After teasing something called "Sega Forever" this entire month, today Sega finally unveiled what the heck this thing is: Sega Forever is a new initiative to bring classic Sega titles to mobile devices, and the first batch of 5 games has just launched in the App Store today. On the surface, Sega Forever sounds great. The selection of games can come from any of Sega's game consoles from the past, meaning everything from the Sega Master System right up through the Sega Dreamcast. The games are released for free and supported with ads, but a one-time IAP may be purchased to disable those ads as well as provide offline saving. Finally, and perhaps best of all, is that all Sega Forever games will support MFi controllers, so those that own a physical controller can play these games the way they were originally designed, with physical buttons.
Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel

In practice, however, Sega Forever is pretty underwhelming, at least to start. Of the 5 games released today, 3 of them have already been available on the App Store from as far back as 2009. Altered Beast [Free], Phantasy Star II [$2.99], and Sonic The Hedgehog [Free] have all been previously released on iOS, and what's nice is that if you owned those older versions the new Sega Forever versions are updates to the originals so you can actually hit the Restore Purchases option to unlock the ad-free versions of the game. At least, that's how it's supposed to work, and does work in ...