@TracyDMcGrath Yeah I can’t tell you how many times that happened to me in the DS/PSP era, lol.
Point taken about Abarenbou Tengu!
Also, seeing that this week’s Arcade Archive X Namco is Sky Kid, a game I love quite a bit, and that always makes me think about making a game that takes its chill aesthetic and removes all of the frustration over controls and gigantic hitboxes that I inevitably have when I play it.
@Karasu I wonder if for some reason the problem with them is Nintendo, since most of the ShotTrigger games for Playstation 4 got localized releases in North America.
Much more likely: the PS4 exports sold like shit and they decided it’s not worth making local versions when most people can just import the games.
Mostly, I just think they‘re not equipped to do it, both in terms of the actual work and also the marketing and outreach it’d take to make them not sell like garbage. They‘re also more appealing to international publishers if they don’t localize them from the jump, apparently.
They also didn't add Switch until Esprade, so I think it's just taken time to get through everything prior to that.
(I also wonder if the likes of LRG even wants to keep putting them out, I hear they took a bath on Feveron.)
The Kyuukyoku Tiger port is predictably incredible.
First off you have every released version of all 3 games, “Super Easy” versions of Tiger Heli and Kyuukyoku Tiger that maintain power level on death and give you auto bombers, custom versions with plenty of things to fool around with, but last but not least, Arcade Challenge mode for Kyuukyoku Tiger and Tiger Heli.
[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/oVecaZK.jpeg]
Arcade Challenge Mode is one of the best training modes I can remember in an official release. You can play any part of any stage of any loop at max power, highest normally possible power, or minimum power. It will give you a set number of rewinds per attempt and saves your rewind usage so you can try to best it later.
Once you start playing you have those sweet M2 widgets. A huge scrolling level map on the right side and trackers for every conceivable thing on the left.
Get Star, while charming, is no Kyuukyoku Tiger, and therefore gets no widgets, but does at least have save states and such.
The big surprise for me was that after closing the eShop I had two menu icons from my download. Kyuukyoku Tiger, and Teki Paki, Toaplan’s awesome puzzle game from 1991. Apparently this is just a free include on all editions of the collection as its own stand alone thing. It even has widgets!
@TracyDMcGrath Hmm you are tempting me but I am still bitter this collection doesn’t include Kyūkyoku Tiger II (which is the only episode I really care about).
@TracyDMcGrath Teki Paki isn‘t just free with this collection, they’ve said it‘ll be free with all their Toaplan Arcade Garage releases going forward (but won’t be sold or otherwise made available separately).
Because what I really needed was another shooter to be coming to the Switch, haha. But seriously, I‘ve heard it’s quite good!
Eschatos/Judgment Silversword soundtrack is absolute god tier. Really happy to see it releasing on Switch!
Never been a huge fan of Eschatos‘ art, but that’s a me issue. Game is cinematic and has some neat caravan esque scoring to it. I‘ll probably skip it as I have it on Steam and don’t play it often but it's objectively one of the better shooters of the 2000s
We‘re out of Namco month on the Arcade Archives and on to NMK month! Starting things off is Black Heart from 1991, which has dragons and fairies and castles and giant birds and monsters and an infinite number of loops. Has some cheap R Type style level obstacles that’ll definitely get you the first time, but otherwise much fairer than say Hacha Mecha Fighter. It‘s pretty, it’s strange, it’s a good time.
Hey I‘m an idiot who compulsively buys Cotton games just to have them on the Switch, and I can casually say that Panorama Cotton seems to be OK? It’s definitely not a Saturn Tribute situation, anyways. Seems to run fine without egregious input lag and has a nice, smooth rewind. Still completely untranslated and hard to recommend against the exquisite stuff Ratalaika is putting out for less than half the price, but there you have it.
Also, rewind has exposed to me how much hit detection in Panorama Cotton sucks. I've rewound at least a handful of situations like half a dozen times each and have been completely unable to determine what the game thinks hit me.
@tokucowboy I always get confused in Space Harrier style games where precisely anything is in relation to anything else. It does look neat but I might wait until it goes on sale
@TracyDMcGrath Yeah, I really can‘t recommend it to most people at $15 (or to shmup/STG enthusiasts at $15, cause it’s not a great one). I think “looking neat” is mostly what Panorama Cotton does; it‘s one of those “wow, it’s cool that this was running on the Genesis” type of things. Good that one of the rarer Genesis games is easy to access on modern platforms, though.
@tokucowboy Also, rewind has exposed to me how much hit detection in Panorama Cotton sucks. I’ve rewound at least a handful of situations like half a dozen times each and have been completely unable to determine what the game thinks hit me.
That may be an explicit issue with this version—their emulator’s straight up not displaying a lot of objects and projectiles. I really wouldn’t recommend it right now.
@gsk Welp, there we go, disregard my casual assessment. I have a repro cart of Panorama and chalked this up to just not noticing how egregious it was as the game whizzed by on original hardware. But I’d be curious to see how this particular Cotton was messed up just to complete my collection of recently messed-up Cottons
It’s easy to forget how the lore of R–TYPE is completely screwed up.
① Gynoug was out last week on Switch.
② Eschatos is out this week (in Japan) on Switch.
③ DoDonPachi Resurrection (Daifukkatsu) is out next week on Switch. Live Wire has been pretty reliable so far (and recruited former Cave staff for these ports) so it should go well.
It looks like the switch port of DoDonPachi Daifukkatsu will be fantastic.
It's got that Ketsuipatchi in there, and a special option to practice the boss fight.
It‘s hard to believe that last year we had 1 Cave game on the Switch, and by the end of this year we’ll have what seven? And some keitai ports to boot.
