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Some dude from Argentina that likes games, shows, movies, music and stuff. Not much else to say, really. lol


sarahssowertty
@sarahssowertty

This week's Arcade Archives release is... Face Off (Namco, 1988)

... Well, it was supposed to be. Face Off joins Marvel Land and Finest Hour in not showing up on the EU or US storefronts. It is, however, on the Japanese and Canadian storefronts:

PSN
JP
CA

Switch
JP
CA

This is a cute hockey game by Piccari, the internal team that made the Famista baseball games as explained by ohfivepro with an interesting set-up- with two hockey players on each team, each player side has a pair of twinsticks allowing you to control both at the same time. This rerelease has a few options to make this a little easier- you can switch off the screen inversion that occurs for the second player (presumably this had a cocktail cabinet release, but I've been unable to find a photo of a cabinet) and also adjust it so a second player can play co-op with another player against the CPU on the same team. I don't have much experience with it- I didn't even know it existed until it got a Wii Virtual Console release- but there's not a lot of arcade hockey to go around, so it's pretty unique!

... So, OK, you can probably guess why this one didn't make it to the EU and US storefronts. I was discussing this with a few people on the Retro Pals Discord yesterday and while we have a couple of ideas and theories as to why this keeps happening, I don't feel comfortable openly speculating on here without any evidence to work off- I felt I did this with Marvel Land and that was my mistake, so I won't be repeating it. ACA releases certainly have had their issues in the West- let's not even go into the long list of ACA games not available on EU PSN for no real reason. I can understand it's frustrating, but as a small consolation, setting up a Japanese account on the Switch in particular is extremely easy and there are ways of getting Japanese point cards. My one request is that you don't shoot the messenger on this one, shout at Hamster or Bandai Namco, not me! Thank you.


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in reply to @sarahssowertty's post:

The Arcade Archives version of Marvel Land came out in Japan but not the US or Europe, although if you use a JP account to buy it, everything's in English. When I posted about it here, I speculated that it was a legal thing and I know it's the most obvious thing to assume but I don't want to spread anything without proper evidence. Just a little me-thing really~

Oh that's entirely fair and reasonable. I was wondering if something happened that reversed course and led to a US release of Marvel Land

I suppose the kneejerk speculation for Face Off is some trademark involving the movie, but.... that seems weird to me. Is there really grounds for a trademark dispute between a 30 year old movie and a completely different, unrelated arcade game? That seems off to me, but trademark law is one of my blind spots. Maybe it's more of an "abundance of caution" thing, but who knows

"Abundance of caution" is the prevailing theory- one thing that was brought up in the RP Discord was that ACA already had one legal dispute involving Neo Turf Masters (the Masters golf championship people weren't happy) so perhaps they don't want to have to deal with that again. Conjecture, of course, but there it is.