Retro Re-Release Roundup, week of September 3, 2025
Arcade Archives delivers the second game in Namco's bombastic button-bashing duology.
Silksong. Okay, traffic secured; as you were, folks.
ARCADE ARCHIVES / ARCADE ARCHIVES 2
- Platform: Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X (worldwide, ACA2) / Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 (worldwide, ACA)
- Price: $17.99 / €14.99 / £11.99 (ACA2), $14.99 / €14.99 / £11.99 (ACA), $2.99 / €2.99 / £2.49 (ACA-to-ACA2 upgrade)
- Publisher: Hamster / Bandai-Namco
What's this? A larger-than-life multi-event athletics game, originally developed and distributed in arcades by Namco in 1995 as a sequel to Numan Athletics, and never ported or reissued before now. After selecting from several playable superhumans, dubbed "Newman", one to four players must compete across 13 different over-the-top athletic events that require the player to mash, hold and/or time the presses on their 3-button panel to perform over-the-top feats that include catching and throwing a gigantic bomb, racing a train, vaulting over a Formula 1 car or dragging a kaiju through a city. (Despite Hamster positioning Arcade Archives 2 as an avenue to bring online multiplayer to their new releases, this one remains local-only.)
Why should I care? If Numan Athletics kept one foot on the side of semi-realism, Mach Breakers brought it down to maybe two toes: the character designs are wilder, the art style is more outlandish and the events are as bombastic as ever, with a few welcome single-player sessions to help alleviate both the uneven difficulty and the general fatigue of mashing buttons for a dozen games in a row.
Useless fact: The arcade board used for Mach Breakers was utilized for just one other game: a little assassin-themed proto-platform-fighter called Outfoxies...
EGG CONSOLE
- Platform: Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
- Price: $7.19 / ¥990
- Publisher: D4 Enterprise / Nihon Falcom
What's this? A semi-real-time sandbox strategy game, originally developed and distributed for PC-98 and FM Towns by Falcom in 1991 and positioned as the seventh entry in the Dragon Slayer series, followed by an "Advanced" revision, conversions for Super Famicom and Sega Mega Drive and a string of incremental Windows PC adaptations through the late-'90s to early-'00s. On each of the 52 maps, players are tasked with claiming territory and conquering the three other occupying forces, which requires both the deft military management of troop units but also the construction of townships from which to draw funds and fresh soldiers, as well as the fortification of the environs and potential alliances with lesser forces; the player is only alloted a certain number of days to finish each map, and efficiently clearing a map will allow them to carry over a larger number of additional days to clear the next one.
Why should I care? For as simple as this game might seem relative to real-time-ish stragegy games from just a year or two later, one has to marvel at just how much depth they managed to wring out of a fairly basic suite of interactions, and how much replayability one can derive from optimizing their domination of each map in what essentially amounts to playing for score — it's not hard to see why they repackaged and map-packed this game to high heaven.
Language barrier? Some of the unit command menus are displayed in kanji but, between the broadly icon-heavy interface and whatever translated instructions are present in the manual, I do think one could probably kludge their way through this one with zero reading comprehension if they were so inclined.
G-MODE ARCHIVES+
Shin Megami Tensei: Tokyo Requiem
- Platform: PC via Steam (worldwide), Nintendo Switch (Japan)
- Price: ¥1800 or equivalent
- Publisher: G-MODE / Atlus
What's this? An all-original Shin Megami Tensei RPG for Japanese mobile phones, originally released in six chapters from April 2007; set in a demon-ravaged Tokyo immediately after the impact of a nuclear attack, the player must utilize tried-and-true Megaten systems including demon negotiation and demon fusion in order to fight for their lives, discover the source of the calamity and, perhaps, examine their own ennui.
Why should I care? A lot of the other phone-exclusive Megaten games have been heavily derived from and/or tied up with existing mainline games and are thus lacking in novelty, but this one certainly has more of an identity: the similarities to Megaten I are there if you squint, especially as they pertain to the core combat system, but there are enough twists to the demon system to make it both mobile-friendly and generally fresh, and the tenor of the plot is a little more personal to the central characters and less philosophical than many Megaten games aspire to be.
Helpful tip: Fans have translated Tokyo Requiem's script, should you wish to read along as you play.
Stella Deus: Shikkoku no Seirei
- Platform: Nintendo Switch (Japan)
- Price: ¥1800 or equivalent
- Publisher: G-MODE / Atlus
What's this? A 2006 feature phone-exclusive companion to Atlus' 2004 strategy-RPG Stella Deus, originally developed and published for PlayStation 2; this game aims to recreate the action point-based mechanics of the main game within the framework of an original story centred around the puzzle-esque Catacomb of Trials, and offers renditions of the original's Hitoshi Sakamoto/Masaharu Iwata-penned soundtrack as background music.
Why should I care? I'm gonna level with ya: before this announcement, I had zero knowledge or recollection of Stella Deus, and upon asking around, I was told "it's Hoshigami with Persona character designs", which hasn't given me any particular inclination to try it out, but perhaps one of you can offer a more considered opinion.
Helpful tip: This one's also coming to Steam in a couple weeks, should that be preferable to buying from the Japanese eShop.
