GSK

After years of requests, Taito's secret-riddled vertical platformer Rainbow Islands has finally made its way to Arcade Archives, and with the Extra revision thrown in to boot. As expected, the ever-troublesome main BGM (which "interpolated" Over The Rainbow) has been replaced, but in a more elegant fashion than reissues past, which have simply dummied out the track, or disabled the melody line in the emulator, or completely replaced the music (as with the version on the recent Egret II Mini, which just drops in a tune from Bubble Bobble): for this release, they've replaced the original BGM with the legally-distinct alteration originally written for the Taito-developed NES port, now properly arranged for the arcade board's YM2151 sound chip by former Zuntata member Yukiharu Urita. This solution was also used for the Rainbow Islands Extra reissue included on the Genesis Mini 2, but this arrange sounds a little less drag-and-drop, and I can't imagine a better alternative going forward.

Hamster tends to go above and beyond for fan-favourite titles, and Rainbow Islands is no exception; they've added some optional enhancements in the game settings menu, which are as follows:

• Improved input response: strictly speaking, the game registers inputs fairly quickly but isn't consistent on precisely how/when the player-character will visually react to an input, so this setting attempts to make the game respond immediately on button press. (I haven't tried this, but there's a disclaimer that it may be a little screwy.)
• Auto-enter hidden commands: Allows you to automatically start the game with any one of the ~dozen secret bonus commands activated, which otherwise have to be manually entered on the title screen. Surprisingly, you can use most of 'em in high-score/caravan modes, too. (HINT's disabled for both modes, and the dollar/continue codes are disabled in caravan mode.)
• Visual confirmation of hidden command entry: Fairly straightforward image/text pop-up upon successful entry of a code.
• Rainbow Special appearance modifier: By default, the super-powerful Rainbow Special item (aka the "MTJ Ball") only appears after every 33rd credit, but you can set it to appear by default if you like. (This setting also works in Extra, but Extra's hard-coded to disable the effects of the MTJ Ball, so it won't actually do anything; it's not an option for high-score/caravan mode.)
• 'Recreation of message text": I don't know what this specifically alters (as most of the in-game text is conditional and I certainly cannot blaze through Rainbow Islands on a whim), but I believe it simply lets you play with either typo-corrected in-game messages or the original text.

They've also added an extra on-screen indicator, as depicted in the attached screenshot: at the press of a button (ZR/L2 by default), you can toggle coloured lines that indicate the screen sectors that determine the colour of the diamond generated upon crushing enemies under a rainbow—for the unaware, collecting all seven diamonds (generally, and also in specific colour sequences) is a major part of scoring and uncovering secrets, and knowing precisely how to generate the required diamonds is required in order to see the final worlds of the game, so this visual indicator is surely going to help a lot of people experience parts of this game that they never saw or knew about in arcades (or at home, as most of the ports excised a lot of the back-end content). The manual also offers a ton of info on the specifics of all the items and power-ups, as well as the secret commands; it doesn't offer a complete breakdown, but it certainly divulges a lot more info than any of the other home versions ever did.

Of course, you can enjoy the game without utilising or acknowledging any of the scoring mechanics, and I suspect that a lot of people would have more fun that way—a lot of people would tell you that knowing Rainbow Islands ultimately leads to hating Rainbow Islands, after all.

A certain Taito rep made a customary appearance on Hamster's Arcade Archives Rainbow Island launch stream last week—they'd been taking questions online in the leadup to the stream, so they came prepared with a lot of info and trivia, including select planning/dev documents written by the late Fukio "MTJ" Mitsuji (archive here).

As part of the rundown of the various home versions, they shared some info on Rainbow Islands Extra for Sega Genesis, the North American version of the 1990 Japanese Mega Drive port that was advertised in the US in '91 but never released, but unearthed (with a much later copyright date) and released in 2022 via the Genesis Mini 2. Put simply, the cartridge release was cancelled but Taito ended up dredging it up again in 1994; their presumption was that it was submitted to Sega of America for release via Sega Channel, but they can't confirm whether it ever actually hit the service.

The Genesis and Mega Drive versions are virtually identical, with one obvious difference: the Mega Drive port uses the original arcade version of the main theme, whereas the Genesis version was altered by Taito themselves to use the NES-compliant version of the BGM at some point (before the planned '91 release? during the '94 resubmission? who knows!). Of course, when it came to including the game on the Genesis Mini 2, they had to contend with the JP Mega Drive version having different music, and so M2's Tatsuhiko Kasuga ended up modifying the JP version to also include NES-compliant BGM—not by importing the data from the Genesis version, but by producing their own arrange, so if you happen to own a Genesis Mini 2, you can A/B both versions (by changing the language settings of the device) and experience ever-so-slightly-different takes on the same tune.

I have a little unexpected downtime right now so what the hell: a quick translation of a twxttxr thread by Yukiharu Urita on their ACA Rainbow Islands arrangement, and how they approached the idea of staying faithful to the original arcade tune while fulfilling the task of transparently not including the original melody:

As a major long-time fan of this game and its music, as I observed the history of the various ports until now, I thought to myself, "if they absolutely had to replace this tune, they could've at least gone about it like this..." To be frank, I have quite a fundamentalist attitude (to put it bluntly) towards the original music; I recognise this about myself, and I'd be lying if I said I felt otherwise.

I was specifically tasked with replacing the "A-melody", but because my instructions were to adopt the melody from the NES version, while keeping that at the forefront, I tried to align everything to match the feel and approach of the existing song and the original written parts: the specific phrasing, the groove, the FM tones, the particular use of the driver, etc. Given the direction I arrived on ("adapt the replacement melody while maintaining the original elements of the original tune"), this version doesn't offer any drastic arrangements over the original—I created the track to follow the original tune to the extent that one might think, "maybe this is a tune from a loc-test version back in 1987?"

Even though I've claimed the track is completely based on the arcade original, from a musical perspective, the fact that the melody was different meant that the overall dimensions of the track had to change, which therefore meant that the structure of the chords (but not the chords themselves) were modified, as well as the rhythm of the bassline and other backing. Additionally, when it came to the elements present in the other iterations of the NES tune, we left out anything that deviated from the basic tenets of four-part harmony or that clashed with the image of the original tune. The alterations were quite modest, so if you listen to it and think, "what even changed here?", I consider that a success.

In addition to the authentic YM2151 (OPN) chip, I worked with a YM2164 (OPP) OPM-compatible chip and a few different emulator-based 2151 software synths. I also paid special attention to making sure the tonality of the main theme wouldn't stray too far from the other songs that were to be played back via emulation. I feel there are some subtle differences in the playback of actual YM2151 hardware vs. emulated 2151 (related to non-linear modulation, which I haven't quite pinpointed), and I think that these cause the grooves to be slightly different when played via emulation.

This has been a long post, and you might read statements like "this could've appeared on location in 1987" and think, "what is this guy talking about?", but as fellow Rainbow Islands fan, I'd be happy if you could enjoy this "melody-replaced version", imbued with my own personal idealism, as fellow Rainbow Island fans.