
Following the release of Sega Forever on smart devices last week, there were quite a lot of comments on social media decrying the quality of its emulation. Digital Foundry's John Linneman was perhaps one of the more vocal critics due to his years of experience in dealing with the technical aspects of game performance. Here's what he said at the time:
Expanding on this, Linneman went on to say:
The games are designed to run at 60 frames per second. This emulator tries to do that but drops frames resulting in something that looks more like ~45 fps or so. There are loads of dropped frames, hitches and skips, 30fps is bad, but an even, stable 30fps would have been better than this. The issue here is that it skips and stutters during gameplay. And when a notification occurs, it gets much worse. So it never plays smoothly.
A lot of our own readers appeared to share this experience too, re-enforcing the claim of poor emulation on the part of Sega. Keen to discuss this fan outcry, our chums over at Eurogamer recently spoke to Sega Networks' chief marketing officer Mike Evans to see how he felt the Sega Forever launch went.
Predictably, he's putting a bit of a brave face on it:
The launch itself has been really positive - if you look at the vast majority of feedback it's been strong, if you look at ratings on the app store from consumers there's definitely some very good sentiment as well. Is there room for improvement like anything? Yeah there is. It's a very ambitious project, and it's taken a long time to get to this point. The beauty with what we have with mobile is that it's an ongoing programme. And we've got lots of things planned as we go through, and we're going to keep on working on that quality. For the vast majority of our fans it's solid, but the specialist guys who are looking for the absolute epitome of quality, we're going to keep improving for those guys.
When challenged why powerful smart phones (such as iPhone 7) struggle to run an emulated 16-bit Mega Drive game, Evans went on to say:
It's difficult - a lot of the devices can run it fine, from the testing that we did. Within mobile there's a lot of fragmentation, if you look at all the different OSs, all the different devices - with mobile, as you go live, you get some feedback which you can't get within a sandbox environment. What we're doing is taking that and continue working on it, and try and get every instance of every OS in advance. Our soft launch wasn't as strong as it could have been maybe for some of the other apps, but this is a different campaign in that sense. What you're seeing is the tip of the iceberg, and now we've got some really good updates coming out soon which will address some of the challenges of the d-pad, some of the shading as well that we're looking at how to improve. It's just the start of things.
We're not sure that we buy the excuse of fragmentation, as a lot of retro classics have been emulated over the years on smart devices and we haven't quite seen this level of poor performance - well, except for with the woeful Mega Man Mobile perhaps.
Hop over to Eurogamer and check out the rest of the interview, and be sure to let us know what you think of the whole debacle with a comment below.
[source eurogamer.net]
Comments 88
Oh Sega
Screw mobile games and just release them on a Switch Virtual Console! wink wink
I love what they're trying to do, and there's certainly a market, especially since it's free. But poor execution. Come on. SEGA has literally nothing better to do. Make this work.
So rather than accept responsibility for the screw up that is Sega Forever, they're blaming people having different types of phones and OS?
You'd think this was unique to Sega, but most other developers manage to make apps work. In fact people have made emulators work perfectly fine.
I thought Sonic 1 played just fine on my Android; a Samsung Galaxy 3. The only thing I dislike cannot be fixed as easily; touch screen controls. I will just play my 3DS version.
why cant we do free ad based games on xbox.pc,nintendo,or playstation?
I have Sonic 1 on my Android device as a standalone app, and it honestly plays great.
Not really dying to play a bunch more old Sega titles on my phone, but on the Switch...sure!
@WhiteTrashGuy try playing phantasy star 2 where the controls cover the game text
Dear Sega, you want my money? Give me a Shining Force Compilation (1+2+3+CD) for my Switch and I gladly pay you 100€!
That's a very long-winded way to dance around the phrase 'It's a bit rubbish because we used Unity'.
There's so many OS's, blahblahblah... Idiots.
There's Android and there's IOS. If others can get it right, and even unofficial emulators, then a professional company bringing their OWN games to mobile should have no trouble whatsoever.
And what's all the BS about shaders? We're talking 8 and 16 bit games here. Easy as pie emulation.
They probably have to use de-shaders because of them using a Unity wrapper for whatever insane reason...
So in this case, and from their side, it's more something along the lines of: "If you look at the vast majority of delusion it's been strong"...
