Following the not-so-exciting release of Kitten Kaboodle last week, this week's Arcade Archives reissue isn't all that more interesting, with Hamster revealing it will be bringing the 1984 Success title Othello to PS4 and Nintendo Switch on February 20th.
Truth to be told, there's not really a whole lot we can say about the game without really stretching things out and wasting everyone's time, but we will quickly go over the premise and rules just in case you've somehow never heard of Othello before and need a quick explanation.
The game basically pits two players against each other, with each person taking turns to place light and dark discs onto empty squares in an 8x8 grid. Whenever you place a piece, the goal is to outflank the opponent's piece and flip it over, switching it over to your own colour of choice and potentially causing chain reactions across the board.
Here's an official description of the game, from Hamster:
"Othello" is a game of Reversi released by SUCCESS in 1984. The rules are extremely simple while still requiring widely varied strategies, for fun and depth independent of luck. This title includes features to help players practice and learn strategies, such as to evaluate your moves or to undo moves once made."
Looking at the English video uploaded to the Hamster YouTube channel, it seems like the game has mostly been left untouched, with the footage still showing Japanese text.
This shouldn't be much of a problem though, if you do decide to pick it up, with the text on the right of the screen being pretty easy to understand if you have a basic understanding of katakana and hiragana. The text reading "コンピューター" simply means "computer" and appears next to a count of the number of white pieces on the board, while the row below it translates to "You" and logs how many black pieces are on the board.
Unless you're a really big fan of the company Success or a huge strategy fan, we imagine this is probably one you will want to skip out on.
Luckily, next week's release is a bit more action-packed, with Hamster having previously revealed last week that it is planning to release Taito's Dead Connection across PS4 & Switch on February 27th.