Retro Re-release Roundup, week of November 26, 2020

Of the approximately eight zillion game sales taking place over the weekend, I'd like to highlight one in particular: itch.io's Black Friday sale, which will see theme waiving their revenue share for anything purchased on that day, meaning all the profits go directly to the developers, in conjunction with whatever discounts happen to be applied at the time, so you can help put a little extra money in some indie devs' pockets without having to, y'know, spend more.

ARCADE ARCHIVES


Rush'n Attack / Green Beret

What's this? A military-themed run-and-gun-but-mostly-knife, originally developed and distributed in arcades by Konami in 1985 and generously ported to European microcomputers, arranged for Famicom Disk System and NES and later remade for Game Boy Advance as part of the Konami Collector's Series: Arcade Advanced compilation; the player is tasked with infiltrating a military base in order to rescue prisoners of war, which primarily requires him to run to the right and shank approximately eight thousand enemy soldiers, occasionally stopping to collect and fire a limited-use weapon dropped by a dispatched foe.

Why should I care? Simple as it may be, and as unwieldy as up-to-jump was and is as a command, Rush'n Attack's merciless enemy rush remains as visceral as ever. (I also wonder if many of the people who grew up with any one of the various home conversions ever actually touched the arcade original...)

Useless fact: As you might have predicted, the PSG rendition of The Great Escape has been removed from the name entry screen of this reissue.

OTHER

BloodRayne: Terminal Cut & BloodRayne 2: Terminal Cut

What're these? Overhauls of the PC ports of Terminal Reality's terminally '00s-y third-person vampire-vs-nazi action game series, originally released in 2002 an 2004 by Majesco and now owned by Ziggurat Interactive; these versions feature a 60FPS upgrade (but no higher) support for ultra-HD resolutions, anti-aliasing, redone lighting, uncompressed textures, upscaled FMV, XInput controller support and multi-language support (including Russian support, as a nod to BloodRayne's allegedly large Russian following).

Why should I care? I am begging you, don't make me do this. 

Useless fact: Oh god, where to start? Like, did you know this series, through its association with Terminal Reality's horror series Nocturne, has a tenuous link to the Blair Witch universe? Or that one of Uwe Boll's four(!) BloodRayne movies is a shot-for-shot parody of the previous film with an overweight lady playing the lead role because Uwe Boll? Or that MTV2 pushed an in-game music video of Rayne singing an Evanescence song as part of a blink-and-you'll-miss-it attempt to establish machinima as the newest advancement in music television?

TRANSLATIONS & HOMEBREW

Ain't no stoppin' this Atomiswave

...actually, now that all the most sought-after Atomiswave titles have been converted, you can probably expect the trickle of Dreamcast conversions to slow considerably, but let's not neglect to acknowledge this week's bountiful selection: the obscure Guilty Gear X 1.5 revision, the unfairly-dismissed but fairly-maligned four-player spinoff Guilty Gear Isuka, Dimps' tween-heavy 2D fighting game The Rumble Fish and its still-played, arcade-only sequel The Rumble Fish 2 and, perhaps most interestingly, Toretore! Sushi / Sushi Bar, a sushi-themed falling-block puzzle game developed by Sammy but never officially released in arcades or anywhere else.

LIMITED-PRINT PHYSICAL GAME RUNS

Shadow of the Ninja (NES) & Return of the Ninja (GBC) cartridge reissues from Limited Run Games

By now, I'm sure many of you are well aware of Shadow of the Ninja, Natsume's cult NES ninja action game: it's appeared on every iteration of Nintendo's Virtual Console, it's available as part of Nintendo Switch Online and Arino played it on Game Center CX that one time. You may be less familiar with Return of the Ninja, however, and with good reason: it's a late-era GBC game, developed by greenhorns at turn-of-the-millennium Natsume and released only in North America and Europe in extremely limited quantities and bears only a superficial resemblance to its alleged NES forebear (that is to say, it's not much fun). Then again, why take my word for it when you can gamble a couple pineapples and find out for yourself?

IT'S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN

Everdrive Black Friday sale

Be it NES, Famicom, Game Boy, Game Gear, TurboGrafx-16, Mega Drive/Genesis, SNES, Game Boy Advance or N64, Everdrive has a flash cart to meet your needs... or at least, they do at the time of this writing;  these things never last long during sale time.