This is most disturbing. Anyone with more knowledge than me care to explain how things may play out if SEGA says sod it and rereleases them anyway? Could they not argue that the publishing rights are not being enforced and as the IP owner they should have the right to reissue a game that otherwise would not see the light of day? Like, nobody benefits by this game languishing like this.
If they are, they're going about it a weird way. Knuckles Chaotix -> The Chaotix are regular characters now who appear in several places right now SegaSonic -> Mighty and Ray being added to Mania with huge fanfare Sonic R -> Literally gets a high-profile remix in TSR by the dude who wrote it Sonic 3D Blast -> most of Sonic Adventure's OST Sonic Advance -> Cream is a regular character Sonic Rush -> Blaze is even more of a regular character than Cream is Fighters -> literally being put into Lost Judgement with a ton of fanfare Kind of hard to assume they've "forgotten" or want people to "forget" these titles when they keep reminding us of them. As opposed to straight malice, honestly I think it's just a matter of costs vs profit...and there isn't a whole lot to be had in this part of the fanbase, especially when some of the "obscure" games aren't very good. Sonic R has a PC port that was used as the basis of its release in Gems Collection, but like most ports of older games around that time, it means it's missing a lot of its fancy visual effects that used quirks of the hardware.
The problem is that there is almost certainly SOMEONE who owns the rights to the THQ name or whatever and will be a roadblock to squeeze cash from SEGA, even if they literally just own the name from it being auctioned off during their bankruptcy.
Interestingly enough, Sonic Advance got rereleased on Wii U VC, but only in Japan, where THQ didn't publish the game. So yeah, it does seem to be some sort of licensing issue holding those games up. SEGA isn't gonna wanna risk it for such little profit. But yea, I don't think SEGA is trying to hide anything, they just wanna get the most money for the least amount of work, which just means rereleasing the same most popular stuff over and over.
Sonic Advance is interesting. It came out on WiiU and Android but only in Japan. However, back in the day, it was released as Sonic N, by Sega which had nothing to do with THQ. In Europe, Advance also had nothing to do THQ, as it was published by Infogrames, which eventually rebranded as Atari, which is still around, and yet, the WiiU/Android version didn’t come out in Europe.
(Knuckles) Chaotix is one strange situation. It’s like the original game was retconned, but we’re still given a familiar name just because. It needs to exist in the rerelease continuum. I beat it ages ago out of curiously thanks to running the rom in Gens and using savestates.
Frankly, I do not see why SEGA would want to re-release a bunch of pretty average at best games. The game gear titles are pretty middling, the 2D nintendo portable exclusives are a bit of a mess, and the Rivals games are just...completely forgettable and average. Almost no one has nostalgia for anything but the Advance and Rush series and the former is in licensing hell and the latter is so inextricably wedded to the DS's 2D screens that porting them would be tricky (also the second one is not good lmao). Now, Sonic Battle? THAT is a very good game that SEGA is just absolutely actively refusing to acknowledge in any way. But it is extremely obscure (frankly, I'm certain the only people who even played it were people like me who were kids at the time and begged their parents for every Sonic game XD, because the older crowd here seems to not care about it at all), so yeah. Heroes has a terrible PC port that would require a whole new port, frankly, and Shadow would have to be ported. Not worth it for such critically maligned games. Same goes for Unleashed. You'll note that SEGA only started regularly providing simultaneous PC releases when they were doing much better reviews-wise. Dragging down their 2021 or 2022 metacritic average with a Shadow/Unleashed/06/whatever port sounds like a bad idea, frankly.
Heroes wasn't largely maligned, it just reviewed worse than Adventure 2 did on the Dreamcast (which was rated extremely highly upon release, but got treated much more harshly by many of the same publications on Gamecube). It was Shadow onward that Sonic's real "bad game" reputation began with the general public. Reviewers were just hard on SA2B, Heroes, and SADX for a mix of reasons that weren't entirely deserved. Most players still enjoyed the games and gameplay itself at the time. They just made "Sonic's crappy friends" memes and mocked the voice acting. Heroes really does need a new port, frankly. It's a main entry that is generally fondly remembered by most fans who weren't bashing it just because it wasn't 2D.
Off-topic, but I really want Sega to be brave and try a third Storybook game. For what it's worth, Cream is essentially a Heroes (i.e. mainline) character, and she was put into Advance 2 as a teaser.
