Retro Re-release Roundup, week of January 30, 2025
Virtua Fighter 5 returns for one last(?) victory lap.
Lemme tell ya, if there's anything the world needed right now, it's another catalyst for irreparable arguments with friends and loved ones. Thanks, Sting.
ARCADE ARCHIVES
Thunder Fox
- Platform: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 (worldwide)
- Price: $7.99 / €6.99 / £6.29
- Publisher: Hamster / Taito
What's this? A macho side-scrolling run-and-gun action game, originally developed and distributed in arcades by Taito in 1990, with a Sega Mega Drive conversion released in 1991 and emulated reissues via the mid-'00s Taito Legends/Memories compilations and, more recently, the Taito Milestones 3 compilation for Nintendo Switch; players control either Thunder or Fox on a mission to liberate the world from the threat of a chaotic terrorist organization, which ultimately involves lotsa shootin', punchin' and occasional vehicle-ridin'.
Why should I care? You're only familiar with this game via its significantly compromised Mega Drive version, and would sleep soundly knowing that the arcade original offers a far defter amalgam of Rolling Thunder, Contra and The Ninja Warriors than one might expect.
Helpful tip: There's just one Taito Milestones 3 game that has yet to reach Arcade Archives as a standalone: the mobster-themed fixed-screen shooter Dead Connection.
NINTENDO SWITCH ONLINE
January '25 update: Fatal Fury 2, Super Ninja Boy & Sutte Hakkun (Super Nintendo)
What's this? The SNES port of the hit sequel to SNK's first Neogeo fighting game franchise, the first SNES entry in Culture Brain's sorta-RPG-y action game series known in Japan as Super Chinese, and the first official global release for a Super Famicom color-absorbing puzzle-platformer developed by Game Center CX/NES Remix devs indieszero for Nintendo, starting with a version for the Satellaview game download service and transitioning to an expanded version for the Nintendo Power rewritable cartridge service that was ultimately given a limited-edition retail release in 1999. (This is yet another NSO update that dropped after last week's roundup went up, so as always, playing catchup on this one.)
Why should I care? One should always care when Nintendo bothers to introduce international audiences to any one of the many Japan-only titles in their vault that could and should have seen global release decades ago, and the SNES NSO app deserves all the fighting games it can get, considering the netcode's actually pretty good and all.
Useless fact: Sutte Hakkun has its origins in a Famicom Disk Systemproject created by future members of indieszero during an early-'90s development called the Nintendo Dentsu Game Seminar, and across their history as a team, they'd produce multiple versions of this game for Nintendo that never saw commercial release, including a Famicom cartridge version and separate Game Boy and Game Boy Color versions, some of which may have leaked online a few years back...
QUBYTE CLASSICS
- Platform: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4+5, Xbox, PC via Steam (worldwide)
- Price: $19.99 or equivalent
- Publisher: QUByte / PAtari
What's this? An emulated five-pack containing a handful of sports games from the early-'90s catalog of Accolade: specifically, the Sega Genesis versions of the baseball game Hardball, the seasonal multi-event games Summer Challenge and Winter Challenge and the ever-so-mysterious basketball game Hoops Shut Up and Jam!, as well as the MS-DOS version of Hardball 2. These games come equipped with Qubyte's traditionally modest array of enhancements, which include some basic screen settings, a rewind button and save state and digital manuals/
Why should I care? One would have no trouble gawking at the audacity of the half-assed Charles Barkley edits presented via this collection without actually paying for it, so perhaps one shouldn't concern themselves this particular commercial exhumation.
Useless fact: Don't mistake the Atari co-credit as an indicator that they or any of their reissue specialists worked on this collection — Atari recently (re)acquired the Accolade brand and much of its catalog and is clawing back the rest from the far corners of the earth, so they're obliged to take a cut from this release but they weren't involved in any meaningful way.
