The Saturn version of 2D sidescrolling shooter Elevator Action Returns was released worldwide for modern platforms today, its publisher announced.
City Connection said the game is out now on the Nintendo e-Shop, PlayStation Store, Xbox Store and Steam for a standard price of US$14.99. However, there is a launch discount of 10 percent on the e-Shop and Steam, making it $13.49 there for a limited time.
Elevator Action Returns, a 2D sidescrolling shooter developed and published by Taito, began life as an arcade game in 1994 before being ported to the Saturn on Feb. 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.
Elevator Action Returns was already entirely in English, making it playable for audiences outside Japan right out of the box.
The re-release offers new options for unlimited credits, stage select, increased healing from items, increasing the number of lives, mapping sub-weapons to a bespoke button, keeping a weapon from one level to the next and changing the amount of damage received from enemies, according to its official webpage. That’s in addition to the features all of their S-Tribute releases have through a menu that can be called upon at any time during gameplay: rewinding it, slowing it down, saving and loading save states, and setting scanlines.
As with all of City Connection’s S-Tribute releases, the menus for the wrapper around the Saturn game are in English, traditional Chinese, Korean, French and Spanish in addition to Japanese.
This isn’t the only Saturn re-release coming before the end of the year from City Connection — a collection of saucy mahjong games in the Suchie-Pie franchise releases next week.
Elevator Action Returns comes just one week after another S-Tribute release, Cleopatra Fortune. The two were announced together at the beginning of November, as Shiro reported.
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, six games have been released under either label: Cotton 2, Cotton Boomerang and Guardian Force, which came out last year; Layer Section & Galactic Attack, which came out in April; Cleopatra Fortune last week; and today’s Elevator Action Returns.
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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