Retro Re-release Roundup, week of March 26, 2026
Star Force, Silver Surfer, Syvalion and much more.
I can't imagine anyone's going to read today's roundup and wish they had just one more game to check out, but just in case, here's a retro-relevant game that's one step more removed than usual: Sanrio Characters Smash Festa!, a Japan-only multiplayer-centric block breaker-esque ball game for Switch starring Hello Kitty and co. that, for boring rights-related reasons, is a very structurally similar but legally-distinct "homage" to the cult Super Famicom game and import staple, Sanrio World Smash Ball — it's no Lethal League, naturally, but maybe an easier sell to certain people in your life. (It's also out on PC, albeit with a Japanese geolock; one might choose to interpret that annoying restriction as a sign that they're serious about pursuing a global release, at least.)
ARCADE ARCHIVES / ARCADE ARCHIVES 2
Final Lap
- 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 / Bandai-Namco
What's this? A pseudo-3D Formula 1 racing game and successor to the 1982 hit Pole Position, originally developed and distributed in arcades by Namco in 1987 and reissued in authentic form for the first time today, with massively scaled-down conversions produced for NES and PC Engine; players select a F1 vehicle from one of four teams and take on an approximation of the Suzuka Circuit, with the race ending after the player either runs out of time or successfully completes four laps. (Do note that, despite what the in-game attract mode might say, this reissue does not offer any of the multiplayer functionality from the original game, either on Arcade Archives or Arcade Archives 2.)
Why should I care? Final Lap's lasting legacy is as a pioneer in multiplayer pseudo-3D arcade racing: through the magic of networked cabinets, up to eight players could compete at once, and that experience did a lot of heavy lifting to carry what is otherwise a very staid game, so one can't say it's not disappointing that the multiplayer element is completely missing from this long-awaited port. Even so, there's a charm to the relatively understated, low-profile pseudo-3D visuals that offers a contrast to the more internationally-celebrated, bombastic visuals of Sega's "super scaler" games, and one might choose to sample this game as a port for the inevitable Final Lap 2 reissue, which'll offer a few more tracks, if nothing else.
Useless fact: The original game contained a litany of real-world billboard branding and other licensed product affiliation that has been edited or otherwise removed from this reissue, but I think we can all agree that Libble Rabble signs are far more appealing than cigarettes or whatever.
CONSOLE ARCHIVES
Terra Cresta (Famicom)
- Platform: Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5 (worldwide)
- Price: $7.99 / €6.99 / £6.29 (ACA2)
- Publisher: Hamster / Nichibutsu
What's this? The Famicom port of Nichibutsu's big-in-Japan 1985 arcade shooting game Terra Cresta, originally released in Japan in 1986 and also ported to Sharp X68000 and various European microcomputers, and reissued in authentic arcade form some years ago via Arcade Archives; this version ably reproduces the broad strokes of the arcade version and notably adds a "formation edit" feature, allowing the player to customize and specify the exact positioning of the ship components when using the game's signature transformation gimmick.
Why should I care? You want a taste of the game that so captivated Hideki Kamiya that he felt a desire to make his own official sequel some 35 years later, or you grew up with the NES version and want to bear witness to a rare example of a Japanese-made game being worse on Famicom (the NES music's way better!).
Useless fact: Arcade/Console Archives publishers and Cresta owners Hamster checked in on a certain barcade during their weekly livestream a few weeks back, wherein the president of porting company M2 pledged to port basically anything Cresta-related that anyone has ever heard of or might care about, including games and ports that were never released and may not exist, brand new games and anything else they cared to name — now, they were very clearly intoxicated, but if you'd like to hold them to their promises, be my guest.
EGG CONSOLE
Take the A-Train / A-Ressha de Ikou (PC-8801)
- Platform: Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
- Price: $7.16 / ¥880
- Publisher: D4 Enterprise / Artdink
What's this? The first entry in Artdink's studio-defining series of railway-themed economic simulators, originally developed and simultaneously released for a wide menagerie of Japanese computers in late 1985, with subsequent conversions for Famicom and Sega Mega Drive, as well as a later remake for Windows at the turn of the millennium; taking place over the span of one year, players are tasked with accruing resources and managing their business in order to successfully build a railway route for a presidential train within the allotted time.