As mobile developers, they have a responsibility to ensure that every major configuration at minimum works as expected. The only excuse here are for edge cases like hardware at least two generations old. Mobile fragmentation is not an issue for many games with much more stringent hardware requirements, so this is not so much an excuse as an admission that they have failed to do this. If they were unable to optimize for many popular configurations for 16-bit emulation, it does not bode well at all for Saturn and Dreamcast emulation, which even unofficial efforts still lack in many respects.
I have trouble with their blaming the different operating systems. Sega has re-released plenty of their games, time and again, on both phones and consoles, with no issues. I find it harder to believe that they supposedly can't get it to run properly on iPhone, when you only have to account for one OS (iOS), and subtle upgrades in hardware. I think they just jumped the gun and released to soon.
For Cheapskater mindset Mobile gamers
....
....
....
Haha !
You are Not Lucky !
@ThanosReXXX
I feel bad for SEGA.
Dreamcast discontinued.
SEGA changed into 3rd party developer.
Now this trobules.
Sounds like mobile phones have reached ultimate parity with PCs - three OCs across the market plus multitude of brands, models and builds aaaaaaand no solid guarantee that this or that software will be optimized for run everywhere without issues. And yes, I find the reasoning credible, looking back at how my phone has lived through two Android version updates (the big ones - 6.0 and 7.0) and some of the apps routinely started acting weird for quite a while thereafter. Crashes, RAM gluttony... and it's just an OC update on the same model.
Frankly, something to say in favour of the "underpowered consoles" which offer relatively standardized hardware (although the midgen upgrades and Switch's different modes can complicate things to an extent, too).
I'm using an iphone 7 and Sonic CD is working prefect for me. Guess I'm just lucky?
Meh, I'll delete the game in a week because I dislike phone gaming anyway.
What a load of bare faced lies- there's putting a brave face on it, and there's blatant lying. This fits the latter.
How about accepting responsibility for the shambles? No? Okay. Just disregard all your customers as lying whiners? Yeah! Sega style...
Did Sega just cry 'Fake News'??
I don't know why anyone is surprised sega has sucked forever. Maybe they should make pachinko machines. Can't screw up the frame rate on pachinko.
Even my old LG Android phone running 2.2 Froyo perfectly emulated GBA games, which is much more powerful than the Genesis.
@Anti-Matter Huh?? Firstly, Sega themselves cancelled the Dreamcast because of their complete and utter incompetence in running a business. They didn't have it unjustly taken from them by sinister forces. Besides, that happened two decades ago- what on Earth does it have to do with this recent debacle?
Weird comment.
@crackafreeze Not anymore, Japanese people only play crappy ftp Anime puzzle games on their phones these days. Or pachinko machines, which is like feeding your pennies to a robotic goat, then watching said pennies disappear into the goat's digestive tract, never to emerge again.
Japan is terrible for gaming just now.
@AlexOlney How is Unity bad?
Just got a new cell phone over the weekend but I'm not touching these games at all.
@MegaVel91 Unity in and of itself isn't bad, but using it as a wrapper for making old Sega games work on smart devices is needlessly complicated and from all reports, isn't working all that good either...
Hope they work all the bugs out now so when this comes to Switch it'll (hopefully) run great.
I downloaded the Comix Zone one just to try it out, and the thing was set to 3-button mode. I've literally never tried to play Comix Zone with anything other than with a 6-button Mega Drive controller, and it just put me off that they didn't even get this basic detail right. I doubt I'll even play Mega Drive games on mobile anyway, there's no point. There's various collections of a bajillion Mega Drive games on Ps3 and the like, so just find a used copy of that somewhere.
I tried out comix zone and sonic 1 over the weekend and they played just fine on my phone, no slowdown or anything. Guess I have one of the lucky hardware/OS combos....
Well, if you plan on putting this stuff on any platform(s) other than the total casual-market smartphones, you'd better get that quality up to scratch for those people who do actually know the difference between just slapping some retro games on a phone with choppy framerates and crappy touch-controls--yes, I know you can use Bluetooth controllers too; but how many people actually do that--and actually giving them something that's near enough as good as the original experiences in all the ways that really matter.
This sentiment goes to who I feel about Nintendo's Virtual Console efforts too (particularly in light of the recent Wii U versions): If you're gonna do it then do it right--or prepare yourself for all the well-deserved bad sentiment and hate that comes from basically taking the p*ss out of your most loyal and hardcore fans and consumers.
Seriously?
