Retro Re-release Roundup, week of April 2, 2026
Epic gambles on a 25th-anniversary reissue of a Korean PC oddball.
Y'know, this week's roundup could probably have used a hilarious April Fools entry or two, but the mere allegation that the new Mario Galaxy movie gives more screentime to Rusty from Rusty's Real Deal Baseball than any of the Galaxy characters is ridiculous enough for one year.
ARCADE ARCHIVES NEOGEO
Shogi no Tatsujin: -MASTER OF SYOUGI-
- Platform: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 (worldwide)
- Price: $7.99 / €6.99 / £6.29
- Publisher: Hamster / SNK
What's this? An arcade adaptation of the Japanese chess variant Shogi, originally developed by ADK and distributed in Japanese arcades by SNK in 1995, with home versions produced for the Neogeo AES and Neogeo CD and later games with the same name released for Neogeo Pocket; in addition to being able to take on another human player, one can also choose to challenge a succession of CPU opponents using either standard rules or the othello-esque Hasami variant.
Why should I care? The decision to go with digitized photos of real people for the opponent portraits was certainly novel, I suppose — beyond that, it's just shogi, which is mostly just chess, executent to an entirely cromulent standard, and Hamster's digital manual should fill in any blanks posed by the extremely Japanese in-game menus. If nothing else, this release reaffirms Hamster's newfound commitment to reissuing every last Neogeo game, I suppose.
Useless fact: Ultimately, there were other games whose production runs were even lower than this one, but this game's home versions were apparently notorious within SNK for receiving exceptionally few orders.
EGG CONSOLE
- Platform: Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
- Price: $6.49 / ¥770
- Publisher: D4 Enterprise / Compile
What's this? An arcade-style action game themed around seesaws, originally developed by Compile and published for MSX computers in 1985, with an expanded conversion produced for Sega's SG-1000 & SC-3000 hardware very soon thereafter. Players are tasked with both defeating the various pompadour-sporting delinquents that might populate a given stage and collecting all the fruit items therein, a tasked primarily achieved by manipulating the seesaws within each stage in order to fling, crush or trap enemies; one must also negotiate the untethered balloon enemies, which can be dispatched after collecting fruit at the expense of the score multiplier.
Why should I care? You're looking for an arcade-style game that's just a little denser than it looks, if only due to being a little over-engineered: that is to say, Compile borrowed ideas from a few different games at once and those ideas not meshing is what makes them mesh. (If you do dig this game, be sure to try the Sega version, too, as it adds a significant number of additional stages.)
Language barrier? Nope!
OTHER
TOMAK: Save the Earth Regeneration
- Platform: PC via Epic Games Store (worldwide)
- Price: free until April 16, $8.99 afterwards
- Publisher: Netmarble Monster
What's this? A fresh port of the cult raising sim TOMAK: Save the Earth, originally developed for the Korean PC market by Seed 9 (currently Netmarble Monster) and ported to PlayStation 2 for the Japanese market by Sunsoft the following year; in order to stave off the destruction of humanity by a council of gods, the love goddess Evian forsakes her body and descends to earth as a disembodied head growing out of a flowerpot, with the player's role being to cultivate a relationship with the many goddesses in order to prove that humanity is still capable of true love... (To my knowledge, this is a fairly straightforward reproduction of the PC version, save for the new localization options which include a first-ever official English translation.)
Why should I care? This game made waves in Korea, and again in Japan, for its immediately bizarre premise and imagery, but rather than allowing people to revisit the game, I suspect this new port will be most impactful for showing new and old players alike that this staple of every "wacky foreign dating sim!" list is regularly eclipsed in silliness by at least fifteen new games every week.
Useless fact: Just days before announcing they'd bought a timed exclusivity window for this game, Epic laid off one thousand employees in the name of fiscal responsibility.