OTHER
Cho Aniki Collection
- Platform: Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
- Price: $44.99 or equivalent
- Publisher: Edia / Extreme
What's this? The global release of Edia's two-pack of emulated reissues of the first two games in Masaya's infamously unserious buff-dude shooting game series Cho Aniki, which originated on the PC Engine Super CD in the early '90s and have been sporadically reissued since, including a global release via the Wii Virtual Console; this collection includes the original Cho Aniki and its direct sequel, Ai Cho Aniki and offers basic subtitles where necessary, saves states, rewind, button configs, sound and visual galleries and more.
Why should I care? While two games from a series with over ten entries can hardly be considered a collection, rest assured that the two games presented here are arguably the only two games in the series made with any sort of overtures towards being authentically interesting games, and not mere digital shitposts or pedestrian cash-grabs made long after the series' notoriety had faded. (Y'ever play Gynoug/Wings of Wor for Sega Genesis? OG Cho Aniki's basically another one of those, minus some difficulty and plus a lot of preening doofuses.)
Helpful tip: The crowdfunding campaign for this collection was so successful that Edia pledged to also port the Super Famicom sorta-fighting game Cho Aniki: Bakuretsu Rantouhen, but that game's coming later as an individual standalone purchase and not as part of this collection.
- Platform: PC via Steam (worldwide)
- Price: $19.99 or equivalent
- Publisher: Sega
What's this? The latest and final(?) revision of the last numbered entry in Sega's legendary 3D fighting game series, Virtua Fighter, which was originally actively updated across arcades, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 from 2006 to 2012 and doggedly clung to relevance as a Yakuza series minigame before receiving a surprise remaster for PlayStation 4, dubbed Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown, in 2022. Using Ultimate Showdown as a base, this new PC-exclusive revision offers rollback netcode and support for ultra-high resolutions and advanced graphical settings and anti-latency measures like Nvidia Reflex, as well as the game's first set of system and character balance changes since the Final Showdown arcade revision released in 2010.
Why should I care? Putting aside this release's primary function as a bench-warmer and hype-builder for the recently-announced, loooong-in-demand new Virtua Fighter, there are very few games of VF5's vintage that could credibly demand and actually get tens of thousands of people to return after two decades — the excitement for this game isn't merely borne out of brand loyalty or spiteful frustration towards competing games, but for the return of a genre watermark, now rendered playable to audiences and generations that haven't had a real opportunity to truly experience it for a long while, if ever. Plus, if it sells really well, they might even get around to re-adding all the dressup items that they surreptitiously left out of this version!
Helpful tip: While Ultimate Showdown on PS4 will not and cannot receive the rollback netcode update nor crossplay with R.E.V.O. on PC, it did and will continue to get the new balance updates, so if you want to test them out and can endure the existing delay-based netcode, that might be an option for at least one or two of you.
- Platform: Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
- Price: $39.99 or equivalent (base game) / $24.99 (Prisoner of the Battles scenario) / $14.99 (Absence of Misericordia scenario) / $71.90 (triple pack)
- Publisher: Game*Spark Publishing
What's this? A Switch port of the recent remaster of Wizardry Gaiden: Itsutsu no Shiren, the final game in the Japan-exclusive Wizardry Gaiden sub-series of classic dungeon crawlers that originally hit Japanese PCs in 2016 and was resurrected for global audiences via Steam Early Access a few years ago; this port offers virtually all the content and features from the Steam version, save for the scenario editor and character image importer, as well as several control and display modes optimized for handheld play and full, free access to the game's hundreds-deep archive of classic and new user-created scenarios. (The two paid DLC campaigns are remakes of the content from a previous Wizardry Gaiden game and its expansion.)
Why should I care? You're a Wizardry oldhead who never tried any of the Gaiden games and wants to catch up with decades of galapogas evolution upon the Wiz 1~5 template, or you're a newcomer who tried Digital Eclipse's recent remake of the original, or even the new and shockingly popular Wizardry Variants Daphne on smartphones — if you like classic, straight-ahead dungeon-crawling and can tolerate some ery basic translated text, The Five Ordeals might keep you fed for a lifetime.
Useless fact: The success of Daphne caused such an uptick in interest for this Switch port that the Japanese publisher had to delay the physical release in order to significantly increase production. Wizardry's... back...?
