Yet another Sega legacy line is dead. Can't wait for Sega Platinum in two years to rerelease the same batch of Master System/Genesis games again while ignoring the Saturn and Dreamcast. Welp, let's pour one out for the Sonic ports with their weird 1 level time trials :specialed: good work pointlessly reinventing the wheel there M2.
Huh. I just picked up Virtua Racing last month. I'm thinking about the Panzer Dragoon remake at the moment. I don't know why but I feel like Sonic The Fighters or Burning Rangers could have fit nicely into the library of "quirky Switch-exclusive Sega lineup". I was always baffled as to why it wasn't multiplatform from the start, considering the younger-skewed target audience of the Switch compared to, well, the Sega Ages lineup.
The SEGA AGES line up had some great features added to games, but it still felt like SEGA was just regurgitating the same 80s and early 90s games that they always do, so there was very little that was actually interesting to me. And the entire catalogue of SEGA re-releases is so messy too. We got a typical Mega Drive collection on PS4/XB1, but the Switch didn't get that and instead got the AGES line exclusively. That is until the Switch did get that collection which included a few duplicates of existing AGES games, although they were entirely separate ports. And the other consoles and PC are still missing out on all the arcade and other games in the AGES line. I'm going to be blunt here; I really don't care to visit SEGA's library of old arcade, Master System or Mega Drive games at all anymore. I'm so over it. Does SEGA really have zero interest at all in re-releasing their Saturn, Dreamcast and early third-party games? Skies if Arcadia? The PS2 Shinobi games? Jet Set Radio Future (or at least the original on Switch)? We all know that Shenmue ports only happened because Shenmue 3 was being released, and not by SEGA.
I would say SEGA is still trying to appeal to the Genesis and Master System audience with their SEGA AGES stuff because they'll keep buying, plus it's a decent audience. I get that, but I also don't get why they aren't trying to re-release the Saturn/Dreamcast games when the opportunity is waiting and is in their best interests to do it. Hell, remake one of those games and you'd see nostalgic fans of that game buying them like hotcakes.
Shame. I've been interested in the Phantasy Star games, but their age has kept me from playing them, and the Switch version of the first game having the "Very Easy" difficulty from the Japan only PS2 collection seemed like a good way to ease the pain (especially with Phantasy Star 2, I've heard stories), so I was hoping all four games would get the same treatment. Now I'd have to buy the second game on Steam, where there's a fan patch to achieve the same effect, and hope that someone will make patches for 3 and 4 with the "x4 EXP and money" modifier.
If you have a PS3, you can buy Phantasy Star Collection on the Japanese PSN. It has the English versions.
They could've brought back the AGES 2500 series of games. Or so I think... Despite being budget works, they felt a bit different from usual classic ports. And some people might've spent money on them, even if only for curiosity. But, oh well, it's SEGA, nothing coming from them ever surprises me again...
Yea, but that requires making a Japanese PSN account and buying Japanese PSN cards, which is a lot of trouble for this one game. On the bright side, it looks like there are tools that allow you to edit enemy stats for Phantasy Star 3 and 4, so if I want to spend an afternoon each manually changing them, I could theoretically make the patches myself. EDIT: Oh, and it looks like there's already a hack for 4 that does that. It's just only on the Steam Workshop and not romhacking.net, the total opposite of the 2 hack.
Ya Sega needs a more concrete plan for these legacy lines. There are too many methods and they're all over the place. Plus it's so much extra work for Sega. How many ports/rereleases of Sonic 2 have they made this console generation, 3, 4 if you count the 3DS? At least Sega Forever was smart enough to use the Taxman versions. And how many times do they expect us to buy the same games? I feel like they should move to a Nintendo esq online service where you pay whatever a month or year and then you get access at least to Sega's pre Saturn line up. So I guess Sega forever without the ad bullshit and all through one multiplatform app. Please though, no more Genesis collections.
It's so weird how they've been avoiding their Saturn/Dreamcast stuff until pretty recently. They've got plenty of cult classic titles, so it can't be that much of a risk to port some of them. If anything, it was more of a risk to keep releasing the same 30+ year old arcade and Genesis titles over and over again and hoping it'll keep selling forever.
Panzer Dragoon Remake is not part of the Ages line. It's still only out on Switch (at least, not yet on Steam). Sega Ages is dead. Long Live Sega Ages.
I don't see that as a good option. The more subscription services there are for games, the more expensive it becomes to bother with games all together.
Don't you think that the lack of Saturn/Dreamcast releases is simply due to the fact that games for these consoles are significantly harder to get running on modern hardware than SMS/MD ones? With 8 and 16-bit games you just use an emulator, hack some features in and you're done. The Saturn on the other hand, is much harder to emulate accurately, and there are a lot of things about the low resolution 3D that would be hard to pass off today, so they usually have to port the games from source, which is much more time-consuming. The same goes for the Dreamcast, which would take pretty powerful hardware to emulate smoothly (and SEGA themselves probably don't even have proper emulators for these machines), so the only viable option is, again, to port from source, which's way more expensive to do. I don't think this has anything to do with the games themselves, they just don't want to shell out the cash necessary to make proper ports of Saturn/Dreamcast games, it's much cheaper to just use SMS/MD emulators.
To be this good takes literally forever SEGA AGES on Switch sucked IMO. Only good that came out of it was English-language SMS games with FM Synth support
The issue with the Saturn and the Dreamcast is that they're notoriously difficult to emulate. Porting the games would take a lot more time and money, which they're clearly not interested in doing.
That's a given for some games, particularly the Saturn ones, but not all. It's a massive shame, because there are so many fantastic games being left to rot. And I can't help but think that the image of SEGA re-releasing the same old games over and over again is going to be at the front of many peoples' minds. I've seen too many people write off AGES as just more Sonic 1, Golden Axe, Altered Beast and other Mega Drive games, because that's the image that SEGA had built up for themselves.
Too bad. I never expected much out of this version of AGES but I was at least hoping to get Fantasy Zone 2. Guess my 3DS is still good for something lmao