Delightful treat of a port (WITH A FEW VERY ANNOYING ISSUES THAT PEOPLE SHOULD KNOW BEFORE BUYING!@!!)- The slowdown feels much better and the input latency is massively improved, both huge issues with the 360 port this was based on. The new m2 style gadgets are complete game changers and im in love with them also. Breathe a sigh of relief.. It pretty much checks all the boxes for a good port, but there are some specific issues that i haven't seen other reviews mention that are super sad to discover.

This would have been the perfect way to forever leave that ungodly inaccurate double pack on xbox in the past, but this port makes a massive mistake in removing all slowdown from the 360 arranges and removing matsuri. Scoring won't be doable for both modes and its an insane oversight, but hopefully they'll go in and attempt to program some back in like they did with akai katana, along with maybe cleaning up the visuals a bit. Even with smoothing off mame does these games more justice visually.

My personal biggest gripes are the lack of 4:3 support and NO BOSS PRACTICE AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is so beyond infuriating. There is no reason why this can't be patched in i hope, because the thought of having to play through all of Pink sweets stage 6 for boss practice makes me shudder. Ill just go back to my mister setup, but having an in-built option for it with all of the specific contextual toggles for options, rank, power etc is 1000000x more convenient, and i hate using mame savestates personally. I dont like akai katana anyways but atleast for deathsmiles 1+2 jitterbug on death mode was the only time i really felt the pain of repeated stage 5 runs in practice, but for these two games and especially pink sweets this is such an insane exclusion when each fight is filled with so many breakables milks mechanics etc etc.

Hopefully the slowdown for arrange can be added, along with boss practice. If not that then just import that akai katana replay takeover feature , ill do anything..................... And i almost forgot its also such a huge shame the 360 arranged tracks are gone too. I can't see a reason why they were axed. Aside from those issues its just as solid of a port as their other work.Thank you for bringing these Lovely Ah Games to steam and hopefully more people can understand how good they are despite them being overlooked by alot of people

the good:

-arcade accurate slowdown for both games (in arcade mode)
-new gadgets to keep track of various things, which matter a lot in these games (especially boss HP)
-input lag feels good

the bad:

-***NO SLOWDOWN FOR THE ARRANGE MODES.*** why? if the developers bothered to improve the slowdown for arcade, why couldn't they do the same for arrange? this is a personal deal breaker
-no Matsuri mode for Muchi muchi pork, previously a pre-order/first print bonus on xbox 360
-xbox 360 arrange ost is absent and replaced with new "boosted" ost which is just the same arcade tracks, just composed with different instruments. the 360 arranges were better as they took liberties and were more varied
-can't download replays off the leaderboards. we could do it in deathsmiles, we could do it in akai katana, why not here?
-specific to pink sweets arrange mode's score attack course, the infinite hadou gun glitch (which was essential for scoring) was fixed
-supposedly there's other minor bugs here and there that i heard from other players, haven't tested enough yet

i'm only recommending this because, as always, more modern re-releases of old shmups are nice, it's just that city connection ALWAYS forgets one thing preventing them from becoming the definitive versions of these games

Keyboard is supported, idk why the steam page says otherwise.