Retro Re-release Roundup, week of June 18, 2026
Koei's most beloved legendary figurehead returns via PS Classics.
Yanya Caballista's next, right? Koei? Sony? Anyone?
ARCADE ARCHIVES / ARCADE ARCHIVES 2
Space Cyclone
- 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? A vertically-oriented fixed-screen shooting game, originally developed and distributed in arcades by Taito in 1980, with an emulated reissue via the Space Invaders Invincible Collection for Nintendo Switch. The player guides a turret to the left and right of the bottom edge of the screen in order to fire at and dodge the attacks of the various enemies that cross the screen; these enemies not only consist of left-to-right-flying spaceships and the occasional lightning-emitting UFO but of aliens who will dive from their ships to the ground, eventually assembling a frantic and deadly attack robot once enough comrades reach land.
Why should I care? You're interested in investigating one of the more interesting and technically ambitious games produced during Taito's post-boom, "quick, make fifty more games with the Invaders board" era, and one held in particular esteem by Invaders creator Tomohiro Nishikado.
Helpful tip: This game came to ACA in conjunction with Taito's Space Invaders anniversary commemorations, which include discounts on digitally-available Invaders products which includes the aforementioned Space Invaders Invincible Collection, so if you own a Switch, you might want to consider taking the money you'd spend to buy Invaders and Space Cyclone via ACA and instead get the collection, which contains both games and quite a few others, including the modern retro masterpiece Space Invaders Extreme. The collection's by the same studio that handles Hamster's emulation, even.
CONSOLE ARCHIVES
The Legend of Kage (NES/Famicom)
- Platform: Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5 (worldwide)
- Price: $7.99 / €6.99 / £6.29
- Publisher: Hamster / Taito
What's this? The most widely-played home conversion of Taito's high-flying 1985 arcade ninja side-scroller The Legend of Kage, originally published for Famicom in 1986 and NES in 1987, with this specific version also coming to various iterations of the Virtual Console service; this version augments the arcade original with additional powerups, enemies and something resembling narrative structure.
Why should I care? You're a child of the multi-cart era, or you're someone who wants to marvel at a ten minute game being stretched into a fifteen-minute game.
Useless fact: This release marks Taito's Console Archives debut, and there are a great many Taito-made or affilated console games that ought to make it to this label someday, including some six dozen NES/Famicom cartridge releases alone.
EGG CONSOLE
Zodiac(PC-88)
- Platform: Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
- Price: $6.49 / ¥770
- Publisher: D4 Enterprise / Riverhillsoft
What's this? A sci-fi adventure game with a text-input interface, originally published for various Japanese microcomputers by Riverhillsoft, starting with the PC-88 version in 1985; accompanied by a helpful "Amaroid" assistant, the player controls a boy whse journey into space in search of his missing father sees him stranded on a mysterious, unexplored planet... (As a reminder, EGG's reissues of games with text-input systems do include a virtual keyboard, as well as USB keyboard support.)
Why should I care? You can both tolerate a story that ends on a blatant cliffhanger/sequel hook and endure a player stand-in character that spends a lot of their time snarking about your every decision.
Language barrier? Well, yeah: if you can't read it, you can't play it. Curiously, while all the text is presented in katakana, the test parser only accepts verbs/nouns typed in English.
G-MODE ARCHIVES+
- Platform: PC via Steam (worldwide), Nintendo Switch (Japan)
- Price: $7.99 / ¥800
- Publisher: G-MODE / Bandai-Namco
What's this? C'mon.
Why should I care? Look, Namco's pledging to reissue a great many feature phone games and conversions with G-MODE and I assure you, they're not all as vanilla as this one.
Useless fact: Off the top of my head, here are the many other venues you can play some version of the original Pac-Man on Switch alone: the Arcade Archives version, the Nintendo Switch Online NES app, the Nintendo Switch Online Famicom app, the Pac-Man Museum+ collection, the Namco Museum Switch collection, the version of the Namco Museum Switch collection that got repackaged with Pac-Man Championship Edition 2, the first volume of the Namco Museum Archives series, the first DLC pack for the Japan-only Namcot Collection, as an unlockable within both Pac-Man World Re-Pac and Pac-Man World Re-Pac 2 and as part of the Namco Legendary DLC expansion for Atari 50. Did I miss any? (Throw in the Game Gear version via Yakuza Kiwami 3 on Switch 2 if ya like, too.)
