Muchi Muchi Pork! & PinkSweets Boosted is out now
Two CAVE arcade shooters that never got a proper Western release have finally landed on PlayStation 5, Switch and Steam, with a physical edition following on 29 October.
Muchi Muchi Pork! & PinkSweets Boosted is out now, and it is the sort of release that barely happens any more: two CAVE arcade shooters that never had a fair shot in the West, arriving together on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam. Clear River Games handled the console release in partnership with City Connection, and physical editions follow on 29 October.
What you are actually buying
Muchi Muchi Pork! is the 2007 cute 'em up, and its premise has not aged a day. General Pork Fillet turns up from planet Iberiko and starts converting the citizens of Butaduka City into pig-hybrids, so Momo, Ikuo and Rafute climb into pedal-powered Ketta Machines and shoot their way through five stages of bullet hell. The scoring hook is the Medal Chaining System, which pays out for staying in the thick of it; parachuting pigs fill a meter that unleashes the Lard Attack, and bombs convert incoming bullet storms into collectible bacon.
PinkSweets Boosted is the harder sell, literally. A 2006 sequel to Ibara, it runs seven stages with four ships and two firing styles, and it scales its own difficulty to punish good play, which means the better you get, the harder the game leans on you. Defence is a skill in itself: the Rose Cracker Shield activates by holding fire, and orbiting Rosehips absorb incoming shots. Clear River Games lists digital pricing at $39.99 or EUR 34.99, with the physical edition at $54.99 or EUR 49.99. Steam has the bundle at $39.99 with a 10 per cent launch discount.
Why this one matters more than the average reissue
CAVE's shooters have spent two decades locked to Japanese hardware and dubious emulation. Muchi Muchi Pork! and Pink Sweets previously reached home console only on a Japan-only Xbox 360 compilation disc in 2011, and neither ever appeared on a Nintendo or PlayStation machine. Rank systems like PinkSweets' are also the part reissues tend to flatten: they exist to stop a skilled player from coasting, and they only work when a port is honest about frame timing and input lag. This is a technical release as much as a nostalgic one, and it is the kind of work Clear River Games has quietly specialised in.
Our opinion
Buy the digital version now if you want to play it, because the packaging premium is not worth fifteen dollars. The physical run is for people who want the shelf, and those people should move before 29 October, since limited retro console printings have a nasty habit of evaporating and then reappearing at triple the price. Anyone cautious about the pair should start with Muchi Muchi Pork!; it is the friendlier on-ramp, and its medal chaining teaches the aggression PinkSweets demands from its first stage.
The real point is that this release exists at all. CAVE's back catalogue is one of the great unported libraries in games, and every time a publisher does the unglamorous rights work to bring a 2006 arcade board to a modern console, the medium gets a little less disposable. Both games are unapologetically brutal and neither has been sanded down to be palatable. That was what the audience ordered, and it is worth the asking price.