Game & Watch Gallery 4 is a collection of minigames based on the classic LCD handhelds from Nintendo's yesteryear. The cover boasts that there are 6 games in one, but that's a serious undersell. Each of the main games in the collection has both a modern and classic version. The classic versions are simply the emulated LCD games in their original version. The modern versions update the games with color and use Mario and Donkey Kong characters, rather than the various iterations of Mr. Game & Watch featured in the original games.
While you start off with six games (really twelve, when you count the modern and classic versions), by achieving more stars in the games you can unlock fourteen more, some with modern versions, and some without. Unlocking the new games requires unlocking stars in the games that have both classic and modern versions, and you can do so by getting better and better high scores. For a 1000 point score, you get the full 5 stars for each game, and each game has an A and B mode. These modes are sometimes just a harder version of the game, but sometimes are multiplayer versions which you can play with a link cable.
Some of these games are really fun, and some are not very fun. I had a great time with classic and modern games like Chef, Fire Attack, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Rain Shower, Mario's Cement Factory, Mario Bros., and Fire. Others, like Boxing, Donkey Kong 3, Manhole, and Octopus were not as much fun. In almost every case, I found myself enjoying the modern versions of the game more than the classic versions. This was particularly true of Chef, which is a straight up masterpiece in the modern version.
Grinding for the stars is the single biggest weakness of this game, and the ceilings for unlocking all of the games is ludicrously high. You can get a maximum of twenty stars for each game, and the difficulty level is highly variable depending on the game. Games like Octopus and Fire were really difficult for me to rack up more than 200 or so points on any given setting, and unless you can get nearly twenty stars on almost all of the levels (which requires 1000 points in each mode), you can kiss unlocking some of the games goodbye. What's more, some of the game modes can only be played via link cable, so unless you have a friend to play with, you can kiss a big chunk of the stars goodbye. This was one game where I would have liked there to be a cheat you could input to unlock all of the games, as some of these LCD handhelds are super expensive, and without paying a lot of money or putting in a ton of time on this cart, I probably won't be able to get an authentic feeling experience playing a Game & Watch like Zelda, which requires 160 stars (I quit between 80 and 90, and didn't really see a path to getting many more without a stupid amount of time or finding a friend to play with). The cheapest one I could find was 80 dollars, and I just wish that Nintendo had put their history behind a less stringent wall with this one.
Sound, controls, and graphics are all basically what you expect. They're all either LCD or low-grade 16 bit quality. Nothing to see here, nothing really to report on.
I really enjoyed my time with Game & Watch Gallery 4, and was pleasantly surprised by some of the creative game designs that Nintendo was doing nearly 40 years ago, in some cases! Some of the games on here are clunkers, but if you enjoy simple little games with a lot of heart and soul, you should check it out. I'd have probably paid the 7.99 for which I acquired this cartridge just for modern Chef, which I'd highly recommend to everyone. I'll give this game a 7.6/10 as a fun little time waster and history lesson, but nothing that will change your life.
Up next on reTROview, I'll be reviewing a game I'd been looking forward to since its launch, but had been unable to play because I'm poor. Check back in tomorrow (hopefully) for another reTROview!
-TRO
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