Retro Re-release Roundup, week of August 1, 2024
A beloved vanguard of '90s side-scrolling returns to the modern era.
Here's one more game I'm relegating to the intro of this week's roundup: Dokapon! Ikari no Tekken, a new remaster of what might be the most ruthless entry in Sting's historically antagonistic multiplayer board-game RPG series, and one that I spared a fuller writeup for two reasons — it's only out on the Japanese Switch eShop and isn't translated, so I figure it's worth waiting for the inevitable localization, but perhaps more importantly, even suggesting that one might try to rope their friends into playing this in Japanese, on top of everything else, might actually result in fatalities.
ARCADE ARCHIVES
The Final Round
- Platform: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4
- Price: $7.99 / €6.99 / £6.29
- Publisher: Hamster / Konami
What's this? A fast-paced boxing game, originally developed and distributed in arcades by Konami in 1988; players are tasked with distributing basic stat points before taking on either a human opponent or a succession of ever-so-slightly-familiar CPU opponents, interspersed with the occasional stat-raising training minigame. (As is typical of Konami's arcade output, the Japanese version, titled Hard Puncher: Chimamire no Eikou, is less punitive than the English version and doesn't constantly drain your energy for no good reason.)
Why should I care? You want to go toe-to-toe with a handful of boxers whose designs and even names are so blatantly "inspired" by the Rocky movies that I'm amazed some of them remain intact for this reissue.
Helpful tip: This reissue provides off-the-bat access to a few secret codes previously gated behind multiple clears, including a one-punch-KO mode.
JALECOLLE FAMICOM VER.
- Platform: Nintendo Switch, (worldwide)
- Price: $7.99 or equivalent
- Publisher: City Connection
What's this? A hybrid pinball/RPG game, originally developed by TOSE and published by Jaleco for the Famicom in 1988 and NES in 1990; in addition to three standard and fairly traditional pinball tables, Pinball Quest offers a RPG mode that sees the player completing simple "quests", defeating bosses and purchasing items across a progression of vertically-stacked fantasy-themed stages. Specific to this reissue are border gadgets that display and explain hidden/obscure info like your gold count, as well as adding overlaid subtitles that explain the effects of the items present in the store.
What's "JALECOlle Famicom Ver."? A new line of reissues centered on the more obscure titles in Jaleco's Famicom/NES library, powered by the same emulator suite behind recent reissues like Hebereke Enjoy Edition, Gimmick1 Special Edition and Abarenbou Tengu & Zombie Nation. Standard JALECOlle features include save states, rewind, screen and wallpaper options, border gadgets that display useful/additional info, a gallery of scanned materials, achievements, a basic speedrun mode and "Subtitle Guide", a feature that'll overlay English subtitles upon Japanese in-game text and vice-versa, as well as display additional pertinent info not present within the original games.
Why should I care? The very premise of a RPG/pinball hybrid has been doing a lot of heavy lifting over the last 30+ years, and if you're someone who can stomach both early videogame approximations of pinball and the kludginess of the average but-it's-a-RPG-now NES games, you'll get a session or two out of this one.
Useless fact: According to City Connection's own North American market research circa 2007, Pinball Quest was apparently the #1 favorite Jaleco game among American game dorks.
OTHER
- Platform: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox (worldwide)
- Price: $5.99 or equivalent
- Publisher: Ratalaika Games / Shinyuden
What's this? An emulated reissue of the first game in a short-lived series of mascot platformers originally developed by Iguana Entertainment and published by Sunsoft for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis/Mega Drive in 1993, with a slightly enhanced port produced for the Game Boy Advance in 2002 and reissues via the Wii Virtual Console in 2009; Ratalaika's serving up the SNES port this time, with all their usual emulator enhancements: screen settings and button mapping, toggleable cheats, save states, rewind and an image gallery, plus a newly-localized Japanese version of the game, should you require it.
Why should I care? Stuart's covered this before and I suspect his opinions are more closely-held than my own, but I'll chip in and say that this game not only occupies a middle-ground between the wanderlust of an early-'90s western PC sidescroller and the more exacting skill-based design of the Japanese platformers of the day, but very nearly makes it work in a manner that won't horrify the detractors of either style of sidescroller design.
Helpful tip: The rest of the Aero series is queued up for release over the next few months, and that include the GBA version of this very game, which some might argue is preferable to the version being presented today.
Bishoujo Hanafuda Kikou Michinoku Hitou Koi Monogatari, Jigsaw Island, SatelliTV, & The ONITAIJI: Mezase Nidaime Momotaro
- Platform: PC via Steam (worldwide)
- Price: $10.99 each or equivalent
- Publisher: Nippon Ichi Software
What're these? Four more fresh native PC ports from Nippon Ichi's early PlayStation catalog: a scenic hanafuda-themed romance sim, the second(ish) game in their signature competitive jigsaw puzzle series, a satellite TV station simulator and a 4-player RPG-tinged boardgame themed around the legend of Momotaro. All of these ports have been reconfigured with widescreen display, basic keyboard/mouse support and upscaled art, and none of them have been localized into English.
Why should I care? Hachinoku Mitou was both a pivotal early title for NIS and publisher FOG, whose catalog was acquired by NIS after the passing of their founder and president a few years back, and a notable precursor to FOG/NIS' cult tourist-brochure romance sim series Fuuraiki, so it's nice to see it here (and far less nice to see that the live-action backdrops have been butchered by the upscale). Beyond that game... well, who doesn't like jigsaws?
Helpful tip: You may have played Jigsaw Island via its extremely late budget-publisher localization, Jigsaw Madness, which "localized" the game by essentially removing any mode with more than a line or two of text.
- Platform: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 , PC via Steam (worldwide)
- Price: $19.99 or equivalent
- Publisher: Limited Run Games
What's this? An emulated reissue of Whoopee Camp's exploratory side-scrolling adventure game Tomba!, originally developed for the Sony PlayStation and published worldwide by Sony (including under the title Tombi in Europe) in 1997; this Limited Run Games-produced re-release offers emulator enhancements like save states and rewind as well as an optional remastered soundtrack, a music player and a gallery containing scanned materials, advertisements and video interviews with key developers on the original game.
Why should I care? The two Tomba! games saw already-veteran developer Tokuro Fujiwara (of Ghosts'n Goblins, Bionic Commando and Gargoyle's Quest/Demon's Crest fame) attempting to broaden the essential fun of a sidescrolling action game and reinterpret the notion of explorating an interconnected environment in a manner that continually surprises with new ways to interact with seemingly "solved" environs — it was quite unlike any of the 2D games of its time (but not the 3D ones, oddly enough) and remains wholly distinct from the five hundred formulaic metroidvanias released every week, so I think even newcomers would find it to be quite fresh. I cannot say that I'm seeing a lot of positive feedback about the technical quality of this reissue, but one would hope LRG knows they can't afford not to fix it...
Worrying fact: This release is built upon the open-source emulator PCSX-Rearmed... and, as far as I'm aware, there's no ethical way to commercialize this emulator, particularly on consoles, in a manner that complies with the terms of the license (or, at least, the route being taken here isn't satisfactory). Hmmmmmm.
BOOKS? BOOKS!
- Price: $24.99
- Availability: ready to ship
Penned by recurring Retronauts guest Brian Clark, this book chronicles the many video games designed and themed around Japanese musicians and recording artists from the earliest years of the industry through to the 2000s and includes retrospectives on dozens of games, newly-translated historical info, a handful of new and exclusive interviews with recording artists and associated developers or fanatics and much more.
