This Rewind Roundup is covering a wide spread: grossout cartoons, LAN‑era shooters, food RPGs, and vampire soap operas.
Limited Run is bundling seven 8‑ and 16‑bit Ren & Stimpy games into one Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy Collection for Switch, PS5, and PC. You get the Game Boy, NES, SNES, and Genesis entries plus rewind, quick‑save, a music player, and a museum of key art.
Unreal Tournament 2004 is now free and patched for modern PCs thanks to community group OldUnreal, with Epic’s explicit blessing. Their new release adds a modern SDL backend, a new renderer, updated build systems, bug fixes, and easy Windows/Linux installers, marking the first public update in over 20 years.
Next up in D4’s EGGCONSOLE line is a deep cut: a food‑themed PC‑98 action RPG from the original Puyo Puyo devs, heading to Switch with quick‑save, rewind, screen options, and manuals. D4 also says it plans to bring its whole EGGCONSOLE catalogue of old Japanese microcomputer games to Steam, finally giving non‑Switch owners a legit way to grab stuff like Eggy and other PC‑88/98 curios.
M2’s Kyukyoku Tiger-Helo: Toaplan Arcade Garage collection is finally getting a European release on PS4 and Switch on February 26. The base package includes arcade Kyukyoku Tiger / Twin Cobra and Tiger‑Heli plus bonus puzzler Teki‑Paki, while the “Console Ports + Get Star Pack” DLC adds a pile of Famicom, NES, PC‑Engine, and Mega Drive ports and the rare Toaplan action game Guardian (Get Star), all wrapped in M2’s usual gadget‑heavy, low‑lag emulation.
Crystal Dynamics is remastering Legacy of Kain: Defiance for modern platforms, with 4K visuals, improved controls, and a big archival extra: a playable vertical slice of the cancelled follow‑up, Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun. For a series that’s been dormant for ages, getting both a cleaned‑up Defiance and a peek at the lost sequel in one package is a big win.
Hamster’s latest Arcade Archives pull is a Konami obscurity designed by staff who worked on Contra and Ghosts ’n Goblins, finally getting a stand‑alone digital release with the usual Caravan and Hi‑Score modes. Limited Run is also bringing the NES Jaws game to Switch this week, complete with modern convenience features and a physical release for people who really want to own that cursed boat again.
Hamster’s next Console Archives release is the Famicom version of Dezaemon, one of the earliest “make your own shmup” tools, now on Switch 2 with save states and screen options so you can build janky little shooters without hauling out 1991 hardware.
Panzer Dragoon II Zwei: Remake is finally showing signs of life with a playable Steam Next Fest demo, letting you test‑fly Lagi’s early campaign chapters after years of delays. Cyan’s Riven remake looks set to hit PS5 soon, too, with a freshly scraped trophy list confirming that the previously PC‑only modern version is finally headed to Sony’s console.
On the licensed side, Marvel MaXimum Collection bundles Konami’s landmarkX‑Men arcade brawler with a pile of NES, SNES, Game Boy, Game Gear, and Genesis X‑Men, Spider‑Man, and Avengers games, plus scans and a music player.
Sunsoft’s 1990 PC Engine game City Hunter is being revived as a, well, “Revival Edition”, for Switch, Switch 2, PS5, and Steam on February 26, with quality‑of‑life tweaks layered onto its old‑school side‑scrolling action.
Bliss Brain is going all‑in on Geppy‑X: Hi‑Res Remastered Edition, a worldwide release of the once‑Japan‑only “fake TV anime” shooter that restores its thousands of hand‑drawn frames to HD and runs on basically every current platform.
Taito’s rare early‑’80s rafting game Challenge the Unknown Rapids is getting a console release this week, complete with its branching route gimmick and brutal difficulty intact. Taito is also pulling Plump Pop, its adorable circus‑flavored Breakout variant, onto modern consoles this week, giving Bubble Bobble‑era art and trampoline physics another shot on current storefronts.
Over on Polymega, Collection Vol. 1–2: Tempest turns Atari’s vector classic into a curated pack with multiple home and arcade versions, good CRT shaders, and the Jaguar’s killer game: Tempest 2000. No 3000 port though, so my condolences to the Nuon fan out there. (Worth noting that all the games in this collection are also available in the excellent Atari 50 collection.)
Finally, Koei has confirmed an early RPG masterpiece is on the way to PS5 and Switch 2: the Famicom historical sim Romance of the Three Kingdoms is getting a modern reissue so people can brush up on their Three Kingdoms history before the series’s story comes to its inevitable conclusion.
