Retro Re-release Roundup, week of May 15, 2025
Capcom Fighting game carries Capcom's turn-of-the-century deadweight onto modern platforms.
A heads-up: if any of you Capcom Fighting Collection 2 buyers find yourselves getting blown up by a K-groove Geese over the weekend, know that you were just facing... well, anyone who's played CVS2 at any point during the last decade and change, really, but there's no way to prove it wasn't me.
ARCADE ARCHIVES
Nebulasray
- Platform: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 (worldwide)
- Price: $14.99 / €6.99 / £6.29
- Publisher: Hamster / Konami
What's this? A vertically-scrolling sci-fi shooting game, originally developed and distributed in arcades by Namco and never ported or reissued before now; the game system is rather straightforward, essentially using the codified shot-and-bomb setup of the day, with the game's big hook being its excessive use of pre-rendered graphics and scaling effects used in service of producing pseudo-3D visuals on 2D hardware.
Why should I care? As a game, this one's pretty rough: it suffers from most of the issues that befell many end-stage, pre-danmaku shooting games, including a torturous mix of tanky enemies that shoot very fast bullets, extremely punitive power-downs on death and a spread of power-ups that aren't necessarily useful. As a spectacle, it's worth experiencing at least once: it may not play nearly as well as contemporary cinematic, setpiece-heavy pseudo-3D shooters like RayForce or Soukyugurentai, but it has a certain of-the-era charm that compares favourably (presuming you're not susceptible to motion sickness, that it).
Helpful tip: Note the price hike on this release, which has traditionally been reserved for games with obvious licensing expenses like Mazinger and Macross — the justification given this time is "this was a complex game to emulate and we've been giving you nigh-weekly drops for 11 years, c'mon", so ACA releases at this price point might be a more frequent occurrence going forward.
EGG CONSOLE
Schwarzschild: Kyouran no Ginga (PC-9801)
- Platform: Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
- Price: $7.16/ ¥880
- Publisher: D4 Enterprise / Kogado Studio
What's this? the first entry in Kogado Studio's signature epic sci-fi war simulator, originally released for PC-98 series computers in 1988 and quickly ported to PC-88 and MSX2; players are tasked with raising the prosperity of their own planet and achieving piece and unity within the cosmos, which is achieved by exporing the galaxy, steadily building and acquiring reinforcements and defeating the many rival factions that emerge via large-scale turn-based battles.
Why should I care? This series began as an attempt to shape the war sim as defined by Koei's Sangokushi / Nobunaga games into something far more directed and narratively-focused and, ultimately, more approachable and less intimidating; that doesn't make the game easier, necessarily, as it ultimately resulted in one long succession of pre-determined and very prescriptive skirmishes that pull no punches, but if you want to try one of these games with most of the thinking stripped out and some unique developments not possible within strategy games centred on genuine strategy, ya might dig this one.
Language barrier? Very much so: all the necessary text is in Japanese, and you'll make no progress if you can't read it.
OTHER
- Platform: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox, PC via Steam (worldwide)
- Price: $39.99 or equivalent
- Publisher: Capcom
What's this? The latest compilation of internally-developed emulated fighting games from Capcom, featuring eight games from the turn of the millennium, most of which have not been ported in well over a decade. These games are presented with new training modes and hitbox viewers, a resolution bump where relevant, unlocks for secret and/or boss characters, enhancements like quick-save, one-button special/super macros and single-player difficulty settings, extensive visual and sound galleries, various filters and display options, online leaderboards and casual, ranked and lobby play with rollback netcode.
Which games are included? This collection includes eight games, primarily sourced from the NAOMI arcade library: the fully-3D versus party brawlers Power Stone and Power Stone 2; the final entry in the 2.5D warring-schools series, Project Justice; the second and final game in the 3D totally-not-Star Wars series, Plasma Sword; the somewhat overlooked Street Fighter Alpha 3 revision Upper, Capcom's two entries in the beloved fighting game crossover series Capcom vs. SNK and, to the excitement of almost nobody, the tepid swansong to the classic Capcom fighting game era, Capcom Fighting Jam. You can find the specific ROM versions listed on Capcom's site, including stipulations for which versions are used for ranked online play.
Why should I care? While these games might not strike some of you as being as immediately accessible as previous Street Fighter-centric collections or even the recent Marvel vs. Capcom Collection, you might find that this is Capcom's most casually inviting fighting game collection to date — the sheer variety of different play experiences and visual styles present from game to game offers something for everyone, from those unfamiliar with fighting games or Capcom's deeper cuts to those few people who know plasma combos with Byakko, and the ability to officially play these games online for, in most cases, the first time, means you're going to be able to learn and relearn them with more people than have ever been playing the games at one time. (Just do bear in mind that these are specifically the arcade versions, so some of the single-player content you might expect from the Power Stone games in particular isn't present here.)
Helpful tip: Two caveats on the game versions included here: firstly, Capcom vs. SNK 2 offers both the original arcade version or a version that conforms to the balance changes made for the Xbox/Gamecube "EO" revision, which include the removal of the notorious game-defining "roll cancel" glitch, but as of right now, only the EO version is playable in ranked matches; secondly, Plasma Sword is not the authentic arcade version but some odd conversion of the Dreamcast version that's pretending to be a NAOMI arcade game, which means it's missing some stuff that was originally present in the home version while also containing system/balance changes that don't conform to the actual arcade version and are not well-documented online, on account of this game having virtually no scene in arcades, on Dreamcast or anywhere else.
- Platform: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox, PC via Steam (worldwide)
- Price: $5.99 or equivalent
- Publisher: Shinyuden / Ratalaika
What's this? An emulated reissue of the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis version of Wolf Team's isometric mecha shooter Final Zone / fz Senki AXIS, originally released alongside a Sharp X68000 version in Japan in 1990; this release is emulated by Ratalaika Games and features all their usual enhancements, including save states, rewind, various cheat options, screen settings and filters and a basic art gallery and jukebox. (This is another end-of-week drop that eluded last week's roundup; perhaps you missed it, too.)
Why should I care? You want a game that revels in the sensation of piloting a big ol' robot and don't mind that it does so at the expense of basic, common-sense playability.
Useless fact: This game, of all games, is (perhaps erroneously) credited for solidifying "quarter-view" as the accepted terminology for games presented with this particular angled perspective among Japanese game fanatics.
