Retro Re-release Roundup, week of September 11, 2025
Never furget.
Before you remark on the paucity of this week's update, do remember that there's a Nintendo Direct scheduled for tomorrow, and therefore an extremely high likelihood of at least one notable vintage game re-emerging out of nowhere. (My bet: oh, I don't know, Martian Gothic: Unification.)
ARCADE ARCHIVES / ARCADE ARCHIVES 2
- Platform: Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X (worldwide, ACA2) / Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 (worldwide, ACA)
- Price: $9.99 / €8.99 / £7.39 (ACA2), $7.99 / €6.99 / £6.29 (ACA), $2.99 / €2.99 / £2.49 (ACA-to-ACA2 upgrade)
- Publisher: Hamster / Konami
What's this? A digital pool game, originally developed and distributed in Japanese arcades by Konami in 1981, with North American distribution handled by Dynamo (under the name Lil' Hustler), with a MSX port released in Japan and Europe (under the name Konami's Billiards) and later for the MSX Antiques Collection for Sega Saturn; players are tasked with completing simplified six-ball pool games using only three cue balls, with the added gimmick being that the point value of a sunken ball is determined by both the number on the ball and the rotating multiplier bonus currently assigned to the pocket.
Why should I care? Believe it or not, this is the first digital pool/billiards game to hit Arcade Archives, so ya gotta take what you can get.
Useless fact: If this game seems vaguely familiar, you may have encountered the MSX port by way of any one of a number of South Korean multicarts for Sega Master System.
EGG CONSOLE
- Platform: Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
- Price: $6.49 / ¥770
- Publisher: D4 Enterprise / Xtalsoft
What's this? The second game in Xtalsoft's trilogy of console-esque role-playing games, originally developed and published for PC-88 series computers in 1989 and ported to MSX and Sharp X1 soon after; in addition to audiovisual upgrades and axiomatic improvements like a larger world map and more elaborate and diversified character archetypes, this game advances upon the original by opening the game with unique prologue chapters for each of the four party members before meeting up with the protagonist (a full year before Dragon Quest IV, mind).
Why should I care? You're interested in keeping tabs with the odd tit-for-tat cold war between Xtalsoft and Yuji Horii, while understanding that doing something first does not at all mean doing something best. You're also going to need to be someone who can stomach the aggravating damage system for attacks, wherein attacks arbitrarily vacillate between their highest and lowest damage threshold for no good reason — they upped the attack accuracy from the first game but saw fit to keep this particular system, and I cannot begin to imagine why. (I'll also proffer my best Marge-showing-a-potato impression regarding the border-bursting monster portraits.)
Language barrier? the bulk of the game's text is in hiragana/katakana, and while this isn't a game with a lot of obtuse roadblocks, it is, for the most part, a very open game that only offerse terse hints at what to do or where to go, so missing or misreading a single line of NPC dialog may spell the difference between progress and stagnation.
OTHER
Bubsy in: The Purrfect Collection
- Platform: PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PC via Steam (worldwide)
- Price: $24.99 or equivalent
- Publisher: Limited Run Games / Atari
What's this? An emulated collection of games from the original run of Accolade's infamously over-hyped and under-enjoyed '90s mascot platformer Bubsy, now in the possession of Atari; this collection follows other recent Limited Run Games-produced collections in offering save states, rewind, various screen/border options, achievements and art/music galleries that include interview footage with series developers and a complete copy of Bubsy's 1993 cartoon pilot, among other features.
Which games are includes? The Purrfect Collection offers the Super Nintendo, Super Famicom and Sega Genesis versions of the original Bubsy in: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind, the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis and Gabe Boy versions of Bubsy II, the Atari Jaguar-exclusive Bubsy in: Fractured Furry Tales and the polygonal PlayStation swansong Bubsy 3D, presented here both in its authentic form and also a "Refurbished" version that seeks to add widescreen support, analog controls/movement and a halfway-modern camera.
Why should I care? We are are at least two revivals beyond the notion of this property being conducive to genuine subversion or irony, so one might at least vainly hope that this collection will, at the very least, seal off future avenues for other parties to capitalize off these exhausted games for the immediate future. I also hear the "refurbished" Bubsy 3D features are extremely prone to breaking, which seems... right.
Useless fact: if you want to nitpick, this collection's missing Super Bubsy, a Windows port of the original game that boasted higher-detail visuals and some other little tweaks.
