Retro Re-release Roundup, week of November 27, 2025
The original Battletoads finally returns to Nintendo platforms.
Allow me a few honorable mentions off the top: Picross S Capcom Classics Edition & Picross S SNK Classics Edition, two additional entries in Jupiter's crossover series of nonogram logic puzzles and lo-fi classic pixel art homage, and Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons, a brand-new entry in Taito's classic cutesy action game series Bubble Bobble (now in exploratory single-player roguelite form!) that comes bundled with an emulated version of the Sega Saturn port of Bubble Symphony, the 1994 arcade successor to Bubble Bobble — I suspect you'll be able to buy Bubble Symphony on its own at some point, but I cannot at all promise it'll be anytime soon.
ARCADE ARCHIVES / ARCADE ARCHIVES 2
Karate Blazers
- 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 / Video System
What's this? An urban brawler for one to four players, originally developed and distributed in arcades by Video System in 1991 and never reissued until now; I'd love to present you with a more descriptive or compelling hook, but I can only work with what I've got.
Why should I care? Karate Blazers' hook, such as it is, is the fact that it's able to throw so many relatively large enemies on screen at once without any major technical hitches. Now, the rest of the game might not display the same level of technical integrity, and the odds of you seeing any of it without electing to choose Glen and smap the E. Honda headbutt for half an hour are slim at best, but it's somethin'.
Useless fact: Not only did a few characters from this game re-emerge as a dedicated team within later Aero Fighters/Sonic Wings titles, their OC partner "Glenda" was inexplicably selected as one of the small handful of Aero Fighters characters to make the jump to the US-developed 3D spinoff for Nintendo 64, Aero Fighters Assault.
EGG CONSOLE
- Platform: Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
- Price: $6.49 / ¥880
- Publisher: D4 Enterprise / Compile / Sega
What's this? The very first version of Compile's genre-defining falling-block puzzle game Puyo Puyo, originally developed for MSX2 and released in 1991, with a simultaneous release for Famicom Disk System as a cover disk for Famimaga magazine; this version offers a single-player endless mode, a mission mode with pre-set puzzles and a two-player versus mode.
Why should I care? You're in it for purely historical reasons: this primordial version is lacking many of the little mechanical subtleties that made the game a top-class competitive experience, and the character-based elements that would come to define the series are virtually non-existent, but there is a delightfully cruse MSPaint-esque win screen for the mission mode, so who's to say they didn't strike gold from the very beginning?
Language barrier? The instructions for the mission mode puzzles are in Japanese, but you can probably intuit what's been asked of you even if you can't read them.
NINTENDO SWITCH ONLINE
November '25 update: Battletoads and Ninja Gaiden II (NES), Bionic Commando and Kid Icarus: Of Myths & Monsters (Game Boy)
What're these? Rare's notoriously grueling, format-hopping mascot brawler, the slightly-more-forgiving sequel to Tecmo's hit ninja action-platformer, the sci-fi handheld remix of Capcom's cult grappling-arm swinging side-scroller and the Japanese-developed but west-only sequel to Nintendo's silly RPG-tinged NES action game Kid Icarus.
Why should I care? Not only is every one of these games among the pinnacles of their respective libraries, they're also all known, mainstream titles that frankly should have been available years ago — if you've not tried any of these games before now, spend fifteen minutes with any of 'em and tell me they shouldn't have been released long before... well, let's not be mean.
Helpful tip: Alongside these new games comes an update to the NES and Game Boy apps that brings them in line with similar updates for the other apps, now branded "Nintendo Classics" and featuring additional functionality including button remapping. Additionally, the Game Boy app now includes a cute easter egg: holding left on the stick while booting a game will display either the Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket or Game Boy Color hardware boot screen, with the specific model determined by your choice of screen filter.
QUBYTE CLASSICS
- Platform: Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
- Price: $6.49 / ¥880
- Publisher: Qubyte Interactive / Piko Interactive
What's this? An emulated collection containing several of the versions and ports of Vivid Image and Ubisoft's wacky multiplayer-centric kart-racing game Street Racer, originally released across various platforms from 1993 to 1996; this collection offers the original Super Nintendo version alongside the Sega Mega Drive, Game Boy and MS-DOS versions, with enhancements that include save states, rewind, button remapping, some basic screen options and box art and music galleries. (The SNES, MD & DOS version offer support for four-player local multiplayer, whereas the Game Boy's limited to solo play.)
Why should I care? Street Racer's original raison d'etre was plainly obvious: the developers wanted to add a Street Fighter-esque world warrior veneer to the Mario Kart format, and to flex their technical chops by producing a faux-3D SNES racer that could natively handle four players where Nintendo's own offering needed an enhancement chip just to support two, and they were able to respectably achieve both goals. Now, I would argue that no version of the game offered the superior play control of a Mario Kart or F-Zero or what have you, but I do think this collection does have value inasmuch as it lines up several different technical approaches to rendering a pseudo-3D racing game — SNES' mode-7, the Mega Drive and Game Boy's raster-rendered tracks, the MS-DOS's polygon-adorned maps with optional camera change — in a manner that lets one appreciate the strengths and drawbacks of each method and each target platform, and I can't think of many other racing games out there for which there exist so many markedly different versions of a single entry.
