Rock N’ Roll is free if you want it
Nintendo isn’t the only company with an extensive back catalog of retro classics. Sega was also hot during the ’90s and their portfolio of titles is nearly as ubiquitous with retro gamers as the Big N’s. While Sega has never shied away from porting these tiles (how many platforms is Sonic the Hedgehog on?), their newest initiative seems like a bold move to get people playing.
Enter Sega Forever, a push to make the entirety of Sega’s back catalog available for free on mobile. I’m sure most of you have tuned out after that word, but Sega promises to bring controller support along with a small fee ($1.99) to eliminate advertisements in each game, should you wish to flat out own them. They are also not limiting the selection of titles to Genesis games, making mention of Dreamcast in the press release (Dreamcast games will be ports instead of emulation).
Sega is also looking to update some of these classics with new features. While multiplayer will be limited to wifi connectivity at launch, Sega will be pushing out support for 3G and 4G networks to really open up the player pool. There will be cloud saving (local saves if you pay), leaderboards to compare scores and achievements (oh joy) to unlock.
The games will be headed to Android and iOS and should be updated with a new game every two weeks. While that seems fairly slow, at the price of free, I can deal with a wait. It still beats Nintendo’s drip feed of Virtual Console titles that makes no sense. Oddly, though, each game is a separate app, so the Sega Forever branding seems more like a marketing gimmick.
Hopefully we get some rarer titles on that list, because it would be a shame to stick with only big name titles that everyone has played.
