Retro Re-release Roundup, week of October 23, 2025

If none of this week's older games do it for you, ya might want to instead check out one of the many vintage franchise revivals that have all coincided for release right around now: there's a new Katamari Damacy (separate from the other new Katamary Damacy that's currently locked in Apple Arcade prison), the forever-in-the-works Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2, a new Double Dragon game from the team behind all your second-favorite wrestling games, even a retro Night Striker sequel from the folks at M2. Night Striker!
 

ARCADE ARCHIVES / ARCADE ARCHIVES 2

Midnight Landing

What's this? The first in a series of pseudo-3D plane-landing simulators, originally developed by Taito and distributed in deluxe multi-monitor, joystick-and-throttle-equipped enclosed sit-down cabinets in 1987, and never ported or reissued for home platforms until now; players are tasked with landing their plane on successive airport runways, with the runway and other landmarks visible only as points of light contrasted against the blackness of the midnight sky.

Why should I care? You're willing to cut a lot of slack to something that was very impressive in its original context, or you want to marvel at one of the many ingenious efforts to produce a sense of three-dimensionality on hardware that didn't stand a chance of rendering polygons. It should also be said that the act of landing the plane is not all that difficult, nor is the game especially punitive towards poor performance.

Helpful tip: As with other recent big-cabinet ACA reissues, this one overtly and less-overtly supports offers configurations various alternative control methods, including gyro controls and various extended analogue controllers, including the USB Cyber Stick.

PLAYSTATION PREMIUM

October '25 update: Tekken 3 (PlayStation) plus Silent Hill 2 & Until Dawn (PlayStation 5)

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What's this? Recent modern remakes of Konami's genre-defining psychological horror game Silent Hill 2 and Supermassive Games' shlocky branching slasher Until Dawn, as well as the first-ever PS Classic reissue of the the crown jewel of Namco's fighting game oeuvre.

Why should I care? You haven't been completely and utterly immobilized by the revelation that Until Dawn qualifies for Retronauts coverage.

Useless fact: Tekken 3 — a game that sold nine million copies in its day, and was only eclipsed on the platform by the likes of Gran Turismo and Final Fantasy — has been missing from Sony's legacy service for all these years due to difficulty in emulating the game accurately via PS3-era methods, and would have been absent from the PlayStation Classic mini console if the Tekken producer did not impress upon Sony the necessity of not making fools of themselves by including any other Tekken game but Tekken 3. They probably should've also insisted they not use the PAL version with terrible emulation, but what can ya do.

OTHER

The House of the Dead 2: REMAKE

What's this? PlayStation and Xbox ports of Forever Entertainment's recent remake of Sega's beloved 1998 arcade zombie lightgun shooter, The House of the Dead 2, which originally made it home via the Sega Dreamcast, Windows PC, Xbox (as an unlockable within the House of the Dead III) and Nintendo Wii, as well as serving as the foundation for the arcade/PC keyboard game Typing of the Dead and the Japan-only Nintendo DS title English of the Dead. As with Forever's remake of the original HOD from a few years back, this version aims to recreate the original game with all-new modern visuals, redone voice acting, rearranged music, approximations of the home versions' extra modes and more.

Why should I care? Look, I don't have it in me to keep being nice about this company's remakes.

Helpful tip: To my recollection, Panzer Dragoon Zwei is the only remake still lingering in Forever's queue, and once that's out, this long nightmare might finally be over.

Persona 3 RELOAD

What's this? A Switch 2 port of last year's Unreal Engine 4-powered remake of Atlus' hybrid social sim/RPG Persona 3, originally released for PlayStation 2 in 2006 and later expanded via the Persona 3 FES revision/append disc and the PlayStation Portable version, Persona 3 Portable. This version overhauls all the game's character models and environments in full, contemporary 3D, with both the character designs and the revised UI given a makeover in the style of the recent-ish Persona 5, and also adds full voice acting for all social links, a multitude of new social activities and links for all male characters and other minor characters, many quality-of-life featured adopted from recent entries (a more useful map, explicit objective descriptions, faster/fastest travel, etc), new and newly-arranged music and alterations to the battle system, including the ability to switch between either the manual or CPU-controlled party actions from the previous versions of the game, as well as a new mechanic that's functionally similar to Persona 5's Baton Pass. among many other changes. 

Why should I care? One of the most common selling points I've seen from Sega about this particular version of Reload is anchored on how easy it was to get running on Switch 2 and how they actually bumped the release forward when they determined they'd overestimated how much time they'd need to throw together the port... and, well, hands-on impressions suggests they probably should've stuck to their original schedule, as it's not a particularly flattering port and doesn't exhibit any of the elbow grease that made previous Switch Persona ports so admirable, but if you exist entirely within Nintendo's ecosystem without access to other options to experience a remake that serves as the nexus point for the legacy, turning point and future of a now-household series, one shouldn't turn up their nose here (least of all because it seems likely that they'll address the performace issues at some point).

Helpful tip: One little addition for this version was the inclusion of several Yumi Kawamura vocal tracks from past versions of Persona 3, which can be used in place of the remake arranges; these tunes are also being made available on other platforms via free update.

Fantasy Maiden Wars: Dream of the Stray Dreamer

What's this? Doujin developer Sabando's Super Robot Wars-style Touhou series strategy-RPG Gensou Shoujo Wars, originally released episodically, and eventually as part of a deluxe box, on PC in Japan from 2008 to 2017, and ported to Switch in 2022; this version takes all the balance changes and additions from the Switch version and brings them back to PC, now sporting an official English localization. (The Switch version is being localized, too, but it wasn't able to release day-and-date with the Steam release.)

Why should I care? One of the oft-repeated memes around this game in Japan is that it's "recommended to those who like Touhou, those who like SRW, those who don't know Touhou, those who don't know SRW, those who like both, those who don't know either and maybe even those who don't like SRW" — put another way, this is an astoundingly well-crafted fusion of two very specific and hyper-cultivated fandoms that might serve as a gateway to either one, and whose massive amount of content and painstaking visual production belies its origins as a fan work, in all the best ways.

Useless fact: The localization for this release is not brand-new but is, in large part, salvaged and repurposed from a fan translatiorn borne via a playthrough thread on the Something Awful messageboard, now overseen by and completed by members of that fan effort that have since gone onto professional localization careers that include works on bonafide Super Robot Wars games.

GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou, DoDonPachi Resurrection, Mushihimesama & Espgaluda 2 online leaderboard updates (Switch)

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After years of lethargy, publisher Live Wire has finally added long-promised online leaderboard functionality into their Cave arcade shooting game ports for Nintendo Switch: not just the still-available DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou, but also DoDonPachi Resurrection, Mushihimesama and Espgaluda 2, which have all been delisted due to lapsed licenses for months, if not years. They've also added some wallpaper tweaks to SDOJ, but have yet to bother translating the menus... (They've also introduced new bugs to Resurrection, somehow, but they at least seem to be in a patching mood, so perhaps they'll fix them at some point this decade.)