Between the Japanese summer holidays and the all-encompassing Gamescom event, a lot of publishers have had ample motivation to sit tight over the last few weeks, and the impending PAX West isn't going to help matters, but I assure you, things are going to pick up on the retro front from as early as next week... but for now, you'll take your muppet brawler and you'll like it. Seriously it's quite good.
ARCADE ARCHIVES
- Platform: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4
- Price: $7.99 / €6.99 / £6.29
- Publisher: Hamster / Taito
What's this? A wacky brawler starring a team of ninja puppets on a quest to defeat a cult working to summon Satan, originally developed and distributed in arcades by Taito in 1990, in both two- and four-player variants, and reissued via various Taito Memories compilations and, most recently, the Egret II Mini. Players control one of four puppets, each armed with unique ninja weapons and ninjutsu, as they thrash the life out of anything and everything that crosses their path, which includes the abundance of destructible objects which hide a variety of powerups and scoring items. (This release contains both the two- and four-player versions, selectable in the options menu.)
Why should I care? You want an arcade brawler that offers a relatively relaxed level of challenge without feeling mindless or one-note, you have a taste for poorly-written dialogue or you want to see how the judicious adoption of a puppet motif allowed the developers to get away with ludicrous amounts of enemy dismemberment.
Helpful tip: I don't know that anyone will absolutely need help making the game easier, but if ya do, I suggest you start with the red ninja.
EGG CONSOLE
- Platform: Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
- Price: $6.49 / ¥880
- Publisher: D4 Enterprise / Nihon Falcom
What's this? A "shooting revolution" that combines menu-based adventure game storytelling with sidescrolling shooting game stages, originally developed by Falcom for the PC-8801 computer in 1989 and later ported to the PC-98 series of hardware, with a remake produced for the Sharp X68000 computer by MNM Software some years later. Players guide contraband trafficker Kain on an adventure that begins with a girl requesting that he locate her grandfather; the choices made by the player will dictate how much money they have to spend buying weapons for their ship and which stages they'll be able to enter, with said stages consisting of real-time horizontal shooting game stages that offer a handful of gimmicks and motifs lovingly copied from the Konami arcade games of the day.
Why should I care? You want to see why arcade-style shooting games and upgrade mechanics rarely mix, and how even the likes of Falcom could only squeeze so much performance out of a hardware set that was famously and demonstrably not designed with high-speed scrolling and real-time action in mind.
Language barrier? The adventure sections are designed in such a way that they're very easy to brute-force and won't present you with any hard roadblocks, but the choices you make do have a material effect on the enjoyability of the shooting sections, and mindlessly mashing your way through an adventure game without reading anything clearly isn't going to be all that fun. The game does offer debug-esque modes that'll let you solely play the shooting game sections, but again, they're not much to talk about on their own.
LIMITED-EDITION PHYSICAL PRINT RUNS
Sonic x Shadow Generations (Switch, PS5, PS4, Xbox, PC) collectors editions from Limited Run Games
- Price: $249.99
- Availability: sales end October 6, 23:59 Eastern; ETA July
Let me make this clear: you are absolutely not going to struggle to find this game at your regular retailer, and this LRG release is specifically for the high-end collectors version and only the high-end collectors edition, but of all the people who'd be interested in buying a Dreamcast statue with Shadow on it, I figure at least eighy thousand of them have to be regular Retronauts readers.