Blazing Chrome AC Launches To Arcades On exA-Arcadia

After Gimmick! Exact*Mix was released to arcades at the very end of this past December, exA-Arcadia took a break from their busy 2020. That break had extended into this month thanks to how the pandemic has played out in Japan, with Japanese arcades still finding themselves in a tough spot. That said, things have improved enough for exA to start rolling out releases again, and they are starting with Blazing Chrome AC.

We’ve mentioned this title a few times on the blog, but if you missed that coverage, think of it as a new Contra, with it falling a little more towards Contra III. Designed by Joymasher, Blazing Chrome was released to consoles back in 2019, where you and your companions find yourselves in a world that sounds like the future era of Terminator 2. For arcades, the run ‘n gun genre has been rather sparse in recent times, outside of games like Metal Slug 6 (2006) and Kraut Buster (2018), so this is certainly a welcome entry for fans of these types of games.

Since this is a port of a console game, you are probably wondering what differs on the arcade edition. From the ordering page comes this brief summary:

BLAZING CHROME AC comes guns blazing with metal on metal action and income that you expect from a 2 player simultaneous run and gun. Featuring an all new exclusive soundtrack from Super Contra composer, Motoaki Furukawa, and 5 selectable characters including arcade exclusive, Zaku who joins from Oniken. Blast your way through the robotic hordes and save the world again!

Apart from other needed changes with initial menus and the like, it also supports English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, French & Spanish (it’s a little surprising that it doesn’t have Portuguese support since the developers are Brazilian, although it could be due to a lack of exA availability in Brazil, which has always been a very tough place to sell games to). The kit comes with AC specific artwork and instruction cards in both English & Japanese.

We also have a fresh trailer that shows the release edition in all it’s glory (best to watch this in 1080p):

Pricing for the kit itself is around $1250USD and it can be ordered from your regional exA distributor or from the exA website itself. What do you think about this from all that has been shown?

This leads us to – What’s next for exA? Looking at the shop page, there are currently no titles showing for pre-orders, although there are still 7 games on the games page that are listed as “Available 2021.” There will also be more title announcements coming on April 25th when exA-Arcadia will be participating in the ShootersFes event that will be streamed on YouTube. That event is also seeing support from several of exA’s partners, including CAVE, Success, MOSS, Psikyo and City Connection. The latter two have been working on a remaster of The Fallen Angels, so I wonder if that might be shown at this event, although I’m sure that any new announcements will be focused more on upcoming shoot ’em ups than fighters.

What do you hope to see?