Why should I care? A-Train didn't have any global presence until the sequel, and remained unnoticed until the vastly retooled third game, so this release not only represents the first big global push for the original game but might also serve as a great many peoples' introduction to the original format of the series, which was less "Sim City with trains" and more "railway-themed resource puzzle".
Language barrier? Many of the menus and basic commands are presented in English, but real-time messages and other information screens are labeled with katakana — between EGG's English-language how-to and basic intuition, I imagine one could find their way around this one without too much trouble.
OTHER
- Platform: PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PC via Steam (worldwide)
- Price: $24.99 or equivalent
- Publisher: Limited Run Games
What's this? A grab-bag of emulated Marvel-themed games of the early '90s with a loose X-Men theming, plucked from the current and former catalogues of Data East, Konami and Acclaim/LJN and published and produced by Limited Run Games; in addition to their usual suite of Carbon Engine enhancements (save states, rewind, cheats, art and music galleries, etc), this collection also offers online multiplayer with rollback and crossplay for the X-Men arcade game.
Which games are included? This collection includes Konami's X-Men: The Arcade Game, Data East's Captain America and The Avengers (arcade, Genesis/Mega Drive and NES), Acclaim's Spider-Man/Venom: Maximum Carnage (SNES and Genesis/Megadrive) & Venom/Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety (SNES and Genesis/Megadrive) and LJN's Spider-Man/X-Men: Arcade’s Revenge (SNES, Genesis/Mega Drive, Game Boy, Game Gear) & Silver Surfer (NES). Do note that, to my knowledge, the X-Men arcade game is the only game to offer online multiplayer.
Why should I care? Capcom had their fun with their own Marvel collection a couple years back, and so this new comp offers not just a complementary take to that one but also a fuller and franker portrayal of the landscape for licensed Marvel games at the time: that is to say, it was a lawless wasteland where anyone and everyone was doing as they pleased, to wildly varying degrees of quality.
Helpful tips: Two tips for ya: one, the PC version will allow you to play the X-Men arcade game on a single ultrawide display if you're so equipped to do so; and two, you can play the X-Men arcade game with up to six local players, hardware permitting (ie PlayStation's capped at 4 local players).
Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection
- Platform: PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PC via Steam (worldwide)
- Price: $39.99 or equivalent
- Publisher: Capcom
What's this? A complete collection of the three mainline entries in Capcom's action-RPG Mega Man sub-series Star Force (Ryusei no Rockman), originally developed and published for the Nintendo DS from 2006 to 2008; each of the seven versions presented here has been refactored for single-screen play and boasts casual and ranked online multiplayer, online card trading, the inclusion and/or restoration of content that was limited to certain promotions or cut from the original localizations (including crossover content with Konami's Boktai/Lunar Knights), assist features that allow for adjustments to encounter rate, Mega Buster damage etc, art and music galleries (including select arranged tunes that can be played in-game), an interactive 3D menu avatar and more.
Which games are included? This collection includes the Pegasus, Leo and Dragon versions of the original Star Force, the Ninja and Saurian versions of Star Force 2 and the Black Ace and Red Joker versions of Star Force 3; for the unaware, the versions offer slight Pokemon-esque differences in in-game content, in order to encourage players to trade and share in order to complete their game.
Why should I care? The recent Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collections immediately proved themselves by becoming the fastest-selling Mega Man games ever, so while Star Force never quite caught the same amount of fervor as Battle Network in its day, one has to imagine that there's an old and new fanbase out there that's energised and ready to visit or revisit this successor series. Now, does that audience have much overlap with the Retronauts crowd, which I assume is weighted heavily in favor of the more conventional action game series? I don't know, but you can file this one away as the final step before a Legends collection, if you must.
