The Switch and PlayStation 4 versions of Metal Black S-Tribute have been canceled, according to their publisher, City Connection.

A producer at City Connection announced during a livestream yesterday that their emulated Saturn version of the classic horizontal shoot-em-up for the Switch and PS4 would be scrapped because an arcade port of Metal Black already exists on those platforms — from a different publisher, Hamster.

They were originally planned to release next week on Feb. 1 alongside Xbox One and Steam versions.

City Connection said it still plans to move forward with releasing on Xbox One and Steam but at a lower price of US$7.99 to match Hamster’s arcade releases on Switch and PS4. Based on previous S-Tribute releases, the publisher likely planned on selling the game for about $15.

Hamster and City Connection seemingly didn’t know about each other’s projects, despite both of them working with the same licensor — Taito — and City Connection announcing its intention to release the Saturn version of Metal Black way back in April last year.

Hamster, meanwhile, didn’t announce its arcade version until the day before its release in November — seven months after City Connection’s announcement.

The producer on the City Connection livestream reconfirmed that their other S-Tribute title releasing Feb. 1, Bust-a-Move 2 Arcade Edition & Bust-a-Move 3, is still coming to Switch and PS4 in addition to Xbox and Steam. That’s despite a Hamster-published arcade port of Puzzle Bobble 2 — but not 3 — already being sold on the Switch and PS4.

A confusing rollout

City Connection’s messaging on the games’ release has been somewhat haphazard. When it announced their release date in a tweet earlier this month, it only mentioned that they’d come to Steam, although a trailer on Bust-a-Move 2 and 3’s Steam page showed Switch, Xbox and PS4 logos at the end. Metal Black’s Steam page didn’t have a trailer at all, but it does now — and it only has Steam and Xbox logos at the end.

Meanwhile, there’s still no official website for either game, despite previous S-Tribute titles like Layer Section/Galactic Attack, Cleopatra Fortune and Elevator Action Returns having pages, with a pair of boxes marked “Coming Soon” at the bottom of each of them.

There’s also no official announcement on the company’s news webpage, nor has it tweeted about the games coming to any platform other than Steam.

The platforms may have been mentioned in a press release that went out to some outlets earlier this month, considering websites like Gematsu reported that the games would come to PS4, Switch and Xbox in addition to Steam. But City Connection has been forced to send a retraction to those sites just a week before launch.

There’s still no page for either game on the Xbox store. Nor is there page for the Bust-a-Move collection on the Playstation Store, although there is one on the Switch eShop now — there wasn’t one a few weeks ago despite the Steam pages for both games going up immediately upon City Connection’s announcement. It can be preordered for $13.49, a 10% launch discount off what apparently will be the previously unannounced price of $14.99.

S-Tribute — sometimes called Saturn Tribute — games are the Saturn originals running on what City Connection calls the Zebra Engine, which dataminers have found appears to be a modified version of the SSF emulator. City Connection appears to use the “S-Tribute” label for the Saturn games from Taito that it’s handling, while games like Cotton 2 and Suchie-Pie are from other publishers and sport the “Saturn Tribute” label.

So far, 10 games have been released under either label: Cotton 2, Cotton Boomerang and Guardian Force, which came out in 2021; Layer Section & Galactic Attack, which came out last April; Cleopatra Fortune and Elevator Action Returns, which came out last November; and the four games in the Suchie-Pai collection. which came out last December.