Sonic Battle I played but to me the gameplay is like pretty much any fighter - you go to opponent and spam buttons until you win, unless you die first. The fact you have to keep playing over and over again with each and every character is also the reason why I never finished it - I didn't care enough about the story to keep going after something like the 8th loop through. Also, speaking as someone who bought Heroes on launch day and came to this conclusion very quickly - it's not a great game at all.
Heroes is an ok game. It's not as great as some other Sonic games, but at the very least it's competent enough in it's design and execution.
I personally would argue it isn't - there's a few bloody awful levels in there, the one with the rising vertical lava column springs to mind... but this isn't a thread about Heroes, really.
Once a PC port with flaws like that makes its way into the re-release stream, it can take a very long time to return to a faithful version of the console original. Look at Halo, for example. Gearbox's 2003 PC port missed some of the Xbox's graphical effects, but that PC version was later used as the basis for Halo Anniversary on the 360, which then used as the basis for Master Chief Collection. It's only now that the MCC version is being updated to get it closer to the Xbox original - an update that was presumably prompted by the series' upcoming 20th anniversary. And that's a game that had the advantages of: originating on hardware (the original Xbox) that - unlike the the Saturn - is reasonably similar to what's used today (x86 CPU, Nvidia GPU, DirectX). being supported by companies with immense financial resources (MS, Saber Interactive, 343 Industries). being in a series that's more widely popular than anything on the Saturn. If it's taken that long for a game with those advantages to get faithfully recreated, I don't think we can expect Sega to ensure that any future re-release of Sonic R is closer to the Saturn original than to its PC ports. Sega have made the effort to port from Saturn in the past (e.g. NiGHTS: Saturn 1996 -> PS2 2006 -> HD 2012), and are generally good when it comes to faithful (or genuinely improved) ports of old arcade games (e.g. Daytona USA on Xbox 360; M2's Switch version of Virtua Racing). But for the Sega of 2021 to return to the Saturn to do a conversion from scratch of a game that has already been ported to PC? That might be too much to ask!
The PC version of Sonic R is better overall. It has four player versus and alternate weather/time of day.
Just to be clear here, if you're referring to the Saturn mode the remakes have, It's pretty much a model swap out with the new game engine rather than a direct port. I'm not sure of the specifics regarding its development, but I'm pretty sure the remake was done from scratch using the original game only as reference. It's not really a great example when talking about direct Saturn ports. That's not to say it's not a great version of the game, but it's not 1:1.
Experiments don't guarantee continuation and I have no idea why people buy repackaged collections for the umpteenth time in the first place. tbh Sega is better at most when it comes to honoring their legacy and I've been paying enough attention to the Yakuza series to know experimental is alive and well. With that said make Seaman 3 happen. Yes I know about Leonard Nimoy, but I mean come on mannnn. I thought Battle was really fun, but it didn't really suck me in for replays. I think it had a solid core that needed to be better elaborated on. I'd argue its a series SEGA is sleeping on definitely, but not for a re release of the old ones.
What I meant by that chain of arrows was that in 2006, Sega went back to the Saturn version and converted it to a different console. Regardless of whether they did that by porting it, or by recreating it all from scratch, the point is that NiGHTS was moved off the Saturn and onto a different format for the first time.* Then when it was time to do the 2012 HD version, AFAIK they based it all on the PS2 version, instead of going back to the Saturn again. I was using it as an example of how Sega previously did conversions of games from the Saturn, but since then, if there's been a version released on a more familiar format (PC, PS2, etc), then it's the latter that will probably be used as the primary source for any future conversions. As for how similar the different versions of NiGHTS are: I've never played the PS2 version or looked closely at any Saturn/PS2 side-by-side comparisons, and though I have both the Saturn and 360/PC versions, I've never played them closely together. So the the main thing I can point to that's definitely not faithful to the original is that in the 2012 version, the bosses are either randomised or associated with their original levels - unlike the Saturn version, you can't choose to play the one with the easiest 2.0x multiplier (Puffy) every time! * Having said that... I just realised that there's an earlier playable official PC version of of NiGHTS that I've forgotten! Though I think it was emulation, not a conversion. I remember seeing this photo of Yuji Naka showing off it being played on a PC version in the early 2000s: He mentioned it in his 2010 NiGHTS fansite interview: http://www.nightsintodreams.com/?p=1343 That link https://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/20030321/sega.htm contains the photo above, and another one of it being played in a window on Windows XP: Google translation: I can't see anything about that 2003 PC release on the SegaRetro wiki article, and the B-Club doesn't have its own article but is mentioned in the page on the GiriGiri Saturn emulator. Does anyone know anything else about it?
