A note on the Ziggurat MAME games:
you can play some for free on Antstream Arcade and I have played Joe & Mac with some nice features time ago:
there are challenges like winning the boss battles in sequence with one coin and such.
I wouln'd mind buying them for much less or if they included extra features - like manual saves at least, challenges, online coop, extras or anything that would make it better. As they are sold now, they are too poor editions to justify the price IMHO.
For now I'll play Wizard Fire on Antstream, and I think the right price should be 1 euro or so for such an old arcade without extra features. At least the Metal Slug games here have stage select, cloud saves and achievements, and I think it should be the least for such kind of release.

The site I visit for MAME roms has the Korean 1.3 version of Night Slashers listed as the main file (at 8.12MB), with the much smaller US 1.2 revision (1.02MB) basically just adding some files to the Korean version. So yeah, they likely just got lazy, grabbed the one that can be played already without doing anything, and then called it a day. But, here's something interesting.

I checked out Gate of Doom that's on GOG. All Ziggurat really did was use Dark Seal (World revision 3), took out two files from it and added two files from Gate of Doom (US revision 4), renamed the file extensions for some odd reason, and called it a day. I can recreate the rom they used, using the Dark Seal/Gate of Doom zip files I mentioned and it works in the emulator Ziggurat uses for their Gate of Doom release. The only difference is the file sizes (Ziggurat's are smaller).

Basically, they're just using MAME roms that they renamed a bit. The problem then becomes how to get the emulator to run a different version, because it seems to be looking for region specific files when it runs (and only those specific files). You can't just take the "darkseal.zip" file for MAME and rename it to "gatedoom.zip" and have it run, because the game crashes in Ziggurat's emulator if you do (even if you rename the file extensions as well). However, you can combine all of the files within the "darkseal.zip" and "gatedoom.zip" I mentioned for MAME, leave the file names and extensions alone, and rezip it all into a new "gatedoom.zip" file that will play in the Ziggurat emulator just fine. So it seems the emulator doesn't care about extra files, as long as the ones it's coded to look for are there .

So it seems like Ziggurat would have to rework part of their emulation package so that it looked for the files needed to run the US version of Night Slashers. But, that also means that someone with a good knowledge of how to get into the files could potentially do the same.

Interesting! The weirdness of decisions made when re-releasing arcade games never seizes to amaze me.

We don't want the US version though, since it is still censored even if there is a toggle to partially uncensor some aspects of it.

Rather, Ziggurat needs to release the fully 100% uncensored Japanese version.

Or else this game is going to flop hard. But maybe they don't care if it does, since apparently they didn't put in any effort or money into releasing it anyway.

Nice additions but as mentioned above Ziggurat should be putting more effort into these releases.

I've initially thought that this remaster(remake?) version of North & South is the game from 2012 (and was surprised, why price was so increased).

But it turns out that there was another version, released in 2020, again changing mini-games for train & fort missions. Plus they've changed control during battles, this time coming back to the control from original game.