Famitsu had a feature on Switch this week with an interview with Satoshi Hamada from Hamster about the company’s Arcade Archives plans and more.
Hamster received requests from fans to bring the Arcade Archive series to portable devices and since Switch acts as a handheld in addition to a console, they thought this would fulfill these wishes in an acceptable way.
Arcade Archive has a feature to rotate the screen to play vertically-displayed arcade games, and with Switch, you can easily stand the display vertically, so Hamster feels it is a good fit for the system.
There were worries that coding around the Joy-Con might be difficult, but doing so isn’t actually that difficult. When speaking of titles currently in development, the hardware specs on Switch are sufficient and Hamada has a good impression about the device as a result.
Hamster thought about implementing the Joy-Con steering wheel for arcade racing games, but an actual steering controller is better. Currently Hamster is collaborating with HORI to make their arcade stick capable to play the Arcade Archive series, and they are discussing possibility of releasing unique arcade sticks with control panels such as twin levers, track ball, and so on.
Hamster is now planning to release new titles for Arcade Archive every week, and Hamada thinks it would be nice for fans if they can find a new title when they visit the eShop on a weekly basis. That being said, this is just a target and there might be a week they can’t release new title for some reason. The dev team is trying hard to achieve this however.
Currently they are only announcing five Neo Geo titles from the Arcade Archives and haven’t announced the regular Arcade Archives series, as they are currently focusing on keeping the series on track with continuous releases of Neo Geo Arcade Archives. They however, will definitely bring the regular Arcade Archives in the future.
The internal storage size is interesting as the Switch version has a lower file size compared to other platforms. It was originally 600 MB in average, but the Switch version is planned to be reduced to 200 MB. And other than Arcade Archives, Hamster also wants to bring over the Nikoli puzzles series, including Sudoku, and Hamada noted they are already talking about it with Nikoli, so they hopefully will be able to announce something soon.
He also noted that there are actually some projects planned aside from Arcade Archives and Nikoli, but Hamster can’t announce them yet.