The Saturn versions of Metal Black as well as a collection of Bust-a-Move 2 Arcade Edition and Bust-a-Move 3 went on sale today on modern platforms, courtesy of publisher City Connection.
The Bust-a-Move collection’s official name is a mouthful: Puzzle Bobble™2X/BUST-A-MOVE™2 Arcade Edition & Puzzle Bobble™3/BUST-A-MOVE™3 S-Tribute. It can be bought on the eShop, the PlayStation Store, the Xbox Marketplace and on Steam for US$14.99, although the eShop and Steam offer a 10% launch discount for the first week on sale.
Meanwhile, Metal Black S-Tribute can be bought on the Xbox Marketplace and on Steam for US$6.99, with a 10% discount for the first week on Steam.
Metal Black’s S-Tribute version isn’t available on the Switch or PlayStation 4 because a different publisher, Hamster, released the arcade version of the game last November. Last week, City Connection canceled their releases and pledged to sell the Xbox and Steam ones for the same price as Hamster’s versions on the eShop and PlayStation Store, although they seem to have gone above and beyond by pricing them a dollar cheaper.
As part of the S-Tribute — sometimes called Saturn Tribute — line of releases, they’re the original Saturn versions of the games running inside an emulator.
That emulator gives players features like rewind, slow mode, quick save and load, scanlines and unlimited credits. Metal Black also gets a stage select and the ability to change the amount of energy increased when picking up NEWALONE items.
Bust-A-Move 2: Arcade Edition released on the Saturn in the U.S. in September 1996, a month after it hit European shores and two months after its release in Japan under the name Puzzle Bobble 2X. It’s a bubble shooter puzzle game that featured infamously freaky cover artwork of a man with his eyes held open in the U.S.
Bust-a-Move 3 arrived in time for the Saturn’s last holiday season in North America and Europe in 1997, about eight months after it released in Japan in March that year under the name Puzzle Bobble 3. It’s another bubble shooter like its predecessor.
Unlike the Bust-a-Move titles, Metal Black never released outside Japan. It’s an apocalyptic-themed horizontal shoot-em-up that came out in May 1996. It’s loosely a sequel to Gun Frontier, a 1990 arcade game that got a 1997 Saturn port, with both games sharing some staff — Metal Black’s intro sequence and credits even identify it as “Gun Frontier 2.”
Metal Black is entirely in English, making it an easy sell in the West for City Connection — which has never hacked a new translation into Japanese games it re-releases — although some of its prose is … pretty awkwardly written.
For more detailed information on the releases’ features, check out the official webpages for Bust-a-Move and for Metal Black.
Modern releases for these games weren’t a complete surprise. During a livestream in April 2022 announcing another game in the S-Tribute line, Layer Section & Galactic Attack, City Connection stated their intention to bring several other Saturn games from Taito to modern consoles: Elevator Action Returns, Cleopatra Fortune, Puzzle Bobble 2X & 3 and Metal Black.
With the release of Bust-a-Move/Puzzle Bobble and Metal Black, there are no more Saturn Tribute or S-Tribute titles that have been announced but not yet released. It remains to be seen if City Connection will continue the line.
Elevator Action Returns and Cleopatra Fortune were just released last November, followed by an early November release for a collection of non-Taito Saturn Tribute games from the Suchie-Pie series.
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, 12 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 in April 2022; Cleopatra Fortune and Elevator Action Returns, which came out last November; the four games in the Suchie-Pai collection, which came out last December; and today’s release of Metal Black and Bust-a-Move 2: Arcade Edition & Bust-a-Move 3.
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