Arcade Archives: Assault Plus + Arcade Archives 2 News

[tepidsnake]

This week's Arcade Archives release is... Assault Plus (Namco, 1988)

PSN
EU
US

Switch
EU browser eShop link not live, but it's there, I promise
US

No other ROMs exist, so just the one is included. Preference Settings allow players to adjust game speed, set player one's right stick to player two's left stick and rotate the direction of the player sticks.

It's Namco's twin-stick tank action game Assault, but with a plus! Two new sets of stages are available- Scenario #2 is the Easy Course, "Rehearsal for Core" if you want a breezier mission, while Scenario #3 is the Hard Course, "Battle for Core", a sturdy challenge awaiting those who thought the original Assault was too easy. New music and graphics too!... Yes, I know, I know, they probably should've bundled this with the Assault rerelease. Namco in particular, however, seems to treat updates to games like this (see also: Rally-X / New Rally-X and Sky Kid / Sky Kid DX) as completely separate games- compare this with other ACA releases of games from different companies like Rainbow Islands (included the Extra version) and Omega Fighter (included the Special version) and you can see the pattern. Oh well. If you didn't get your fill from the first Assault (or you decided to wait out for this version) then Assault Plus is for you.

We're not done this week, though! If you saw the Nintendo Direct on the Switch 2, you might've spotted a very important announcement, dropped in the middle of a development partner montage...

It's Ridge Racer! Riiiiiiiidge Racerrrrrrrrr! (Sorry, I had to).

When Dead Connection released a while back, it was accompanied by ACA2NEOGEO The King of Fighters '98 on Playstation 5 and Xbox Series, which added a whole boatload of new features (oh, and it was patched to add support for PS4 fightsticks, yay!). It seems that non-Neo Geo games are also getting the Arcade Archives 2 treatment in the future, with Ridge Racer on Switch 2 (no mention of other platforms, but we'll see) being the inaugural release, and the description of the video mentions the same set of extra features as ACA2NEOGEO (no Network Mode for this game though, it was only one-player in arcades). This is huge news- just by showing Ridge Racer, Hamster's letting us know that 3D arcade games are on the table, and if you thought there weren't enough ports of 2D games of the era, oh boy, there's a lot of 3D arcade gaming history that's just not available at home nowadays. Namco especially made huge technological strides in this era in the 3D space, and this means games like Starblade and Solvalou could be on the table in the future. And you know what, the original Ridge Racer is excellent too, I'm really glad it's finally making it home! It won't be out for a while (it releases in June, same day as the Switch 2) so I'll be rotating in excitement until it arrives.