Helpful tip: There are yet more versions of Street Racer that didn't and probably won't ever come to this collection due to ease of emulation: the Amiga version, which is largely similar to the Mega Drive version; the PlayStation version, from which the included DOS version was largely derived; and the Sega Saturn version, which shares some similarities with the PlayStation/DOS versions but eschews the polygons in favour of maximalist 2D visuals, and uniquely supports eight-player split-screen multiplayer.
OTHER
Jaleco Sports: Bases Loaded & Jaleco Sports: Goal!
- Platform: PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
- Price: $7.99 or equivalent each
- Publisher: Sickhead Games / Rock-It Games
What're these? Emulated reissues of select entries from Jaleco's various turn-of-the-'90s sports titles, which were unified by the Moero! branding in Japan but unaffiliated elsewhere; these two-packs hit Steam a few months back with no forewarning, and recently hit consoles with just as little fanfare. You're getting two core entries from each series per release, with select regional variants — NES Bases Loaded and SNES+SFC Super Bases Loaded, and NES GOAL! and SNES+SNES-PAL+SFC Super Goal!, respectively — which are augmented with basic emulator functionality, manual scans and virtual box models.
Why should I care? Jaleco custodians City Connection have deemed these games unworthy of their "B-grade-rehab" line JALECOlle, so reissues of this caliber are all they're likely to get.
Helpful tip: There's at least one more of these Jaleco two-packs coming, and it'll include the NES Double Dribble knockoff Hoops, among other games.
- Platform: PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
- Price: ¥4180
- Publisher: RS34
What's this? A fresh port of Milestone's angst-ridden cel-shaded vertical shooting game Karous, originally developed for NAOMI arcade hardware and distributed in Japanese arcades, with a Japan-only Dreamcast port released in 2007, a Wii port released as part of a compilation released in North America in 2009 as Ultimate Shooting Collection and a further compilation appearance on the Japan-only Sakura Flamingo Archives releases for Xbox 360 in 2014. This port was successfully crowdfunded several months ago by Milestone successor studio RS34 and boasts enhancements that include higher-resolution visual assets, new arranged BGM and online leaderboards.
Why should I care? Karous' status as the final officially-licensed Sega Dreamcast game has given it some small degree of notoriety, but it'd be nice if people were able to remember it for more than being a footnote in the history of Sega's home console exploits — it's perhaps the most immediately accessible manifestation of Milestone's bizarro-caravan design style, and every element of the aesthetic, from the drum-and-bass soundtrack to the pop-gone-gun-metal visuals and the charmingly on-the-nose prose encapsulate a certain strain of mid-'00s subculture that the cutting-edge developers of today could only wish to fake. That said, this port's launched with its fair share of technical issues, so you might not want to jump in right away, especially given that...
Continuation of previous sentence: ...the developers have all but confirmed both a localization and a PC version are in the works, and one would expect those future versions to include whatever fixes they should deliver.
- Platform: Nintendo Switch(Japan)
- Price: ¥7480 (collection) / ¥2860 each (individual games)
- Publisher: Edia
What's this? The latest emulated compilation dredged from the bowels of the Telenet library, this one focused on a trio of unaffiliated Super Famicom RPGs: Wolf Team's 1993 time-attack action-RPG Neugier: Umi to Kaze no Kodou, the 1994 mission-centric, play-as-the-baddies Dark Kingdom and the 1994 Super Famicom redux of Wolf Team's PC98 revenge-fantasy real-time RPG Hiouden: Mamono-tachi tono Chikai. In addition to basic screen setting, controller configs and rewind, these versions offer toggles for things like enemy encounters, as well as galleries that include not only manuals and audio but also original art and development documents.
Why should I care? Edia's promoting this collection as a pack of "quirky" and "progressive" RPGs, which is a euphemistic way of acknowledging that they were, at best, games whose reach far exceeded their grasp, and whose charm only exists in spite of their very obvious structural, technical and/or design shortcomings. That said, many of these folk would go on to make Tales of Phantasia soon after these games, so you might want to A/B these games with that one, just to understand how crucial elements like "reasonable schedules" and "humane working conditions" and "any semblance of quality control" were to ensuring talented folk could produce competent products. (Do note that these games have not been translated, but Edia's indicated that they do have some plans for an international release.)
Helpful tip: Neugier was originally planned for release on SNES under the title The Journey Home: Quest for the Throne, and the essentially-complete localized ROM was made available online a few years ago.
SEGA GIVETH, SEGA TAKETH AWAY
Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami & Yakuza Kiwami updates, upgrade paths & delistings (PlayStation 5, Xbox, PC)
The current-gen versions of Yakuza 0, Kiwami & Kiwami 2 will be rolling out on December 8, with differing upgrade paths per game and per platform: some are free, some cost a nominal fee, some cost slightly more than a nominal fee. More important are these two caveats: one, these upgrade paths are not available for the physical versions, nor versions redeemed via services like Game Pass, and two, the original version of Yakuza 0 is being delisted from Steam and consoles in order to make way for the newer, pricier Director's Cut, so if you specifically want the OG, act fast.
