News Toaplan's Slap Fight & Grind Stormer Are Being Reissued For Modern Consoles

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Update [Tue 17th Sept, 2024 12:00 BST]: In response to our article below, Shinyuden has been in touch via email to state that "We have not made any official announcement yet on these titles and its showcasing at TGS has not been confirmed".

We asked Shinyuden whether that meant reissues of Slap Fight & Grind Stormer definitely wouldn't appear at the event, and Shinyuden has confirmed the games won't be at the Tokyo Game Show, with a company spokesperson telling us"

"Yes, I confirm these games will not be showcased at the TGS. We got in touch with the organization of the TGS to see if they can still be removed from their website, but regardless of their decision, these games won't be at the TGS2024.

We've since asked whether Shinyuden is also denying the existence of these reissues, given the somewhat vague wording of the above statement, but have yet to hear back from the company.

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With the Tokyo Game Show set to place later this month at the Makuhari Messe in Chiba (from September 27th to September 29th), the list of exhibitors has started to be revealed on its official website, giving us an idea of what to expect from the industry event.

This includes some early pre-announcements of titles that have yet to be properly revealed, such as a new set of reissues of the Toaplan shoot 'em ups Slap Fight and Grind Stormer from Ratalaika Games and Shinyuden (thanks Gosokkyu for the spot!).

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Slap Fight, in case you're unaware, is a vertical shooter that originally debuted in the arcades in 1986, and was later ported to platforms like the Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Thomson M05, Thomson T08, and Sega Mega Drive.

Grind Stormer, on the other hand, is its 1993 spiritual successor, which, again, debuted in arcades before being published on the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis by Tengen in 1994.

Over the last couple of years, both arcade games have received emulated ports for PC (via Steam & GOG) from Bitwave Games, though neither of these were released on consoles.

As these new reissues from Ratalaika Games and Shinyuden are still yet to be properly announced, there's not a whole lot of concrete information available on these ports just yet. For instance, we currently don't know whether these will be based on the original arcade versions or their Mega Drive counterparts.

However, what we do know is that they are both currently slated to launch across Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S and that neither title has currently been dated for release just yet.

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We'll try to keep you in the loop as more information is revealed, which we expect will be sometime later this month.