with their light-sensitive mock guns. As far as I know this doesn’t have light gun support, which would have helped with this.
The only other gameplay feature is the charmingly-named “Akiba Parts Shop” menu. Here you can purchase gameplay modifiers for the various games; whether it be the ability to continue from a game over, a longer paddle for a block breaker, or an altered graphic set. The currency for these is time: your accumulated time spent playing the games is shown on this screen, and cashed in for these features that often make the games themselves much more playable. The extortionate exchange rate ruins the interesting idea of this mechanic; to unlock all the options would require almost 20 hours of play time, by which time even the most rose-tinted retro gamers will surely be thoroughly sick of the offerings here.
The novelty of this collection is striking. It’s a fascinating look at what was at the time 20-year old nostalgia which itself is now more than 20 years old. Depicting these vintage games is something you don’t see too often outside of niche homebrew communities, or for franchises that have continued like Space Invaders (and even then callbacks will invariably revamp the aesthetics). I can’t help but compare it to the more recent collections I’ve just played though, and Game Center CX 3 in particular since it was a more varied attempt to homage the game experiences from this era and beyond. But Serofans, despite its extreme obscurity, paved the way for those later celebrations of previous-gen gaming. It’s certainly worth a look for depicting a now mostly-forgotten era when the first video games were crawling out of the primordial ooze into cathode ray tubes.