Retro Re-release Roundup, week of February 13, 2025

ARCADE ARCHIVES

Kitten Kaboodle

• Platform: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 (worldwide)
• Price: $7.99 / €6.99 / £6.29
• Publisher: Hamster / Konami

What’s this? A block-pushing action-puzzle game with a cutesy aesthetic, originally developed by Konami and distributed in extremely limited quantities in Japanese and European arcades in 1988, and never reissued or ported until now. Players are tasked with hurling blocks at the enemies that populate each level in order to get them to drop coins or the keys necessary to unlock the door to the next stage; players can also work to align three of the various symbol blocks in order to trigger helpful, flashy stage effects, or spend their coins on various hidden screens including a power-up store and a casino.

Why should I care? You’ve finally accepted that Pengo and Kickle Cubicle aren’t making it to Arcade Archives and are willing to settle for their far more saccharine and loosey-goosey little brother… or you’re just into bunny-girls.

Helpful tip: Given that the casino completely undermines any semblance of scoring integrity this game might otherwise have presented, Hamster’s opted to split the caravan mode into both score-based and stage-based categories.

EGG CONSOLE

Arctic (PC-8801mkIISR)

• Platform: Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
• Price: $6.49 / ¥880
• Publisher: D4 Enterprise / Artdink

What’s this? A rail-based action-puzzle game with an vague interstellar theme, originally developed and published for PC-88 series computers by Artdink in 1988; players are tasked with guiding and directing the blue and yellow balls to their designated docking stations by judiciously switching rail points and/or bouncing the balls off the neutral silver balls or other junctions in order to reverse their direction.

Why should I care? You want to try an early Artdink game with the vibes of a launch-era Game Boy game, ie one that’s about eight thousand times more immediate than their usual output.

Language barrier? Not at all, but I imagine a color-blindness barrier may be in effect.

NINTENDO SWITCH ONLINE 

February ’25 update: Wario Land 4 (Game Boy Advance), out February 14

What’s this? The fourth mainline side-scrolling entry in Nintendo’s long-dormant Wario Land series, originally released for the Game Boy Advance in 2001 and reissued for the Wii Virtual Console in 2015; Wario retains his brutish moveset and variety of conditional, reactive states triggered by touching various enemies/objects from previous games but the format has shifted away from the open-ended exploratory nature of the immediate predecessors in favour of a more conventional, skill-based focus, complete with a return to a traditional health system.

Why should I care? You want to see for yourself why so many recent indies have felt compelled to riff on this specific Wario game, of all games: not only is it a razor-sharp action game that’ll offer a lot for high-intensity players to sink their teeth into, it’s also the first (and perhaps only) Wario platformer to share a lot of the more out-there aesthetic choices that would soon be completely subsumed (and ultimately shed once more) by the Warioware subseries. Also, it’s dropping on Valentine’s Day; y’all know what it be.

Useless fact: Wario Land 4′s Japanese website published answers to a multitude of fan questions, allegedly answered by Wario himself, which include such trivia as his favorite member of Morning Musume (answer: he insists he doesn’t know who they are, and he especially doesn’t know who Rika Ishikawa is.)

OTHER

Cosmic Fantasy 4: Prelude to Legend

• Platform: Nintendo Switch (worldwide)
• Price: $26.50 or equivalent
• Publisher: Edia

What’s this? A standalone digital issue of the first volume of the fourth and final entry in Telenet’s anime-esque fantasy RPG series Cosmic Fantasy, originally developed and published for the PC Engine Super CDROM in Japan in 1994 and recently reissued and translated as part of the crowdfunded Cosmic Fantasy Collection 2; by this point in the series, they’d begun showing the slightest bit of mechanical ambition, which manifests through very direct adventure game-style sections and a quasi active-time element to the RPG battles.

Why should I care? I can only imagine that you’re a) someone who might’ve tried the previous Cosmic Fantasy Collection and are rightfully disinterested in trying any further games, or b) someone who already bought Limited Run Games’ Cosmic Fantasy Collection 2 no-questions-asked and is waiting for it to show up, but for the few people who don’t fit into either category, I will say that this series’ sole redeeming purpose (that is, as a vessel for Kazuhiro Ochi shlock) is best realized — or at least adequately realized for the first time — by these final games, and they finally thought to tone down the encounter rate to a reasonable level, too. Let’s hope the menu translation’s correct this time, eh?

Helpful tip: Cosmic Fantasy Collection 2 also contains Cosmic Fantasy 3 and the second volume of Cosmic Fanrasy 4, but I couldn’t tell ya why they’re not available right now or when they might show up on the eShop.

Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered

• Platform: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox, PC (worldwide)
• Price: $29.99 or equivalent 
• Publisher: Aspyr Meda / Saber Interactive

What’s this? A remastered three-pack of the second and final trilogy of classic Tomb Raider games developed by original creators Core Design: 1999’s PlayStation/Sega Dreamcast/PC Mac entry Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, the 2000 PS/DC/PC/Mac sequel Tomb Raider: Chronicles and the much-maligned 2003 PlayStation 2/PC/Mac entry Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness. following last year’s remasters of the original trilogy, these remasters allow players to switch between Aspyr’sclassic and remade visuals on the fly and offer a bevy of performance improvements (including higher framerates), optional modernized controls and other game specific tweaks. Of particular note are the many significant changes and additions made to Angel of Darkness, which include a thorough reworking of Lara’s basic handling in tandem with the new controls, a substantially reworked camera, the implementation/completion of several unfinished or unused areas and sub-systems and much more.

Why should I care? While these games definitely represented the inevitable deflation of the Lara Croft hype balloon, time has been very kind to TLR and Chronicles, and one can only hope Aspyr & co. have been just as kind to Angel of Darkness, as I’m willing to accept on faith that there’s probably a good game buried deep, deep in there somewhere.

Helpful tip: Aspyr’s not offering official editor/mod tools for this trilogy, looks like.

LIMITED-EDITION PHYSICAL PRINT RUNS

Earnest Evans & Annet Returns (Mega-CD, Genesis) physical runs from Limited Run Games

• Price: $59.99 or equivalent (standard MCD) / $99.99 or equivalent (Earnest Evans Genesis collectors edition) / $139.99 or equivalent (premium MCD double-pack)
• Availability: orders close March 9, 23:59 Eastern; ETA September

Late last year, Edia attempted to crowdfund an emulated three-pack containing the cult Wolf Team action games El Viento, Earnest Evans and Annet Futatabi… and somehow, despite argably being the only one of their crowdfunded collections thus far to contain good games, it was the first one that wasn’t fully funded. Whatever the case, LRG was clearly already on the hook for these physicals, so make the most of ’em: physical versions of both the original US-released Genesis version and the newly-localized Mega-CD version of history’s greatest creative accomplishment, Earnest Evans, as well as a first-ever localized global release for Annet Futatabi, now officially titled Annet Returns. One has to wonder what ol’ Vic Ireland thinks of LRG’s “Ultra Series” branding…. (If you’re wondering why LRG’s not also handling El Viento, it’s probably because Retro-Bit already put out their own cartridge reissue several months ago.)