City Connection announced today that it intends to release two more Saturn games on modern platforms by the end of the year as part of its “S-Tribute” line.
Cleopatra Fortune is planned for Nov. 24 while Elevator Action Returns is set to debut Dec. 1. Both games will release globally on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Steam. No price was announced.
Steam pages are active for both games already (Elevator Action Returns, Cleopatra Fortune) but the other storefronts have yet to put the games up for preorder. For some reason, the Steam pages list release dates a day earlier than the ones named in City Connection’s tweets — perhaps an oversight on their part to account for the time zone difference between Japan and the United States.
They aren’t the only Saturn re-releases coming before the end of the year from City Connection — a collection of saucy mahjong games in the Suchie-Pie franchise is planned to release Dec. 8.
Cleopatra Fortune is a falling-block puzzle game that was originally released for a home karaoke machine called the Taito X-55 in late 1995 before coming to arcades in fall 1996 and then the Saturn in early 1997. It eventually made its way to the Dreamcast and PlayStation in 2001. Only the PlayStation port was localized for the West.
Elevator Action Returns, a 2D sidescrolling shooter, began life as an arcade game in 1994 before being ported to the Saturn on the same day as Cleopatra Fortune, February 14, 1997. It remained a Japanese exclusive until it was included in a 2006 compilation for PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC called Taito Legends 2, which was released in North America, Europe and Australia.
Both games were developed and published by Taito.
Elevator Action Returns was already entirely in English, making it playable for audiences outside Japan right out of the box.
Cleopatra Fortune, on the other hand, features tutorials and a story mode that are almost entirely in Japanese. City Connection hasn’t said whether it will hack an English translation into the game, but it’s unlikely considering the publisher hasn’t done that for its other Saturn re-releases.
But since Cleopatra Fortune has straightforward puzzle game mechanics and some of its user interface was in English to begin with, City Connection may believe that it’s playable enough to be worth releasing outside Japan.
And as with all their S-Tribute releases, the menus for the wrapper around the Saturn game that are used for starting it up, rewinding it, slowing it down, saving and loading save states, and setting scanlines will be in English, traditional Chinese, Korean, French and Spanish.
According to the official webpage for Elevator Action Returns, the re-release also will feature options for increasing how much items heal the player, increasing the number of lives, changing the amount of damage the player takes from enemies, setting a separate button for firing sub-weapons (the original game required the shoot and jump buttons to be pressed at the same time) and having the ability to keep a weapon between levels.
Cleopatra Fortune’s official webpage says that re-release will offer options for unlimited credits, changing the speed at which blocks fall and selecting any stage in Mystery Mode — aka story mode — regardless of whether it’s already been cleared.
Modern releases for these games weren’t a complete surprise. During an April 2 livestream announcing another game in the S-Tribute line, Layer Section & Galactic Attack, City Connection announced their intention to bring several other Saturn games from Taito to modern consoles: Elevator Action Returns, Cleopatra Fortune, Puzzle Bobble 2X & 3 and Metal Black. There’s been no further news on Puzzle Bobble or Metal Black since then.
S-Tribute is short for Saturn Tribute. City Connection appears to use the “S-Tribute” label for the Saturn games from Taito that it’s handling, while games like Cotton 2 and Suchie-Pie are from other publishers and sport the “Saturn Tribute” label. It’s unclear why a distinction is made there, but some sort of copyright entanglement behind the scenes is the likely cause.
So far, four games have been released under either label: Cotton 2, Cotton Boomerang and Guardian Force, which came out last year, and Layer Section & Galactic Attack, which came out in April.
S-Tribute and Saturn Tribute games are the Saturn originals running on what City Connection calls the Zebra Engine, which dataminers have found appears to be a modified version of the SSF emulator.
Danthrax is a contributor to the Shiro Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the ’90s, he didn’t get a Saturn until 2018. It didn’t take him long to fall in love with the console’s library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and has helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.
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