Cave's Muchi Muchi Pork and Pink Sweets bundle is out today

City Connection and Clear River Games have released Muchi Muchi Pork! & PinkSweets Boosted digitally for the PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC. The bundle includes two of Cave's most elusive mid-2000s arcade shooters, marking their first official release outside of Japan.

Both games were originally directed by Shinobu Yagawa. He's the programmer behind Raizing's Battle Garegga, and his style is distinct from the typical Cave bullet hell. Pink Sweets: Ibara Sorekara hit arcades in 2006 as a pastry-themed sequel to Ibara. It brings a brutal dynamic rank system that scales the difficulty up the longer you survive, forcing players to intentionally manage their power-ups. It also uses a variable charge-and-shield defense system instead of a traditional smart bomb.

Muchi Muchi Pork! followed in 2007. It's a bizarre cute 'em up where three girls ride flying militarized exercise bikes. The scoring revolves around a Lard Attack meter, which you build up to turn enemy drops into collectible pig medals. I'm curious how the Lard Attack system feels on a modern controller, since the original arcade boards are notoriously hard to track down.

Escaping the Xbox 360 import tax

Before today, playing either game at home meant finding the 2011 Xbox 360 compilation. Since that disc didn't leave Japan, it's become a wildly expensive import for Western collectors. I'm glad to see these titles finally escape the secondary market. Cave dominated Japanese arcades in the late 1990s and 2000s, but their back catalog has only recently started getting comprehensive global ports through partnerships with studios like M2 and City Connection.

City Connection has built a solid reputation for handling these types of archival releases. They started out managing the Jaleco catalog before pivoting to become one of Japan's premier arcade restoration studios, working on modern ports for games like Deathsmiles and Akai Katana.

Arranged modes and physical copies

The digital launch arrives alongside a new announcement trailer detailing the extras. The collection features arcade and arranged modes, along with online leaderboards.

The bundle also features arranged soundtracks, bringing modernized quality-of-life additions and new music to both classic shooters.