Helpful tip: As with Capcom's other collections, this comp doesn't offer cross-play nor cross-save, so think twice before choosing a platform.
Neopets Mega Mini Games Collection - The Neopian Arcade Odyssey
- Platform: PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PC via Steam (worldwide)
- Price: $24.99 or equivalent
- Publisher: U&i Entertainment / No Gravity
What's this? A 25-ish-game anthology of minigames from the virtual pet fantasy browser game Neopets, which debuted in 1999 and, after many, many twists and turns, remains active to this day; this collection reproduces a couple dozen of the minigames from the web portal and features a basic map-based story mode and interlinking with the Neopass account, allowing one to transfer earned Neopoints to the main game.
Which games are included? The official messaging is a little mixed on this but, according to those who acquired the game early, the total list of included minigames is as follows: Jumpin' Gem Heist, Snowball Fight, Faerie Bubbles, Spinnacles, Moon Rock Rampage, Destruct-O-Match, Usuki Frenzy, Nova Defender, Hasee Bounce, Kass Basher, Spellseeker, Gadgadsgame, Turmac Roll, Meerca Chase, Jubble Bubble, Ultimate Bullseye, Meepit Juice Break, Kou-Jong, Extreme Herder, Dubloon Disaster, Bouncy Supreme, Snowmuncher, Sutek's Tomb, Cream Machine and Pyramids, as well as the brand-new Starlight Symphony.
Why should I care? Not my generation, sorry. I think it's no longer owned by Scientologists, so that's somethin'.
Useless fact: This is the non-web, non-phone Neopets game since Neopets Puzzle Adventure back in 2008 (which,in the grand tradition of classic puzzle games, was essentially a Puzzle Quest reskin).
- Platform: Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
- Price: $29.99 or equivalent
- Publisher: Taito
What's this? The fourth volume of Taito and Hamster's ten-game Taito arcade anthologies; these collections are underpinned by the same framework that powers the Arcade Archives series, offering various screen settings, button configs, per-game settings and a save state per game, as well as online leaderboards (but missing certain Arcade Archives features like dedicated hi-score modes and region variants.)
Which games are included? This collection includes seven games previously released via Arcade Archives — Water Ski, Field Day, Typhoon Gal, Bonze Adventure, Kuri Kinton, Doko Doko Don and Ninja Kids — plus three games that have yet to hit Arcade Archives, but will in future: Arkanoid, Syvalion and Cameltry. Do note that these last three games are all games that were originally controlled via spinner and/or trackball, and are being reissued with USB mouse compatibility for finer control, which may or may not extend to support for any USB trackball and/or spinner you might have lying around. (Also note: this is OG Switch software, so it won't support Switch 2 joycon mouse functionality.)
Why should I care? The latter three games are the star of the show here — not just due to the controller gimmicks, but for being among the most accessible and compelling games in Taito's arcade oeuvre — and I think Taito knew this when they picked the remainder of the comp, as it's full of games that might be a hard sell on their own but feature an odd charm that'll draw you in should you give them a chance (Bonze Adventure, Ninja Kids and Typhoon Gal being the standouts, in my humble opinion), so think of this less as a hits-and-dregs collection and more as an invite to play some very neat games that'll never be this cheap on Arcade Archives proper.
Helpful tip: The version of Arkanoid presented in this collection features the same content edits seen in the recent Egret II Mini version: put simply, due to legal concerns about infringing on Atari's Breakout, they changed the layouts of any stage that originally featured full horizontal lines of single-color bricks, and in some cases those edits had severe unintended impacts on the intended difficulty curve, but the final edit they settled on is much less off-kilter than the initial version they introduced with no warning.
