Resume the fight for freedom… until the end of February, at least.
2025 is kicking into gear, with all the usual sicko reissue lines reactivating and the rush of lower-profile remasters and ports kicking off in earnest. Of course, those publishers hoping to monopolize a traditionally quiet time of year must be stressing about the Switch successor announcement hanging over everyone’s heads, but after years and years of waiting for it to drop, it’d be silly to start treating the big reveal as a foregone conclusion… right…?
ARCADE ARCHIVES
- Platform: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 (worldwide)
- Price: $7.99 / €6.99 / £6.29
- Publisher: Hamster / Namco
What’s this? The Nintendo Vs. System conversion of Namco’s Famicom tennis game, originally released in Japan in 1987 and adapted for feature phones in the early ’00s; players pick one of 16 identity-infringing characters and one of 4 courts before taking on either a CPU player or another player in a race to win six games of tennis. (Aside from the removal of the lengthier single-player tournament mode, I believe this version’s identical to the Famicom version in terms of audiovisuals and mechanics.)
Why should I care? Namco’s legacy of home tennis games, which include the cult Turbografx-16 title World Court Tennis, have very apparent mechanical roots in this game, and any reissue of this particular game, let alone this extremely obscure version, has been a long, long time coming.
Useless fact: Vs. Family Tennis was distributed in such low quantities that some of its developers have openly wondered whether it was actually formally released; after some inquiries, it seems it was solely released in select Namco-owned arcades, hence its scarcity.
EGG CONSOLE
- Platform: Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
- Price: $6.49 / ¥880
- Publisher: D4 Enterprise / Nihon Falcom
What’s this? The MSX2 port of Falcom’s super-popular bump-combat action-RPG Ys II, originally developed and published for the PC-8801 in 1988 and ported far and wide in the intervening months, years, and decades, including a reissue of the PC-88 original some months ago; this port preserves and maintains the form and content of the original while making necessary hardware-specific changes and concessions, the most obvious of which being a slightly lower resolution, an increase in on-screen colors and a lack of FM audio, with music and sound restricted to the PSG chip (which sounds very similar to that of the Sega Master System or Game Gear, for reference).
Why should I care? Unlike the previous MSX port, this one runs comparably to the PC-88 original, and the PSG renditions of the BGM have a certain charm that can’t be found in the original game nor the vast majority of its ports, so you may want to take this opportunity to revisit the game with a cute new soundscape.
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Original article by retronauts.com
