SLG's opened orders for an emulated physical reissue of Parasol Stars, one of many fixed-screen action games developed by Taito and one positioned as the third game in the series that began with Bubble Bobble and continued, however tenuously, with Rainbow Islands. For whatever reason, this game never made it to arcades and was released primarily for the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 and, owing to the popularity of the genre and especially Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands, all of the existing ports to other platforms (NES, Game Boy, Amiga, Atari ST) have the distinction of being produced by European developers and published exclusively in Europe.
(One port that never made it market was the Commodore 64 version which, at the time, was reported to have been cancelled after an alleged burglary saw the dev's equipment and code stolen; the developer later admitted that their code was actually destroyed during a drunken dispute with their former wife.)
Naturally, this release bugs me, for all the reasons that SLG releases typically bug me:
First off, charging €29.99+ for a ROM on a disc/card is a little rich—I'm not one of those people that thinks old games, or games reissued via emulation, necessarily have to be dirt-cheap, but there are countless other examples of developers and publishers going above and beyond to ensure higher-priced reissues are given premium treatment, and SLG is not one of those developers, with even their most boutique releases presented in the same perfunctory, drag-and-drop front-end with questionable ESL text, incorrect or inaccurately-labeled images, etc. Even just the base emulation isn't reliable, and has seemingly become more of a crapshoot over time. Ratalaika Games, the Polish studio that handles all SLG's self-produced emulated reissues, self-publishes emulated games on their own on the side, and their cheap packages are functionally identical to SLG's in regards to presentation and emulation quality, which makes the price difference especially hard to ignore.
Secondly, SLG has a habit of beelining for games/franchises with convoluted genealogies or release histories that are begging for easy-to-follow, comprehensive anthologies and then delivering the exact opposite—they milked Turrican for three separate collections (with minor ROM hacks to pad out each line-up) without including or even touching on the original C64 versions of the first two games or the NES game by the guy who actually created the series, for example, and their Wonder Boy/Monster World collection was similarly confusing due to multiple SKU that were arbitrarily missing content for the sake of "choice". Bubble Bobble is absolutely one of those series that has demanded a fool-proof collection for a long time, and Parasol Stars is a game that would've inevitably factored into such a collection, but this release indicates that possibility is off the table.
This isn't even an especially enticing Parasol Stars-centric package, either: like I said, there were a bunch of other versions of the game that aren't here, and an interesting story to present about how this game and genre found such a foothold in Europe, but this release offers none of that... and yes, I could be sympathetic to the possibility that all those other versions are in legal limbo, but in that case, maybe just rethink your package, eh?
Beyond that, it irks me that Taito, the company that pioneered all this convoluted SKU bullshit in Japan, has not only encouraged SLG/ININ to adopt all the same practices but to also apply them to non-Taito games. Nothing is safe.
Ultimately, I'm not walking around fuming about this release or whatever—for as diligently as I like to keep tabs on who owns or licenses what and who's doing justice to the games they're curating, it ain't nothin' for me to just not buy any of this junk—but I did once feel like we'd reached a point were audiences were becoming more savvy about reissues of old games and were going to be more critical of half-assed product, and yet we're at the exact opposite place where people can toss out any ol' thing at any price and somehow cultivate a sustained audience.
