Cannon Dancer - Osman (Nintendo Switch)

An arcade legend that spent decades in the shadows finally has a home on your Switch. Cannon Dancer, known as Osman in the West, arrives on Nintendo Switch as a Strictly Limited Games edition capped at 4,000 individually numbered copies worldwide. This is the first time this 1996 arcade classic has ever been ported to a modern console, and it comes with a colorful game manual tucked into the case.

The game's history reads like collector folklore. Former Capcom employees left to join Mitchell Corp. and built what many consider Strider's secret sibling, a blistering action platformer with a Persian-Arabian aesthetic, psychedelic boss encounters, and movement mechanics that still feel ahead of their time. It was released in such tiny numbers across Japanese and US arcades that most players never laid hands on it. Original circuit boards command staggering sums on the secondary market. Fan communities have kept the torch burning for three decades through fan art and relentless searching for surviving cabinets.

Now Kirin the Cannon Dancer lives on a Switch cartridge you can carry in your pocket. The port includes rewind and save/load features for those of us who didn't grow up feeding quarters into the one cabinet that existed within a 500-mile radius. Six stages of exotic locations, three power-up types, and the kind of boss gauntlet that reminds you what arcade designers were capable of when they wanted your money one coin at a time.

This is a game that was almost lost to time. Owning the physical copy feels less like a purchase and more like an act of preservation.