Arcade Archives Thundercade gets a gameplay trailer for October 15

Hamster Corporation is bringing SETA's 1987 vertically scrolling shooter Thundercade to modern consoles on October 15, and the publisher has shared three minutes of new gameplay footage ahead of tomorrow's launch. First announced earlier this week as part of the publisher's two-tiered retro lineup, the port lands on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 as a standard Arcade Archives release for $7.99. An enhanced Arcade Archives 2 edition arrives on the same day for Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S at $9.99.

Whilemost vertical shoot-'em-ups from 1987 put you in the cockpit of an experimental fighter jet, SETA kept things on the pavement. You play as a special forces operative riding a high-speed motorcycle straight into an occupied city, a military base, woodland regions, and a fortress housing a nuclear power plant. It's a weird, scrappy premise that immediately sets the game apart from its airborne peers.

Two sidecars, one B-7 bomber, zero traffic laws

Your default bike fires a fairly modest stream of machine gun rounds. The real firepower comes from flattening civilian buildings and enemy structures until you uncover attachable sidecars armed with heavy gun barrels. These sidecars aren't uniform upgrades: some extend your forward firing range, and others only shoot sideways to clear out flanking infantry and artillery.

You can mix and match the attachments depending on what the stage throws at you, though the bulky profile of a bike with two sidecars makes dodging dense bullet patterns much harder in narrow streets. When the screen gets too crowded, you can call in a massive B-7 support bomber that casts a shadow across the entire playfield and wipes out enemy projectiles with a carpet of explosions.

The enemy escalation is completely unhinged. You start out dodging regular foot soldiers and small tanks on city streets, and before long you're trading fire with a giant submarine marked with the number 99 sitting in a dockyard basin. Bringing a motorcycle to a submarine fight seems like a poor tactical choice, yet the sidecar cannons chew through its hull fast enough if you stay aggressive.

From Taito tables to Switch 2

Known in Japan as Tokushu Butai U.A.G. (and distributed in some territories as Twin Formation), the original coin-op was developed by SETA, published in Japan by Taito, and handled in North America by Romstar. It was a solid hit in Japanese arcades, where Game Machine magazine ranked it as the seventh most successful table cabinet in its December 15, 1987 issue. Universal Entertainment currently holds the rights to SETA's back catalog, which is how the license made its way to Hamster.

Home players in North America might remember the 1989 NES conversion developed by Micronics and published by American Sammy. That 8-bit port added a manual backstory about an atomic terrorist organization called AATOM, though it suffered from the choppy scrolling and heavy sprite flicker typical of Micronics releases. Aside from an appearance on Taito's Egret II Mini via the Arcade Memories Vol. 2 expansion card, the arcade original hasn't seen wide distribution on modern hardware until now.

Both versions launching tomorrow include the standard Hi-Score and Caravan modes alongside online leaderboards and CRT display filters. The $9.99 Arcade Archives 2 release on Switch 2, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S adds a dedicated Time Attack mode, though I'm not convinced a single extra mode justifies the two-dollar markup on newer consoles.