Ridiculous Fishing EX is a perfect arcade remix

polygon.com:

Vlambeer’s Ridiculous Fishing — formerly known as Radical Fishing — has already had one unlikely rebirth. The Dutch duo of arcade specialists was still in the process of turning their Flash game Radical Fishing into a fleshed-out version for iOS when they were gazumped by the launch of a hit clone on the App Store… and then another… and then another. One of them, Ninja Fishing, was a big hit. But Vlambeer persevered, turning the fight against clones in the mobile gaming Wild West into a cause célèbre for the indie developer community, and eventually released Ridiculous Fishing into instant-classic status in 2013.

Ten years later, Ridiculous Fishing needed another save. The game hadn’t been updated since 2017 and had compatibility issues with modern devices, but Vlambeer had disbanded in 2020. What to do? Enter Apple Arcade. Apple’s mobile gaming subscription service offered Vlambeer an opportunity to get the band — Rami Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman, plus collaborators Zach Gage (SpellTower) and Greg Wohlwend (Threes!) — back together for one last job: reworking their mobile stalwart in time for its 10th anniversary.

The result, Ridiculous Fishing EX, belongs to that special class of remakes that play exactly as the original does in your memory; only when you compare them side by side do you realize how far advanced the new incarnation is. Wohlwend’s distinctively angular art has been completely redrawn in 3D without losing any of its chunky, irreverent style. The game’s silly world of bizarro marine life and heavily armed sport fishing has been fleshed out via the medium of an in-universe TikTok parody. And there’s an expanded new game plus mode. But best of all, there’s a new, competitive daily challenge mode — the Pro