PC Engine Classic Cho Aniki Returns in Steam Release
The Cho Aniki Collection arrives on Steam, bringing the PC Engine’s strangest shooters to modern players with rewind, sound and visual options. A cult slice of retro gaming history finally preserved for a new audience.
The legendary Cho Aniki Collection has finally landed on Steam, bringing one of retro gaming’s strangest, most beloved curiosities to PC at last.
This cult bundle collects Cho Aniki and Ai Cho Aniki, the infamous side-scrolling shooters from the PC Engine’s Super CD-ROM² era. Originally released in the early ’90s on NEC’s 16-bit hardware, these games quickly became underground favourites among import fans, not because they were the biggest or flashiest shooters on the system, but because there was absolutely nothing else like them. Muscular men firing lasers from their heads, protein as a power-up, and gloriously over-the-top presentation turned Cho Aniki into the definition of a “what on earth did I just play?” classic.
Credit: Steam
The Steam collection launches with a 10% discount at $44.99 (approx. £36 / €44.02, based on current exchange rates; check local retailers for exact pricing) until 2nd December, before returning to its standard $49.99 price point. That might sound punchy at first glance, but you are effectively getting a lovingly preserved slice of PC Engine history – the kind of thing that, until fairly recently, you either imported at great expense or experienced second-hand via magazine screenshots and whispered forum legends.
Originally developed by Masaya and published by NCS, Cho Aniki carved out a niche on the PC Engine as a horizontal shooter with surprisingly solid mechanics hidden beneath all the camp chaos. Tight hitboxes, satisfying power-ups and a CD-quality soundtrack by Koji Hayama helped it stand out even before you factored in the surreal art direction. Ai Cho Aniki followed a few years later, ramping up the colour, the animation, and the self-aware humour to levels that pushed it firmly into “cult kuso-ge” territory – the sort of knowingly absurd “so bad it’s brilliant” experience Japanese players still talk about today.
On Steam, these new ports – now handled by Edia – keep that original weird charm intact while adding modern conveniences that retro fans genuinely appreciate. You get Sound Mode to soak in the gloriously bombastic soundtrack, Visual Mode options to tweak the image to your liking, and, crucially, a Rewind feature. That last one is especially handy when the screen fills with enemy fire and you mistime a dodge, just like you did on the original hardware back in the day. It feels less like “making it easy” and more like giving players a respectful way to learn tricky patterns without burning through virtual continues.
The story, such as it is, remains as delightfully deranged as ever. In Cho Aniki, you’re thrown into a galactic protein crisis as Bo Emperor Bill, a bodybuilding champion turned villain, drains entire star systems to fuel his gains. Heaven responds by sending Idaten and Benten to stop him, assisted by the now-iconic floating beefcakes Samson and Adon. Ai Cho Aniki picks up two years later, shifting the spotlight to Samson and Adon themselves as they take centre stage to battle a new threat in the Builder Star System. It’s part space opera, part gym advert gone wrong, and entirely unlike any other shooter series out there.
For players who grew up with the PC Engine, or who discovered it later through the import scene, Virtual Console, mini consoles or Project EGG – this collection feels like a small victory for retro game preservation. Cho Aniki and Ai Cho Aniki have already seen renewed life on Nintendo Switch, first in Japan and then worldwide, but the Steam release finally gives PC players an official, convenient way to experience these once-obscure oddities without emulation tinkering or expensive discs.
From a broader retro gaming perspective, Cho Aniki is a reminder of just how experimental that era could be. While other shooters chased military realism or sci-fi drama, Masaya went all-in on bizarre character design, dense parallax backdrops, wild bosses, and a tone that veers between genuinely cool and completely unhinged from moment to moment. Decades later, when so many games blend into one another, that kind of bold, unapologetic identity is exactly what keeps players coming back.
If you love digging into the weirder corners of gaming history – the imports you used to see in tiny magazine sidebars, the games that made your mate say “you have to see this to believe it” – the Cho Aniki Collection on Steam is absolutely worth a look. It’s challenging, it’s camp, it’s gloriously daft, and it’s another important win for getting classic, once-niche titles legally and conveniently onto modern hardware.
