Retro Re-release Roundup, week of August 13, 2026
F.L.U.D.D.ing the zone.
Exhausted 007 Goldeneye? Deflated by the recent cancelation of the Perfect Dark reboot? Tired of waiting on the completion of the Timesplitters remake? You might want to check out this week's not-vintage-but-vintage-fried release: Agent 64: Spies Never Die, a very clinical research paper on the Rare FPS oeuvre, and one that's so well made it almost makes one want to tolerate the inclusion of Easy Anti-Cheat.
ARCADE ARCHIVES / ARCADE ARCHIVES 2
V'BALL
- 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 / Technos Japan
What's this? A 2v2 beach volleyball game, originally developed by Technos Japan and distributed in arcades in Taito in 1988 (under various titles, including U.S Championship V'Ball), with a later port to the Sharp X68000 by SPS and a Technos-made NES adaptation titled Super Spike V'Ball; in addition to player-vs-player matches, one or two players can challenge a single-player tournament through major and minor leagues, culminating in a title fight against a US Navy team. (This release includes both the Japanese and US ROMs, with only the US ROM offering full four-player multiplayer.)
Why should I care? You want a well-crafted, no-frills volleyball game that feels Kunio-kun but looks and sounds Double Dragon, and you're accepting of the fact that it naturally doesn't offer all the modes of the NES version.
Helpful tip: The Japanese version does offer one perk that solo players might appreciate: a very silly attract story and interstitial cutscenes detailing the exploits of the two player-character, beach bums and volleyball hustlers George and Michael, as they enter the tournament circuit in order to strike it rich and win over the ladies.
ARCADE ARCHIVES
Pinball Action
- Platform: Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox, PC via Xbox Play Anywhere (worldwide, ACA2)
- Price: $9.99 / €8.99 / £7.39 (ACA2), $2.99 / €2.99 / £2.49 (ACA-to-ACA2 upgrade)
- Publisher: Hamster / Tekhan
What's this? A digital pinball game with four tables, originally developed and distributed in arcades by Tekhan (later Tecmo) in 1985 and reissued on the Tecmo Arcade Classics/Tecmo Hit Parade compilation for Xbox/PlayStation 2, and reissued via Arcade Archives for PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch last year; aside from being able to transition seamlessly between tables, this is a fairly faithful and not especially video-game-y adaptation of pinball.
Why should I care? When this hit ACA last year, it was the better of the two digital pinball games on offer (the other being the Vs. System conversion of Nintendo's Pinball), and that remains true, if only because Hamster has yet to reissue any other digital pinball games.
Useless fact: Adding onto Hamster's recent trend of reaching into their archives for ACA2 upgrades, this release represents the first retroactive ACA2 upgrade — and with that, the first PC release via Play Anywhere — for a game that isn't part of Hamster's self-owned stable of game catalogs, which portends good things for the future of the broader ACA catalog on PC.
CONSOLE ARCHIVES
Toukiedenshou ANGEL EYES (PlayStation)
- Platform: Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5 (worldwide)
- Price: $11.99 / €10.99 / £9.89
- Publisher: Hamster / Koei-Tecmo
What's this? The 1997 Japan-exclusive PlayStation port of Tecmo's all-girl, mixed-medium fighting game Toukidensho ANGEL EYES, originally released in arcades in 1996 and reissued via Arcade Archives in 2022; the home version offers several perks over the arcade original, including a voiced story mode, a wide array of additional characters (including conventionally-drawn versions of characters that were originally only presented via pre-rendered 3D visuals), arranged music, a training mode and more. (The story mode remains untranslated, naturally, but the core menus and settings are displayed in English.)
Why should I care? You're looking to experience a very solid and feature-packed port of a game that went overshadowed in its day, both by other contemporaneous fighting games and also Tecmo's own Dead or Alive, which not only superseded this game but swallowed its development team in the process. One must also understand that this game's short life in arcades was in no small part due to its wild array of mechanics which combine to allow players to immediately end rounds with relative ease via extremely versatile touch-of-death combos, but to many, I'm sure that hardly registers as any sort of demerit.
Useless fact: ANGEL EYES' game-destroying reverse combo scaling system, which increases the damage on every hit in a combo rather than decreasing it, was recently revealed to be the work of a rookie planner who admittedly did not play or follow fighting games and presumed that gaining a bonus for successive hits was something players would appreciate.
EGG CONSOLE
Onryou Senki (PC88)
- Platform: Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
- Price: $6.49 / ¥990
- Publisher: D4 Enterprise / Studio Soft WING
What's this? A command-based adventure game with an occult theme, originally developed and distributed for PC-88 by Studio Soft WING in 1988 and separately remade for both PC Engine CD and Windows 95 in 1995, and later subject to various commercial and non-commercial PC continuations. Players guide overworked programmer Hiroyuki Kitahara on a quest to uncover the truth about an encounter with strange figures that may or may not have been supernatural in nature, with investigations and actions initiated via a deceptively versatile four-choice command input system.
Why should I care? You want to experience the most celebrated game from the library of a studio that specialized in occult horror and whose works were quietly influential, both aesthetically and subject-wise, on a particular subset of Japanese computer adventure games, and one that led the '80s zeitgest of media that juxtaposed modern technology with traditional supernatural phenomena a la Megami Tensei. One might also argue that the later remakes diluted the chilling essence of the game by replacing the super-low-fi visuals with more conventionally detailed graphics, but that might just be a me thing.
Language barrier? Everything's written and presented in full Japanese, and the deliberate ambiguity to the deployment of your four commands might present a particular challenge to those without any degree of fluency.
