Retro Re-release Roundup, week of October 3, 2024

A little heads-up for something that may or may not transpire over the next day or so: Tatsujin, the company currently handling and reviving the catalogue of classic arcade and shooting game developers Toaplan, has announced a Toaplan 40th anniversary announcement stream that's set to commence within the next 24 hours, and it seems they're probably going to announce an all-in-one arcade catalog app for smartphones in the vein of Capcom Arcade Stadium... or they might just announce some merch or somethin', who knows.

Moon Shuttle

What's this? A horizontally-scrolling sci-fi shooting game, originally developed and distributed in Japanese arcades by Nichibutsu, with an international release handled by Taito; the game alternates between an auto-scrolling phase that tasks the player with quickly defeating spawning enemy waves and a fixed-screen phase in which the player must clear a path through an impeding asteroid belt as their ship slowly (or quickly, if you push right) advances towards the right side of the screen.

Why should I care? With some very notable exceptions, Nichibutsu's games strove for uniqueness within the extremely simple boundaries afforded to them by primitive hardware, and it's nice to see some of these little-played games being brought out of the vault... lord knows they've got a whole bunch more of 'em in the wings.

Useless fact: One might presume this game was related to, or named to capitalize on the success of, the hit Moon Cresta, but Nichibutsu's output at the turn of the '80s was generally just littered with games and other products with "Moon" in the title.

EGG CONSOLE

Silver Ghost (PC-8801mkIISR)

What's this? A strategy RPG with chaotic real-time battles, originally developed and publshed by Kure Software Koubou in 1988. Set in a world very loosely themed after Arthurian legend, the player controls Lancelot on a quest to reclaim Camelot Castle, which is achieved by recruiting units and exploring, allying with and otherwise claiming each section of the world map (which might also entail the occasional boss fight). Recruited units will follow you in real time as you traverse each area and can be moved into manual formations, but will automatically engage enemy forces on sight with bump-style combat; each units in individually named, gains individual levels from battle and can be equipped, and their classes dictate their behavior in battle, including their combat tactics and their willingness to engage in battles they can't hope to win.

Why should I care? This game sits somewhere between a proto-musou game, an RTS antecedent in the vein of something like Herzog and the formative Hydlide/Ys-style action-RPGs of the day—the developer would continue to expand upon this particular style of real-time SRPG, dubbed "gocha-chara", across successive games and series (most notably the First Queen series, which recently saw a remake released in adquately-legible English on Switch and PC) and while other developers were more selective and specific about which parts they chose to mimic with their own games, it's widely cited as an extremely influential title on those looking to fuse grand strategy games with the pandemonium of large-scale combat and the character growth and narrative elements of RPG.

Language barrier? Many of the high-level menu commands are in English, but most of the dialog and other text is in Japanese, including the tutorial-esque/instructional content.

G-MODE ARCHIVES+

Utakata no Sora

What's this? A horror-tinged novel adventure game with escape-game elements, originally developed and published on Japanese feature phones by Riverhillsoft successor studio Althi in 2008; players controls a high school student who sojourns to a mountainous rural village on their vacation and inadvertently triggers a breach of the spiritual boundaries and with it, the memories of unspoken incidents that haunts the denizens of the village to this day...

Why should I care? G-MODE's released quite a few Althi titles thus far but this is the first one that's all-original, so it'll be nice to see what they were up to when they weren't rehashing or adapting old Riverhillsoft games, and both the setting and the escape room-esque puzzle sections help differentiate it from the usual cavalcade of detective mystery games coming out of G-MODE Archives these days.

Helpful tip: This release not only includes all the episodes of the main game but also a gaiden story originally delivered as a standalone app.

OTHER

Neverossa: Mille e una notte

What's this? A remaster of the expanded deluxe version of the RPG-infused raising sim Neverossa, originally released by Hong Kong team Firedog Studio across 2005/6 for PC in Chinese territories; as far as I'm aware, this "remaster" is essentially the original Windows Vista game running in a compatibility wrapper, with the occasional upscaled texture. (The game is launching sans localization, but the developers have pledged their intentions to provide official English and Japanese translations as soon as possible.)

Why should I care? Neverossa is, by some accounts, an extremely credible pastiche of Japanese turn-of-the-millennium RPG-adjacent series like Princess Maker and early Atelier, and has been high on many peoples' lists of most-requested Hong Kong PC games for almost two decades... so it's a shame they didn't take the opportunity to localize the game, seeing as it's being released globally and all, but perhaps this remaster will at least provide for a slightly simpler base from which to produce a fan translation. (I should also mention that I don't know enough about the game to know precisely which era of Princess Maker they're aping, so yeah, the nudity warning on the Steam page is probably worth heeding.)

Useless fact: This reissue seems to largely be the beneficiary of Firedog's recent Vampire Survivors clone, which borrows characters from this universe.

Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel

What's this? An emulated reissue of the Iguana Entertainment-developed action game starring Aero the Acro-Bat rival character Zero, originally published by Sunsoft for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive and Super Nintendo in 1994/5 and recently reissued on replica Genesis cartridge; this version presents the SNES version with Ratalaika's usual suite of controller configs and tweaks, screen and filter settings, cheat options, save states and speed settings, a sound test, image gallery and an option to switch between the original English version and a new Japanese localization.

Why should I care? As always, await Stuart's review for a second and probably more positive opinion, but I will say this: Zero's a game that's clearly modeled off certain late-era 16-bit action game showpieces, particularly Shinobi III, and even thought it belongs in a different class to any of those classics you might care to name, you might also be surprised by how frequently it almost kinda gets it.

Helpful tip: The game has been renamed to Zero High-Flying Squirrel in Japan, for reasons I should not have to explain. The contentious rising sun motif seen on Zero's headband may or may not be present in the game, either now or in the future — it's missing in the key art and all the press screenshots but it seems to still be present in the released game, both on the character sprites and on every other illustration that isn't the one picture they're using for the cover.