We have some good news for Cave fans, to add to the exciting news from earlier this year that a version of the incredibly rare Dodonpachi DaiOuJou DX Reco.ver had been recovered and dumped online.
Across social media, the feature phone preservationist RockmanCosmo is now stating that the 2003 mobile shoot 'em up Dodonpuchi Zero from Cave has also just been saved from the digital abyss, alongside a trial version of Dodonpachi's 2002 mobile port, known as Dodonpuchi.
Both Dodonpuchi Zero and Dodonpuchi were originally released in the early 2000s via Cave's web portal Game Center Yokocho, for i-Mode compatible phones, and were designed to be portable entries in the company's popular bullet hell series Dodonpachi, which had initially debuted in arcades back in 1997.
But, whereas Dodonpuchi was designed to simply be a port of the very first Dodonpachi game, Dodopuchi Zero was instead envisioned as a slightly more ambitious project, becoming the company's "first original shooter for keitai [phones]" with its own original score from Japanese composer Manabu Namiki.
For the longest time, both games have been unavailable to buy, thanks to the closure of Game Center Yokocho, with the only way to play them in the modern day having been to track down phones that already had the game pre-installed.
But now, thanks to the efforts of the feature phone preservation community, they are finally available to try out once again, giving fans of the series an opportunity to get to grips with the obscure entries.
According to RockmanCosmo, the person responsible for dumping Dodonpuchi Zero and the trial version of Dodonpuchi is Cuebus, who has previously been responsible for saving countless other Keitai titles in the past.
This includes trial versions of House Of The Dead and Friends of Mana, and more complete games like Cubic Invaders and Densha de GO! Going Round in Yamanote Line.
If you want to give the game a try, you should check out the Keitai World Launcher, which is available to download from the new community-led preservation site, KeitaiArchive.