NINTENDO SWITCH ONLINE EXPANSION PASS
July '26 update: Super Mario Sunshine (Nintendo GameCube)
What's this? A tropical-themed, water-spraying 3D Mario action game, originally developed and distributed by Nintendo for the GameCube in 2002 and reissued for Nintendo Switch via the limited-window Super Mario 3D All-Stars compilation in 2020; Nintendo followed up the genre-defining Super Mario 64 with larger and more expansive levels, more involved cutscenes and voice acting, more intricate camera controls, an ever-so-slightly-stronger push towards contextualized realism (or unrealism, on occasion) and, most prominently, the use of a back-mounted water-spraying device that significantly augments Mario's mobility and interaction with enemies and the larger environs.
Why should I care? You want to experience the one 3D Mario made on a 3D Sonic schedule — that is to say, one with lack of polish and refinement that was and is uncharacteristic of first-party Nintendo flagships (save for the similarly-afflicted The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, I suppose), but one that has received a degree of positive reappraisal from folks who might unironically champion the term "schmoovement".
Helpful tip: Unlike the 3D All-Stars version, this is a raw emulation of the original: no 16:9, no higher-definition UI/text etc, but one might happily trade those features for NSO's rewind and save states.
OTHER
- Platform: PC via Steam (worldwide)
- Price: $29.99or equivalent
- Publisher: IGS / H2 Interactive
What's this? An emulated collection of games produced for the Neo Geo-esque PolyGame Master arcade board, designed and sold by Taiwanese company IGS from the late-'90s to mid-'00s, and originally reissued on Nintendo Switch a few year back; now on PC via a belated port courtesy of H2 Interactive, this collection offers eight games with save states, button mapping and move lists, some extremely basic screen and audio settings and online leaderboards and/or multiplayer functionality for almost all titles.
Which games are included? This collection includes three games in the Three Kingdoms-themed brawler series Knights of Valour — Knights of Valour: Superheroes, Knights of Valour Plus and Knights of Valour 2 - Nine Dragons —, two games in the Journey to the West-themed brawler series Oriental Legend — Oriental Legend and Oriental Legend Special (now mistranslated as Oriental Legend Spooky), the wuxia-themed brawler The Gladiator, the very Capcom-esque martial arts fighting game Martial Masters and the extremely Metal Slug-esque run-and-gun Demon Front. All of these game are solely available in their English-language variants, and Demon Front and The Gladiator lack online functionality.
Why should I care? You're somebody with a (perhaps counterproductive) drive to support the commercial, global proliferation of games whose original appeal was largely regional, irrespective of whether those commercial reissue might do those games justice — seriously, they've had years to patch this up since the Switch version and they did nothin' — or whether you're not just going to immediately play them on Fightcade anyhow.
Useless fact: Outside of the fighting game barrel-scrapers, people might be most familiar with IGS' arcade work by way of veteran shooting game developers Cave: DoDonPachi DaiOuJou, Ketsui and Espgaluda all run on a version of IGS' first-generation arcade hardware, and IGS themselves made and distributed the apochryphal DoDonPachi II under license.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
- Platform: Nintendo Switch (worldwide
- Price: $49.99
- Publisher: Bethesda
What's this? A Switch 2 port of the recent Unreal Engine 5-powered remaster of Bethesda's 2006 genre-setting open-world RPG Oblivion, originally developed for PC and ported to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3; this version offers cutting-edge visuals and redone textures with support for up to 4K resolution/60FPS framerate, new and/or re-recorded voice acting where feasible, a redone HUD/UI and additional accessibility features in like with more recent Bethesda titles and a litany of changes to the character creation, leveling, skills, NPC AI and other game systems.
Why should I care? I'm patently incapable of evaluating the intrinsic appeal of these games but it does seem that the quality of this particular port is distinctly... not-terrible? Then again, I suspect people are grading on a curve...
Reminder: Jangle jangle!
The Lord of the Rings: War in the North - Legacy Edition
- Platform: PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PC via Steam (worldwide)
- Price: $19.99 / €23.99 / £18.99
- Publisher: Aspyr Media
What's this? A reissue of Snowblind Studios and Warner Bros Games' 2011 action-RPG loot treadmill The Lords of the Rings: War in the North, originally released for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC; this Aspyr-produced port appeared with zero fanfare and no info on what, if anything, has changed or improved, but at a glance, it seems to boast AI-upscaled textures, some basic touch-ups allowing hot-swapping of characters and inventories that previously required entering menus and/or were only accessible from specific locations, basic camera lock-on functionality and other little nips and tucks.
Why should I care? I'm not a massive LotR dude but I did believe I had at least a passing recollection of all of the related games from this era, but I don't know that I'd so much as heard about this one before this surprise port, and a quick ask-around summated this game as "buggy, behind-the-back Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance" — now, do I want to roll the dice on an Aspyr reissue of an already-buggy game? Absolutely not, but they have indicated this is the first of several planned LotR game reissues, so for the sake of all you Tolkien dorks, I hope they did an adequate job.
Upgrade path? No Switch 2 upgrades from OG Switch, and no free or discounted Legacy Edition for owners of the OG on PC.
FREE DEMO, TAKE #2:
Panzer Dragoon Zwei Remake second demo
Were you one of the countless thousands of people who recoiled in disgust at the initial demo for Forever Entertainment's Panzer Dragoon Zwei Remake demo? Well, they've gone back and given it a second pass to address as many of the regularly-cited complaints as possible, and if you're willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, you are a more charitable person than I.
