BODY: The ball drops on another retro revival this week. Hamster launches Arcade Archives 2 Pinball Action on August 13 across PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox Series X|S and Windows PC, priced at ¥1,100.
The game is a faithful re-release of the original arcade pinball title, tasking players with navigating four distinct tables and clearing each one's features to rack up scores. It's a deceptively simple premise that made the coin-op version a fixture of Japanese arcades in its day.
Existing fans get a break at the register. Anyone who already owns the PS4/Switch release of Arcade Archives Pinball Action can pick up the new version for the owner's discount price of just ¥330 on their respective platform — a nod from Hamster to the players who kept the series alive.
There's also good news for Xbox and PC players: the title supports Xbox Play Anywhere, meaning a single purchase carries across Xbox consoles and Windows PC, with saves and progress syncing between them.
The insider take
Hamster's Arcade Archives line has quietly become one of the most reliable engines of game preservation in Japan, shipping a new classic almost every week for years. The jump to the "2" branding — with Switch 2 and current-gen consoles as targets — signals the company is future-proofing its enormous back catalog rather than letting it stall on aging hardware. For a Tokyo audience that grew up feeding ¥100 coins into these cabinets in Akihabara and Nakano game centers, the ¥330 loyalty price isn't just a discount; it's Hamster acknowledging a fan base that has effectively been funding this preservation project one re-release at a time.
Originally reported by GAME Watch (Japanese).