SEGA Forever Performance Issues Reported

Earlier today, SEGA announced their ongoing SEGA Forever initiative, which will see classic games from SEGA’s back catalog released on mobile devices on a regular basis. The intent is to build a new market for the company’s storied game library, but unfortunately, this may come with some caveats. According to a report by Eurogamer, many of these mobile ports are emulations built with the Unity game engine, and this implementation may be the source of some performance issues on a range of mobile devices. John Linneman from Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry division describes the issues as follows:

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.

According to the article, Linneman tested these apps on an iPhone 6S+. In an attempt to corroborate Eurogamer’s findings, we downloaded and played the new port of Altered Beast on an iPhone 6, and we can confirm that the experience wasn’t seamless. The game dropped frames and the audio stuttered noticeably several times during our playthrough of the first few stages, though at no point did these issues really impact our ability to play the game. It’s important to remember that game performance can vary wildly from device to device, so as always, your mileage may vary.

What do you think? Have you seen any performance issues with SEGA Forever games on your device? Are you able to look past emulation issues, and if not, how much do they bother you? Make your thoughts heard in the comments section below!