It seems like it's pretty much every other day now that the Japanese feature phone preservation community shares an exciting new announcement about a previously lost games being discovered and dumped online.
Earlier this week, for instance, we published a short article about a rare Lost In Blue spin-off that had been located and dumped thanks to an individual named @frigamarrymepls, giving people a chance to play the little-known entry in the Survival Kids series via an online emulator. And now we're back again already, with the exciting news that two more games that were once thought to be lost to the void have been discovered and distributed online for more people to enjoy.
This time, the games in question are Capcom's match-three puzzle game Rockman: The Puzzle Battle that sees players battling against various robot masters, and Namco's Galaga Kai, a reimagining of the 1981 arcade game with an additional arrange mode including stages based on Mappy, Dig Dug, and Xevious.
Both of these games were released for Japanese feature phones in 2011, and were initially made available to download from a set of online portals (Capcom Party and Namco Games), which the game's publishers set up and that charged a small monthly subscription fee.
However, both of these portals have long since been discounted and these titles were ported elsewhere, meaning that for a number of years there was no longer any way of accessing the game, without hunting for a phone that already had the titles pre-installed.
Luckily, as RockmanCosmo announced on social media recently, though, this is now a thing of the pst, with a person named 2Soulz having come across the two tiles and preserved them for future generations to enjoy.
Here's some footage of Rockman: The Puzzle Battle in action. Footage of Galaga Kai is also available above.