Thursday, January 27, 2011

Shinobi III and Virtua Fighter 2 Genesis release on iOS

I think it should be assumed by now that SEGA will be continually releasing Genesis games to iOS devices from here on out, It seems we're getting one or two a month. Think of it as the "Genesis Game of the Month Club". The latest two games to hit the device are Shinobi III and Virtua Fighter 2 Genesis, priced at $2.99 and $1.99 respectively. Early reviews cite spotty controls, TouchArcade goes into detail as to why the controls for Shinobi III are so difficult:

Like other Sega iOS releases running in their emulator, there is both a full screen and a windowed view. The fullscreen mode, with its larger image, is the most desirable play mode, I would say, but it suffers from the fixed arrangement of the onscreen D-pad and three action buttons; very often a thumb on either completely obscures your character, making gameplay highly awkward. This can be avoided by using the windowed view which renders the game at it's native resolution (fullscreen is a scale-up, not the other way around) with D-pad and buttons below, but on a screen with a pixel density as high as any iPhone or iPod touch device, it's a strain to behold. It's possible that an option to reposition the touch points would help matters but, frankly, I can't imagine an arrangement that would be truly acceptable. As is, the gameplay will leave you longing for your old Genesis.
At this point, I think SEGA should stick to releasing RPGs and slower paced games to the Genesis emulator. Shining Force was extremely fun on my iPod Touch, running smoothly and retaining the graphics and sounds of the console versions. Meanwhile, faster games like Sonic 2 have trouble on the emulator and suffer from imprecise touch controls. Here's hoping the complete Phantasy Star and Shining Force series make it to iOS before faster paced action games hurt SEGA's App Store cred.

1 comment:

  1. Why they keep re-releasing that mega Drive version of Virtua Fighter 2 is beyond me, I guess it's easier to just slap the rom up of than the arcade version but come on..

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