Sega Replies to SUGC Outcry, We Respond Back

Sega has responded to our reporting on the community outcry surrounding the Sonic’s Ultimate Game Collection debacle.

Immediately, Sega’s PR team dismissed the notion that anyone at Backbone or Sega lied to the community about the reason for not including the lock-on releases Sonic 2 & Knuckles nor Sonic 3 & Knuckles, despite the inclusion of all three games separately.

Sega continued to assert that Backbone’s initial statements were correct. The Xbox 360 disc was full, and that adding the code to tap into the compiled releases would add too much time to the release cycle.

Both assertions have been technologically dismissed by experts across the emulation, gaming, and development communities. Further, Sega’s PR team dismissed PC emulation as being inferior to the experience on Xbox 360. They claimed that the quality and upscaling features would add time to the development of each individal game. That too has been disputed by Genesis emulation experts, who respond that such features are already available on PC emulators, and that Sega “[Media relations] doesn’t know what they are talking about”

Read more to see our interim editor-in-chief’s reply to Sega.

“Edward, we anticipated that reply. Quite simply, every technical expert out there disagrees with Backbone. The answer reads like classic backtracking.

First, we’ve looked at the Xbox 360 disc. It isn’t full.

Second, on this blog alone, the five lines of code have been posted that would have needed testing. While the argument could be made that those additional lines do indeed require additional testing… nobody can make the argument that that time would have resulted in “the loss of all other extras.”

Again, I’ll defer to the many technical experts that have been emulating Genesis for over a decade in the PC world.

To put it bluntly, I’m unimpressed by Backbone’s reply.

P.S. Edward, your assertion that there is a quality gain versus PC emulation, is a bit misleading. I won’t call it a lie, because it isn’t (I still consider Backbone’s initial statement to be one). The “advantages” in HD upscaling that are available on SUGC are readily available on PC emulators today. And, in addition, there would be no added code to apply those changes to S2&K nor S3&K. They are interpreted identically to any other Genesis game.

My position is unfazed by your reply, but I do appreciate your attempts to get Backbone to cope with reality.”