BS, you make an app that runs on a modern iPhone, it will run in Apple's framework. You make an apk that runs on a modern Android phone, it will run on a myrid of frameworks, not just Google's. Both methods work, they only have themselves to blame. Don't pin it on "ooh, those dastardly computers!"
How could they blame all the different hardware and OSes? There are Mega Drive emulators that work perfectly fine on far more primitive phones than those where this struggles on.
I tried sonic 1 and phantasy star and had no emulation problems on a galaxy s7 edge. The diversity of phone hardware is a very real problem. You cant expect them to make the game specially for every singal phone, they have to streamline to put out the volume they are planning. And come on people, its FREE. Just be happy with what you get
A nice excuse lol.
So Sega, care to explain why unofficial emulators run so much better on the same devices across the board?
@MrGamerClock64
I have devices that can run snes, gba and genesis games with zero issue and they are significantly lower power than anything that ran 2.2... it's all about the coding/engine. In this case, the coding/engine is clearly terrible considering it stutters on an iphone 7 which is literally 10's (or more) times faster than my older emulation devices. No excuse here, blatant lies and marketing spin.
First, "don't touch those sega games" seems a bit dramatic, considering they are free to play with ad support. Secondly, they run flawlessly on my iPhone 7+. I'm sure if you have a garbage low end android you will run into some issues, but the same could be said for every other app on those phones.
@SEGATA_DREAMCAST Sure you can, when you take into account that other unofficial emulators run perfectly on almost all modern phones with little to no config required.
@MegaVel91 There's nothing inherently wrong with Unity, it's just a much more limited toolset for developers to use over a custom engine. The Sonic games are the exception as they were created by the exceptionally talented Christian Whitehead and don't use the same wrapper as all the others.
@mikegamer yeah but are those emulators cross platform?
Emulation is a lot different than just playing a game
@AlexOlney what has the world come to when people scoff at free games
@SEGATA_DREAMCAST Yes, a lot of them are, and are optimized to run on most mobile devices. Unity is just a piss poor engine to use, and is lazy; they should just use regular emulators instead. These emulators are free as well, and usually without ads, why would people want to use Sega's own sanctioned emulators, I'm more than willing to show a video of me using Sega's Steam example of shoddy emulation.
@nhSnork It's not credible at all: apart from a brief foray into x86, Android is a far more uniform platform than you'd think, and iOS development isn't so drastically different. You've basically got two major platforms to target. The fact that they didn't get it right on any platform belies the excuse of fragmentation as just that: an excuse. Modern smartphones are far more powerful than is required for real-time emulation of a 16-bit platform several times over, and more importantly, it has been done better before. There is existing software out there that can emulate 16-bit games with reliable performance on all modern devices.
@SEGATA_DREAMCAST I present to you, how bad Sega's emulation efforts are, on a Core i5 3570 machine with 8 GB RAM and a 2 GB GTX 660 video card
https://youtu.be/O6llYlrvyA4?t=84
Skip to 1:24 into the video and listen to the horribly crackling audio. The very fact Sega's old Classic emulators sound better than their crappy Unity ones is absolutely pathetic.
A Core i5 and Core i7 is more than enough to emulate a 16 bit console, unofficial software is what Genesisn't.
@HappyMaskedGuy
I mean, I feel bad for SEGA to have to struggle with these problems.
It's pain to see their oldies games couldn't played well on IOs and Android.
Honestly, touch screen controls for games that require and kind of precise or quick button presses are garbage anyways.
I must be one of the lucky ones. Sonic 1 and altered beast play flawlessly on my old iPhone 6s
then why didn't you make it iOS only?
@ParasolStars you can hook up most Bluetooth controllers. It's air easier on android devices
@SEGATA_DREAMCAST SEGA hasn't done this just to be lovely, the games are supported by ads so they're making money from them being out there. They deserve the same level of criticism as anything else.
@SEGATA_DREAMCAST No one is scoffing at free games. We're scoffing at the poorly thought out and implemented method by which they have been presented and made available by a company that should know better.
Sega had a history of using crappy emulation on most of their re-release (The Sega Dreamcast Genesis collection, the off-key audios in the AtGames Sega Genesis systems, and now this) so this doesn't surprise me at all.
@mikegamer Forget that, a Pentium 3 or AMD Athlon OG with a 3dfx Voodoo card and 64 MB of RAM was more than enough to emulate Genesis/MD games. Lol
@UK-Nintendo Sure you can, but the point of a smart phone is a simple all in one device you can put in your pocket, backpack, etc. Most people over the age of 12 don't want to have to haul around a bluetooth controller or controller shell for your smart phone just to play games on it.
