Retro Re-release Roundup, week of January 1, 2026
Examu's never-ported fighting game closes out 2025 with a bang.
One quick notice concerning a not-quite-ten-years-old game: River City Ransom: Underground, the crowdfunded, indie-made River City Ransom sequel released on PC in 2017, is to be delisted from digital storefronts at some point in the extremely near future, owing to the expiration of the license granted by Arc System Works a decade ago — it's an extremely rough game whose most interesting elements were adopted or improved, directly or indirectly, by WayForward's River City Girls series, but as yet another wrinkle in the odd and increasingly ouroboric history of Kunio-kun, one might wish to grab it while they can.
ARCADE ARCHIVES / ARCADE ARCHIVES 2
Space Invaders Part 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 / Taito
What's this? The first Taito-made sequel to the juggernaut arcade hit Space Invaders, originally distributed by Taito in Japan and Midway in North America (as Space Invaders Deluxe) in 1979, with a conversion produced for Game Boy in 1990 and various more authentic reissues via various Space Invaders and general Taito anthologies from the mid-'90s onwards, most recently the Space Invaders Invincible Collection for Nintendo Switch; this version largely maintains the rules and structure of the original but with a few new wrinkles like dividing enemies and new UFOs, as well as bonus for executing famous scoring tricks and other little perks like high score registration.
Why should I care? I mentioned this last week, and it's true of this release as well: the folk behind the emulation of Space Invaders Part 2 are the same folk that produced the Space Invaders Invincible Collection, and in circling back to this game they've been able to further reproduce and augment this game beyond what was offered by that already-stellar collection, so if you're someone who's familiar enough with the original game and hardware to recognize the ever-so-slightly-more-accurate sound reproduction and so on, you'll want to upgrade.
Useless fact: While the game itself never left an especially large mark on the direction or legacy of the series, Space Invaders Part 2 is historically significant for being the subject of a lawsit initiated by Taito that set a precedent for computer programs being recognized as protected works under copyright law.
OTHER
- Platform: PC via Steam (worldwide)
- Price: $19.99 or equivalent
- Publisher: Team Arcana
What's this? The first-ever home port of Examu's angels-and-demons 2D fighting game Daemon Bride, originally distributed in Japanese arcade via their eX-Board hardware in 2009, with a revision subtitled Additional Gain produced for the NESiCAxLive arcade network in 2011; now managed and published by Examu successor Team Arcana, this port allows one to play in either the original 4:3 aspect ratio or a new 16:9 mode, allows the boss to be chosen in versus play, adds a training mode and offers online play with rollback netcode.
Why should I care? Even as the overton window for anime-esque or anime-adjacent games has majorly shifted over the last ten years or so, Examu's uniformly excellent fighting games have fought, and mostly lost, the uphill battle inherent to trying to attract a wider audience to their other, female-centric and moe-presenting games, so in that respect, I think Daemon Bride — which wouldn't look at all strange to any of the surprisingly large number of people who might mess with an Under Night, for example, and whose late-'00s 2D visuals have a certain semiotic charm for fighting game channel-surfers — might be the game that finally helps Examu/Team Arcana's works breach containment into an ever-so-slightly-larger segment of the contemporary fighting game community. Naturally, this port is following in the well-worn footsteps of other small Japanese PC fighting ports in being completely and utterly broken at launch, but patches are already flying thick and fast and the game is currently quite playable offline, if you're lucky.
Helpful tip: One neat extra included in this release: "Primer of Duel", a digital reprint of the fan-made, 60-page strategy guide originally distributed for free by scene members at Japanese games, now viewable in-game — it's not translated, but it's there.