PLAYSTATION PREMIUM
June '26 update: Gitaroo Man (PlayStation 2)
What's this? An emulated reissue of the iNIS-developed, Koei-published PlayStation 2 music game Gitaroo Man, originally released worldwide in 2002 and ported to the PlayStation Portable as Gitaroo Man Lives! in 2006. Players guide meek protagonist U-1 on a coming-of-age journey as they find themselves wielding the legendary Gitaroo in a war against an evil empire, with battles presented as one-on-one, multi-phase guitar duels where one must follow lines approaching the center of the screen with the analog stick and/or time their button presses in order to charge their energy, attack or fend off attacks.
Why should I care? This might be a bold claim, but I feel confident in declaring Gitaroo Man the absolute most early-aughts music game of all time — or at least, the most early-aughts-as-filtered-through-Japanese-pop-media game of all time — and it's nice to see that this reissue is merely inconvenienced by input lag rather than totally crippled by it, as is typically the case with music game reissues. (I will say that I don't feel like the game holds up at Master difficulty with contemporary Dualshock analog sticks, but I may be alone in feeling that way.)
Standalone availability? Yup; $9.99 or equivalent.
QUBYTE CLASSICS
- Platform: PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PC via Steam (worldwide)
- Price: $9.99 or equivalent
- Publisher: QUByte Interactive
What's this? A two-pack containing the DOS and Super Nintendo versions of Krisalis Software's heavily-ported football-themed sidescroller Soccer Kid, which originally released for the Commodore Amiga in 1993 and continued to be ported to various computers and consoles for a full decade afterwards, as well as a DOS reissue in 2019; these two games are being presented with QUByte's usual modest selection of options, which include button configs, a digital manual and some basic screen options. (Curiously, they're presenting the SNES version with its US-localized title and box art, The Adventures of Kid Kleets, but the ROM itself seems to be the European version.)
Why should I care? World Cup Fever, I suppose. (Let me say this: no more "collections" with two games in 'em, folks, especially if they're just ports and especially if that one game has substantially more ports than the two easiest-to-emulate versions you settled for.)
Useless fact: QUByte's got an announcement stream queued up that will have just finished by the time this article goes up, and they seem to be teasing the addition of PlayStation games to their ever-growing repertoire...
OTHER
- Platform: PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PC via Steam (worldwide)
- Price: $49.99 or equivalent
- Publisher:Granzella / NIS America
What's this? A remake of the two turn-based strategy war spinoffs of Irem's legendary shooting game series R-Type — the 2007 original, released globally as R-Type Command, as well as the 2009 Japan-exclusive sequel, R-Type Tactics II: Operation Bitter Chocolate, both developed for PlayStation Portable — by the original developers at their new studio, Granzella; these versions have been reconstructed with modern high-definition visuals and feature a brand-new, multi-language localization with both Japanese and English voice acting, a redone UI, rebalanced unit values and enemy AI, all of the downloadable content released for the second game, a brand-new scenario playable after finishing the original games, online multiplayer and more.
Why should I care? The original R-Type Tactics games exhibited a novel take on war sim games that adopted the conventions of a horizontal side-view shooting game and the specific peculiarities of the R-Type series, and in doing so not only presented a deceptively deep, lengthy and challenging tactical combat experience but also a new vector for more deeply examining the rather bleak series lore that had heretofore only been hinted at in ancillary material, so not only reintroducing them to new audiences but localizing the second and best game to boot is, ideally, a great thing. Now, these particular remakes launched a few months ago in Japan, in a state that might charitably be described as "premature", so you might want to wait for reports on the technical state of the international versions before digging in, just because playing an already grueling and time-consuming war sim with a cumbersome save/load system with the added burden of unintended slowdown, frequent crashes and zero autosave is going to make you hate them more than you've hated anything in your entire life.
Helpful tip: Most of the really egregious technical issues were specific to the Switch version, and it seems like NISA might've quietly delayed the Nintendo versions as they wait for additional patches, so if they don't appear on the eShop alongside the other versions, you know why. I should also mention that the PC version's making its debut today, so I can't speak to any particular issues with that build. (Both PC and Switch 2 offer mouse controls, by the by.)
