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:
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.