- Platform: Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
- Price: $39.99 or equivalent
- Publisher: Cosmo Machia
What's this? The second in a recent string of crowdfunded ports of Triggerheart Exelica, a cult mecha-girl shooting game originally released in arcades by the defunct studio Warashi in 2006, with a Sega Dreamcast port released in 2007, a delisted, Microsoft-published XBLA version released for Xbox 360 in 2008 and a crowdfunded version that pulls from both the arcade and X360 versions released for Nintendo Switch and PC across 2023~4; this "Enhanced" version, which hit Steam several months back, is a separate port that's specifically derived from the PlayStation 2 version produced and owned by publisher Alchemist, which featured an additional playable character and an exclusive story mode, as well as subtle mechanical differences, all of which have been reproduced here to the best of new dev Cosmo Machia's ability, along with some other touch-ups like vertical display support for arcade mode, higher-resolution character art and online leaderboards.
Why should I care? Between its status of "almost-last Dreamcast" game and some very fortuitous timing as being an early proponent of the "mecha-musume" boom, Exelica found outsized success with people who don't typically play these kinds of games, and who probably spent more time ordering merch than they ever did actually playing the thing from which the merch was birthed, and in that regard, Enhanced might be either a very easy or a very hard sell: the mechanical differences are so slight as to make one question why this couldn't have been DLC for the existing port, but if all you care about are the characters then you probably weren't going to buy anything but this version, were ya? Whatever the case, if you've not tried this game, you might as well skip straight to this version: even if you're not interested in the character drama, the unique swingy tether mechanic makes for a largely different experience than other more notable games in this ilk, and the various modes offer a wide spread of difficulty that'll accommodate you wherever you're at.
Useless fact: This publisher's done with Exelica for the moment, but they do have a few fresh crowdfunded ports from the Castle of Shikigami series queued up for next month.
Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. World Stage
- Platform: Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
- Price: $39.99 or equivalent
- Publisher: Sega
What's this? A Switch 2 port of the recent revision of the most current entry in Sega's genre-defining 3D fighting game series Virtua Fighter, which originally hit arcades in 2006 and saw multiple revisions across arcades, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 through to 2012, only to be resurrected and remastered as Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown for PlayStation 4 in 2021 and subsequently updated with additional content and features as Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. World Stage across PlayStation 5, Xbox and PC in 2025; this port conforms to all the content and features of the World Stage version on other platforms, which notably added a new single-player "World Stage" mode and online cross-play (and yes, it has rollback netcode).
Why should I care? It's a very performant handheld version of one of the most beloved fighting games ever made and one that has unquestionably cemented itself among a small handful of fighting games, be they 2D or 3D, that will always be competitively active, and the various content updates made over the last year or so have brought this version to a point where it's more than just a competitive tool — I mean, it's Virtua Fighter, so not that much more, but Virtua Fighter 6 is bound to be ready any decade now, so this'll do until then. (It's also nice to see this series finally represented on a Nintendo platform in a real way: this is the first time it's ever received a mainline VF game in anything resembling a contemporary fashion, and they hadn't even been given ports of the old ones until VF2's inclusion in the Yakuza Kiwami 2 port released just a few months ago.)
Helpful tip: Along with this Switch 2 release, all versions of World Stage have received a major update: in addition to requested features like a wi-fi indicator, more room/lobby settings and the ability to play as Dural (who's still paid DLC...) in solo modes, they've also performed significant system-level and per-character balance changes that threaten to alter the meta more substantially than any update since the Final Showdown version some fifteen years ago. 'Tis the season, huh?
UPDATES UPDATES UPDATES
Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection (PS, Switch, Xbox, PC) update-before-the-update
After months of inactivity, Digital Eclipse has returned with a fresh update for the issue-fraught Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection which applies quite a few bug fixes and adds a few much-requested features, including private lobbies, the addition of the Mortal Kombat 4 FMV endings to the krypt and further CPU adjustment options to more of the games/ports present in the collection. More exciting to some, I imagine, is the promise that this patch will be followed by a future update to add cross-play, a feature requested, expected and demanded since long before the collection was in peoples' hands. They might also take the opportunity to fix the lobbies that this new update accidentally broke, but we'll see.