If I'm sitting waiting somewhere and I can't pull it out of my pocket and use the stock device to play the games well on it, I might as well have a 3DS or Vita with me instead if I need to have a controller.
I agree with him. The issues as not as game breaking as some say. Sure there are issues, but this is a free mobile app, it's fine for what it is, and obviously there will be updates. But these days it seems most just look for someone else's opinion to call their own, instead of trying to make one of their own. I bet most of the complainers haven't even tried it themselves.
"It's a very ambitious project...."
Of course, it's not like quality Genesis emulation has been a thing since the 90's or anything......
Sega is actually down to blaming platform fragmentation for their failure to reliably emulate a 1992 SEGA GENESIS?!?
Well, I suppose if platform fragmentation is such a big problem, it's high time they just focus on a single standardized platform....like Nintendo Switch.
I mean, I realize emulation must be hard without a Blast Processor in modern devices and all, but still, it seems like it should work better than this at least.
Sega has spent 25 years not doing anything Nintendoes, apparently
Unity. WHY UNITY?!
@mikegamer @AlexOlney @PlywoodStick
I can see Segata is not wanted here... very well, I take my leave...
@ParasolStars exactly. Bluetooth controls only if you can't do touch screen. I've completed sonic 1 with touch screen controls all on my ipad
@AlexOlney @ThanosReXXX . . . Wrapper? That's a new term for me in regards to Video Games. Mind explaining?
I call B.S. on his arguments. While there might be fragmentation on the Android side of things, on iOS there really isn't. The vast majority of users are on iOS 10, with a small minority on earlier iOS. But all iPhone 7s run on iOS 10 and if the 7 is having difficulties with Sega Forever than it's not the iPhone that's the problem, it's the shoddy emulation from Sega.
I've just been playing Sonic 1 there and it seems perfectly fine to me.No framerate or sound issues,it looks superb actually.I used touchscreen controls which aren't ideal but they're still usable.My phone is using the most current version of Android and it's a bit of a beast with 6GB of RAM if that's helping but no problems for me so far..Going to try Kid Chameleon next.
Wow, Sega really don't care about the quality of their products when they release them. Usually these things already occur during internal testing. So either Sega didn't test them properly (or at all) or they just didn't care and released it anyway.
Those two statements are just lame excuses for that (especially the part about fragmentation).
As long as their games sell and get good "ratings on the app store", Sega don't care about the actual quality of their products.
Meh...mobile gaming is a joke...but I guess I care just enough to write this.
amazing they run fine on my wii
Well I just gave Kid Chameleon,Altered Beast and Comix Zone a try and it's a different story.They're practically unplayable with the touch controls and I did notice some frame drops and some strange sound effects.The start menu for all those games is different from Sonic.I keeps saying "Failed to load" when trying to connect but then starts anyway.I'm guessing Sonic 1 runs fine as it's just the same version that was on Android already.It has widescreen unlike the others so it must be.
@OorWullie that's correct, Sonic 1 is a proper optimized port, as I understand it. It is not representative of the emulation for Sega Forever.
@MegaVel91 A wrapper is a layer, a container for software to run in. They made a base from Unity and the emulator is running inside of that, which is making an extra, unnecessary step. All unofficial emulators for Sega ROMs are running directly on the Android or IOS systems.
Just sticking around for the rest of the Sonic ports to become free, they seem to be the only worthwhile things coming out of this unless they improve.
@PlywoodStick Exactly, there is literally no reason why Sega, you know, would actually know their own hardware and actually emulate it what with all the documentation publicly available. Oh no, that makes too much sense, it's too logical >< Nice going, Sega.
they rushed it to market, and now are trying to neuter their botched job by blaming fragmentation , LOLz especially with their response to iPhone 7.
@sdelfin Well if there's one positive that comes out this,it's that these great Sonic 1 and 2 ports will be free to play.I was sure Sonic CD was on Android as well but I can't find it.
