𝔞𝔷𝔲𝔯𝔢𝔩𝔬𝔯𝔢 𝔤𝔴𝔢𝔫𝔡𝔬𝔩𝔶𝔫 𝔨𝔬𝔯𝔯𝔦𝔤𝔞𝔫 🕷️🍂

After years of requests, Taito's secret-riddled vertical platformer Rainbow Islands has finally made its way to Arcade Archives, and with the Extra revision thrown in to boot. As expected, the ever-troublesome main BGM (which "interpolated" Over The Rainbow) has been replaced, but in a more elegant fashion than reissues past, which have simply dummied out the track, or disabled the melody line in the emulator, or completely replaced the music (as with the version on the recent Egret II Mini, which just drops in a tune from Bubble Bobble): for this release, they've replaced the original BGM with the legally-distinct alteration originally written for the Taito-developed NES port, now properly arranged for the arcade board's YM2151 sound chip by former Zuntata member Yukiharu Urita. This solution was also used for the Rainbow Islands Extra reissue included on the Genesis Mini 2, but this arrange sounds a little less drag-and-drop, and I can't imagine a better alternative going forward.

Hamster tends to go above and beyond for fan-favourite titles, and Rainbow Islands is no exception; they've added some optional enhancements in the game settings menu, which are as follows:

• Improved input response: strictly speaking, the game registers inputs fairly quickly but isn't consistent on precisely how/when the player-character will visually react to an input, so this setting attempts to make the game respond immediately on button press. (I haven't tried this, but there's a disclaimer that it may be a little screwy.)
• Auto-enter hidden commands: Allows you to automatically start the game with any one of the ~dozen secret bonus commands activated, which otherwise have to be manually entered on the title screen. Surprisingly, you can use most of 'em in high-score/caravan modes, too. (HINT's disabled for both modes, and the dollar/continue codes are disabled in caravan mode.)
• Visual confirmation of hidden command entry: Fairly straightforward image/text pop-up upon successful entry of a code.
• Rainbow Special appearance modifier: By default, the super-powerful Rainbow Special item (aka the "MTJ Ball") only appears after every 33rd credit, but you can set it to appear by default if you like. (This setting also works in Extra, but Extra's hard-coded to disable the effects of the MTJ Ball, so it won't actually do anything; it's not an option for high-score/caravan mode.)
• 'Recreation of message text": I don't know what this specifically alters (as most of the in-game text is conditional and I certainly cannot blaze through Rainbow Islands on a whim), but I believe it simply lets you play with either typo-corrected in-game messages or the original text.

They've also added an extra on-screen indicator, as depicted in the attached screenshot: at the press of a button (ZR/L2 by default), you can toggle coloured lines that indicate the screen sectors that determine the colour of the diamond generated upon crushing enemies under a rainbow—for the unaware, collecting all seven diamonds (generally, and also in specific colour sequences) is a major part of scoring and uncovering secrets, and knowing precisely how to generate the required diamonds is required in order to see the final worlds of the game, so this visual indicator is surely going to help a lot of people experience parts of this game that they never saw or knew about in arcades (or at home, as most of the ports excised a lot of the back-end content). The manual also offers a ton of info on the specifics of all the items and power-ups, as well as the secret commands; it doesn't offer a complete breakdown, but it certainly divulges a lot more info than any of the other home versions ever did.

Of course, you can enjoy the game without utilising or acknowledging any of the scoring mechanics, and I suspect that a lot of people would have more fun that way—a lot of people would tell you that knowing Rainbow Islands ultimately leads to hating Rainbow Islands, after all.