With digital storefronts quickly aging out of business and retailers literally binning unsellable physical media, the topic of video game preservation is front-of-mind for many in the modern day. Putting aside how you might feel about their business model, one group doing respectable work in the field is Limited Run Games, which has put its mouth where its money is with the Carbon Engine – an internally developed, multi-platform tool designed to bridge the game between emulated classics and modern hardware and interfaces. It aims to offer a best-of-both-worlds outcome, presenting retro games with as much accuracy as possible while also embellishing them with up-to-date features and extras.
We’ve already seen the Carbon Engine in action with games like Shantae and River City Girls Zero, but Tombi! is definitely one (aside from Gex, of course) that I’ve been hanging to finally revel in the nostalgia of.
First released on the PS1 in 1997/98, Tomba! (known as Tomba! or Ore! Tomba in other regions) often goes all-too underrepresented in conversations about classic platformers, despite being a fresh and fairly innovative release at the time. I won’t spend too many words on the quality of the game itself – there’s nearly three decades of material out there on it – but playing it back I’m consistently surprised at how well it’s held up. It is, in a lot of ways, an open-world, mission-based RPG presented as a 2.5D platformer with controls, mechanics and gameplay shifts that seem utterly bizarre for about your first 30 minutes of play and then positively delightful thereafter. It’s scrappy in a way that probably didn’t help it compete with your Marios and Sonics of the time, but that just adds to the charm.
In terms of gameplay updates in this re-release, it’s very minimal, no doubt owing to LRG’s desire to keep the original experience preserved and intact. There are some added menus and in-game overlays with various options, but in the moment it’s pretty much identical to the 90s version. You’ve got the option of using analogue controls to move the titular, pink-haired hero around though, which is nice to have in a game where the foreground and background regularly trade importance.
Easily the most revelatory gameplay change in this version of the game is the ability to save your game at any point, rather than having to inconvenience yourself to go and find a signpost to save the original way. Anyone who’s been around any kind of emulation in the past would already be familiar with the idea of save states, of course, but it’s welcome nonetheless. It’s also particularly neat that using the game’s native save posts brings you to the same menu as the new save function, so you’re not running an “official” and “unofficial” file – it’s all integrated. Having access to a quick rewind is similarly handy for those mistimed jumps or frustrating sections, although Tomba! has always been fairly forgiving.
In terms of how it’s all presented, it’s very much mission accomplished on offering something that’s accurate to the original release (at least as far as my memory and a bit of research takes me) while keeping it nice for modern displays. You’ve got the option of playing a raw, unfiltered display or toggling some aspect ratio/CRT filter stuff to achieve a look more aligned to your tastes. That authenticity does come with some pitfalls, like the frequent, long load screens between areas that are just as disruptive now as they were nearly 30 years ago. All of the pre-rendered cutscenes appear to have had as much upscaling done as is reasonably possible but, expectedly, they still look pretty dated and low-quality.
The game’s soundtrack has probably had the most attention with a full-scale re-recording in its entirety by one of the original composers, Harumi Fujita. Fujita has done a fantastic job of recreating the game’s tunes to be much fuller and more dynamic without losing a lot of the charm – though I did find myself pining for the goofy MIDI voices in some of the OG tracks. Luckily, you can swap between the original and remastered versions at will.
Aside from everything in-game, this Special Edition of Tombi! also packs in a bunch of bonus “Museum” type content including some really early design docs and sketches, high-quality scans of covers, manuals and even some deeply weird Japanese magazine ads.
There’s also a bit of “development footage” which includes a pre-release promo reel and an extremely short but hilariously disarming cutscene concept, though more interesting are a series of interview snippets with creator Tokuro Fujiwara and composer Harumi Fujita about the conception and creation of the game. These are certainly worth watching, even if the presentation of them is a bit barebones with some Windows Movie Maker-level title cards, and a good way to get some context around the game as it was in the 90s before jumping back in or giving it a go for the first time.
Overall I wouldn’t say the extra stuff isn’t exactly essential, but it’s a decent enough value add for anyone looking to plonk down $25 on this re-release digitally or a $60-100 for the LRG physical versions – either option a steal compared to the hundreds of dollars for an original copy.