The annual Shooters Fes 2024 event is underway in Japan, held at Mikado Game Center in Tokyo. If you aren’t familiar with it, it is a showcase of many shoot ’em up (“shmup”) titles for both arcades and consoles that will be hitting the scene soon. exA-Arcadia was there to make some arcade announcements, so let’s get you up to speed on those developments.
Shooters Fes Live Stream
If you come across this post when it goes live, the stream for the festival can be watched here. Just note that it’s 100% in Japanese. If the link changes afterward its all done, I’ll update. Note that there is a Day 2, but I’m not anticipating any arcade stuff to come out of that one:
Airgallet Exa Label
Airgallet is the next “Exa Label,” which is what remakes are branded with for the platform. If you are unfamiliar with Airgallet, it’s a vertical shooter that was designed by ex-Toaplan staff. It’s pretty rare and I don’t think it received any ports, so most have only played it in emulation:
Fixeight Exa Label
Another Exa Label that was announced, but it is one that you might be slightly more familiar with, is Toaplan’s Fixeight. Basically a sequel to Out Zone (and by extension, titles like Ikari Warriors and Commando, or the later Shock Troopers), you are a soldier running vertically up the stage, blasting enemies along the way. Fixeight is generally considered to be inferior to Out Zone, but the Exa Label may ‘fix’ that with some enhancements.
Those enhancements include:
- Up to 4-players, simultaneous
- Proper vertical mode support (TATE)
- “Out Zone aiming” – ability to lock your direction in by holding a button
Note that there was a tease for another Exa Label game in the stream, but that’s all it was – a tease, no mention of what the game will be. Place yer bets now…
Jamjam’N Jelly Exa Lente
This game was announced quite a while back; I even got to play it at Amusement Expo 2023. A year later, some things have changed, which you can see in the video below. The impression I had while playing it is that it feels like Cotton Rock’N Roll meets Dariusburst. It also looks fantastic and runs as smooth as warm butter. This will see location testing in July, which could indicate it will release around that time (assuming the tests go well):
Cambria Sword -Another Cry-
Last but not least, is another title that was announced back in 2022 (alongside Jamjam), Cambria Sword AC. This also has a sea creature theme, but looks and plays differently (I’d say it’s kind of like Lords of Thunder on the PCE meets Darius II). The footage shown in the stream is four months newer than what they had at AEI24, although the footage looked pretty close to the same to me.
Wrap Up
If you are curious to see these games in action from the stream, you’ll have to wait until it’s over and jump about an hour in. Fortunately, the latter two games should begin shipping within the next few months, although no firm dates have been set yet.
Fixeight is an interesting one to me, since we haven’t seen an arcade game in that subgenre in a long time. Let me know what you think about these other upcoming games though.
Shooters Fes is also not the final event where exA will be making game announcements this month – recall that they will be attending EVO Japan 2024. Many more new titles will be showing up there, although look for fighters, not shmups in that case.
Nice improvements to the Toaplan stuff. I guess it’s not bad if you want something to easily buy for your location. For a home user though, I’ll stick to my 7.99 Fixeight legally purchased for my IIRCADE 🙂
That $8 version for the now defunct IIRCADE platform isn’t going to have all of the improvements and bug fixes though (which are also being worked on by original Toaplan staff) 😉
Of course, none of these games are being made for home users. This notion that the exA was designed as some kind of fancy home console needs to die already.