This is a great idea I downloaded all the games and I'm looking forward to more. With that said the emulation is...lacking. But it is free so I don't have complaints
@Guspaz and I've witnessed such software myself. My point is that generally there's no GUARANTEE everyone will account for everything, and I was talking brands and models as well - different specs, different UI, different whatever else. The issues occurring across all platforms do indicate that Sega done goofed somewhere as well (perhaps in the attempt to squeeze everything into Unity as some suggest - I have no expertise to assess such claims), and it's good to see they intend to keep calm and polish on rather than just throw down the towel. But it's not even the first case of smartphone emulation having issues, as Mega Man on the official front and various hiccups among fan emulators (even the cores used by Retroarch) are my witnesses. AndriOSoid may be still more unified and easier platforms than Windows/Mac/Linux and thousands of builds they can happen on, but beyond engine choices and other stuff, it doesn't look like Sega discovered smartphones yesterday either. So I do think Evans addresses a sizeable elephant in the room regardless.
Firstly, for anyone who sees this, Sonic 1 is not indicative of the quality here. It's an optimized port, as I understand it, which has been on mobile for a while. Sonic 1 is the one game that literally tells you nothing about the emulation quality. As it's probably the most popular of this first batch, that would explain positive reactions to Sega Forever.
I agree that playing with touch controls for such games is bad. But at least there is the option to use controllers, which is not a given these days. I like the idea of having the option to play on my phone(which I've done with a controller, it was quite fun), tablet, tv boxes and single-board computers. It doesn't just have to be phone games. I want stuff like this to be available on many platforms and I'm glad "mobile" is among them.
While free-ish, it would be nice to have accurate emulation. There are people who have been away from gaming for a while who think that Mega Man is supposed to be choppy and unresponsive thanks to the recent mobile version, and that their memories of it being better are just rose-tinted nostalgia glasses. There are people who think the old ATGames Genesis boxes are accurate depictions of the Genesis with their awful display and sound. It would be in their best interest to have the games emulating properly, so that people who check them out stick around and don't end up disappointed that their memories of the Genesis are better than the "real thing".
While free, this is ad supported so Sega makes money here. Plus, they're willing to take money to remove the ads. I'm willing to pay for games, even on mobile, but not if they perform poorly. Whether or not the emulation is game breaking depends on the game, but it absolutely can ruin a game that takes some precision. Good for them if they intend to improve performance, but the chance to make a good first impression is gone.
Maybe they should have just done a collection and released it on game consoles instead?
@Anti-Matter Why is Sega being third party a bad thing? If anything, it's a good thing because more people are able to experience Sega Intellectual Properties.
What I'm more interested in knowing is why SEGA updated my Sonic 1 app, that I paid for, just to include ads, and then tell me I have to pay them again to remove them.
Hmm this collection of games are all on the megadrive collection you can download on vita, actually it has 20 games on it costing 30pence each for the full games, no need to bother with this mobile stuff
@ThanosReXXX I see... That makes sense now.
@MegaVel91 You're welcome. Actually, come to think of it, I could have even made it more clearer to see, so just for completion's sake:
A smart device is running an Operating System (Android/IOS), and any app/program on there takes a certain amount of processing power away from the device.
Now, in Sega's case, they opted to run the game engine Unity on those Operating Systems, and to use Unity's tool set to run the emulator, which in its turn is running the game.
So, basically it comes down to a total of 3 programs running on your smart device to make that game run, on top of the Android or IOS Operating System itself that is running everything.
Most unofficial emulators are a standalone app, running directly on Android/IOS, and once the emulator is running, you can load games. That means that your device of choice only has to run 2 programs, being the emulator and the game.
And also note that these games take far less power from your device than a modern engine like Unity, so if they have to take all kinds of phones/tablets into account with varying grades of memory/CPU power, then making the solution as straight-forward as possible should have been the way to go, so that they could have been sure that even modest hardware could run these games.
But no, let's make things nice and complicated. Why the heck they chose to go this route is anyone's guess...
Maybe they should have made new games specifically for mobile instead of the same ports they've trotted out in collections for the last decade. Who on earth prefers sidescrolling beatemups on a touch screen?
It mystifies me how Fire Emblem has reached SRPG highest sales ever on handheld and even success mobile but Sega hasn't even attempted a new Shining Force game
I'm surprised more people don't bring this up...considering how many different devices there are, and how many complaints I've seen with mobile games that varied based on what platforms the individuals were using, it seems like it is a relatively common issue, just...not one I've seen anybody brought up before. I guess everybody just accepts it as part of working on mobile games...
@Spike6958 I think there is an option to say that you already own it and request the ad free again
@w00dm4n
Oh man, I bet!!! Didn't think about that..
@Ryu_Niiyama Sega got compilations on almost every platforms known to man:
@retro_player_22 yeah i know... that's why I said that should've been the route that they take this time as well.
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