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Arcade Archives: Adventure Canoe
Feb. 20th, 2026 10:32 amThis week's Arcade Archives release is... Adventure Canoe (Taito, 1982)
Arcade Archives (previous-gen consoles)
PSN
Switch
EU
Arcade Archives 2 (current-gen consoles)
PSN
Switch 2
EU
Xbox
Just the one ROM and no Preference Settings this time, although that's not really a problem, seeing as there's still no publicly-available dump of this game for MAME! This is a rare one, so your only other options are the Taito Egret II Mini (it's included as standard- the PR specialist for the system Yukito Ohayashi, was so insistent on getting the game included that he sourced the extremely rare PCB himself just to make sure it was included) or, well, this release.
Adventure awaits you on the open river! This is a very rare Taito game that was a bit of a mystery even to me, a die-hard Taito arcade rat- In the weekly Hamster stream, they even went to the trouble of sharing a list of games kept by an arcade enthusiast in 1983 (complete with multiple location test games and quite a few American titles like Sinistar and Krull) just to show that Adventure Canoe did show up in at least one Japanese arcade! Although it was in the Taito Egret II Mini, now it's got a much wider release, and it's pretty interesting! This has a similar visual style to Taito games of this era like Alpine Ski and Wild Western, with you rowing your canoe across the river littered with driftwood, whirlpools and exposed pieces of land. You've got a gun to nudge oncoming driftwood slightly (I wouldn't rely on it if I were you) but if you turn, your aiming direction changes too, allowing you to hit animals and unfortunately stereotyped natives for extra points. You'll need that gun for the boss fight (!) at the end of the river (after the high-speed section, where the river turns into green slime, as often observed in nature) where you either hunt down the giant crocodile and take him home for dinner or escape with your tail between your legs, at which point you go on another river adventure.
The movement is pretty interesting too compared to other early shmups (I guess this is a shmup, of sorts) as you slow down and become a larger target while turning and also have an accelerate button, necessary to move up the screen faster. You can even lose one of your oars if you move too close to land, reducing your turning speed! This was definitely one of the surprises of the Egret II Mini for me and I ended up really enjoying it, so if you missed out on getting one, I definitely recommend getting this ACA version, it's an interesting twist on the at-the-time buregeoning shmup genre with a less-often-seen nature theme (the closest contemporary would be Tehkan's Swimmer, but that takes quite a different approach) and the unique movement alone makes it stand out.