NINTENDO SWITCH ONLINE EXPANSION PASS
September '25 update: Forsaken 64 (Nintendo 64) plus Magical Vacation (Game Boy Advance)
What're these? Probe Entertainment and Acclaim's Descent-esque six-degrees-of-freedom 3D shooting game, originally released as two distinct games across PlayStation/PC and Nintendo 64 in 1998; explore twisty 3D mazes, shoot stuff, marvel at the of-the-era rave lighting. (Also available via the Japanese Game Boy Advance app: Magical Vacation, the Japan-only RPG by ex-Mana devs Brownie Brown that begat the globally-released DS title Magical Starsign.)
Why should I care? You want a free-ish sampler of a game you can go on to enjoy in a much more playable form via Nightdive's Foresaken Remastered, or you specifically want to play the game with your buddies via split-screen multiplayer, a mode promised but ultimately not delivered by Night Dive.
Useless fact: This game's being distributed via the separate "Mature" N64 app reserved for games like Perfect Dark and Turok, specifically due to the age rating given to the original N64 game back in the '90s — that age rating was lowered for the remaster, but I suppose that ain't good enough for Nintendo.
OTHER
- Platform: Xbox (worldwide)
- Price: £5.99 / $7.19 / €7.19
- Publisher: Pixel Games
What's this? A grab-bag of 1980s European microcomputer games once published by Ocean Software, Artic Computing, Imagine Softwareand/or Atlantis; collated here by regular Euro software port-house Pixel Games, these games are presented with rewind, various screen/display options, a save state, rewind, 3D-modeled packaging and more.
Which games are includes? Attic Archives includes 13 games, represented in multiple formats: Ah Diddums (Commodore 64/ZX Spectrum), Arcadia (Commodore 64/ZX Spectrum), Armageddon (Commodore 64/ZX Spectrum), B.C. Bill ((Commodore 64/ZX Spectrum), Gilligan’s Gold (Commodore 64/Amstrad CPC/ZX Spectrum), Mutant Monty (Commodore 64/Amstrad CPC/ZX Spectrum), Mutant Monty and the Temple of Doom (ZX Spectrum), Mutants (Commodore 64/Amstrad CPC/ZX Spectrum), N.O.M.A.D. (Commodore 64/Amstrad CPC/ZX Spectrum), Paws (Amstrad CPC/ZX Spectrum), Superkid (Commodore 64/Amstrad CPC/ZX Spectrum), Skatin’ USA (Commodore 64/Amstrad CPC/ZX Spectrum) and Superkid in Space (Commodore 64/Amstrad CPC/ZX Spectrum), .
Why should I care? Pixel's not offering any through-life for the contents of this collections beyond "quirky", and i suspect that descriptor is entirely euphemistic; whatever the case, their emulation is typically solid, so consider this a cheap one-stop solution for sampling a hefty number of games that you mightn't otherwise remember, let alone seek out.
Helpful tip: This collection's also available on PC via Xbox's new PC presence, which I have yet to investigate and cannot explain nor recommend, but to my knowledge, most if not all of these games are available standalone on Steam.
- Platform: PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, PC via Steam (worldwide)
- Price: $9.99 / £8.99 / €9.99
- Publisher: Limited Run Games / Implicit Conversions
What's this? An emulated reissue of Kronos Digital Entertainment and Eidos' cinematic stealth-action game Fear Effect, originally published across four discs for Sony PlayStation in 2000; this re-release offers widescreen and a less tank-y analogue control option, alongside the usual assortment of screen filters, save states, rewind, etc. (This release shadow-dropped immediately after last week's roundup, so if you've already played and beaten it by now... my bad?)
Why should I care? Fear Effect's hardware-defying visual panache was always betrayed by its incredibly graceless, first-draft-Biohazard action gameplay, so being offered a version with instant rewind might be the difference between seeing this game through to the end vs. shelving it and never picking it up again. (This release is also noteworthy as being one of the first outside forays for Implicit Conversions, the studio that's been handling recent PS Classics for Sony — to extremely mixed results, I might add — and is currently queued up for more projects for LRG, Digital Eclipse and other regular vintage publishers, including direct work on Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection).
Useless fact: Forever Entertainment, the studio behind the recent contentious remakes of games including Panzer Dragoon, The House of the Dead and Front Mission, were long licensed to produce remakes of Fear Effect and its sequel, but those contracts were terminated a little while back for reasons unknown...
Psycho Dream (September 4)
- Platform: PlayStation 4/5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PC via Steam (worldwide)
- Price: $5.99 or equivalent
- Publisher: Ratalaika / Shinyuden / Edia
What's this? An emulated reissue of Telenet's 1992 Super Famicom action game Psycho Dream, which was released globally for the first time a few years back via the Nintendo Switch Online SNES app; this Ratalaika-emulated version offers a brand-new translation alongside their usual accoutrements, which include save states, rewind/fast-forward, cheats, button mapping, various screen setting and art and music galleries.
Why should I care? As with so many of Telenet's games, Psycho Dream was a game carried almost entirely by aesthetic — in this case, early-'90s ESPer surrealism as perpetuated by the OVAs and light novels of the day — but, for whatever reason, most of the actual plot and characterization (provided by future Moon/Chibi-Robo creator Kenichi Nishi, by the by) is only present in the manual, so if for no other reason, this reissue might be preferable to the NSO version if only for the fact that you can check out the manual in the gallery (not that I can guarantee it's translated). The game itself is... still a better side-view femme action game than Valis, but what else is new?
Useless fact: This game was originally localized for release on SNES by publisher Renovation under the title Dream Probe, with that version making it as far as being reviewed by press before being canceled, allegedly as a direct consequence of Renovation's purchase by Sega.
