There are times where we hear about a game, it presents a cool or unique concept and then we never hear about it again. Namco’s Afrec! comes to mind. Then there are times where something like that happens and one day, out-of-nowhere the game reappears on the scene somewhere months or even years later.
That is the case with Goodman Entertainment’s Astro Ranger, which we last heard about back in 2010. As a nutshell refresher, Astro Ranger takes two arcade-centric concepts of a Bemani game and a fighting game and blends them together. Now the home turf of Goddman is South Korea so it’s possible that the game has been out and about there soaking up plays and we just haven’t heard about it since we don’t really hear about developments there on a regular basis, just the occasional update to Pump It Up or DJ Max Technika or the random chaingun shooter Vulcan-M.
As such, the picture above is Astro Ranger as seen on a current location test at a Round 1 facility in Japan. Will we ever see the game overseas? Maybe – South Korean arcade games have a decent track record of making the jump so it’s possible. Here’s a video of the game from TGS 2010, it is unknown whether the game has changed drastically since then or not.
