A day on the Game Center CX set
Brian Ashcraft went to the Bandai Namco offices to witness the pain of Shinya Arino, the tortured host of the Japanese TV show Game Center CX, soon to be a DS game from the same company. The game is about kids playing fake retro games; the show is about one guy playing real retro games all the way through, even if-- especially if-- they're senselessly difficult. During the show Ashcraft visited, Arino tried his best and failed to complete the Tower of Druaga prequel The Quest of Ki. We would not like to be filmed trying to play The Quest of Ki.
The feature, much of which is contained in the photo gallery, describes a normal day on the set of the show, as Arino spends the entire day trying to finish this game, getting covert tips from Namco staffers, applying cooling pads to his forehead to stay alert, and facing the constant danger of failure. Will the games in the DS adaptation be as hard as the real thing? Will we be expected to suffer?
We have an ulterior motive for posting about Game Center CX. We continually hope that our posts about the show will convince someone at one of the companies who localizes and releases anime to pick up the license for this show and subtitle it in English. We'd totally buy the DVDs, and that's not something we can say for any current anime offerings! And then, in this hypothetical ideal universe we've built up, a localized version of the DS game could come out!
