It's
fucking
HAPPENING!!!!!
and Daytona 2 with the serial numbers filed off but honestly I am just ELATED I can run this at tournaments again without a goddamn tech headache. And also more FV2 availability
and I don't get it—porting these games for the exclusive sake of padding out the yearly RgG game is almost more insulting than doing nothing with them
Enough people have questioned me about this that I guess I oughta offer an actual take:
Being on the very outer periphery of a lot of people who are directly involved with vintage game initiatives like this one, I have a top-level idea of how these games are getting reissued and why they're specifically showing up in RgG as opposed to anywhere else: essentially, it's understood from the jump the the company will not and does not want to reissue these games on their own merits and/or to take the extra effort to get them to the point where they'd be commercially viable, but they do care just enough to let certain parties/individuals toil away at some low-frills, no-budget method of running them on new hardware that they might tack onto some other project if the opportunity arises.
(It hasn't been as heavily reported but this new RgG also includes the SG-1000 version of Flicky and the overseas-only Master System conversion of Galaxy Force, and this sentiment applies to those games just as much as the more advanced arcade titles: they're in here precisely because one specific person wanted to add them and the team was willing to humour them because they implicitly understood that absolutely nothing else would ever be done with those games.)
This ties into the broader corporate direction Sega's indicated for their legacy content over the last few years: that is, remakes, "remasters" and reboots are being prioritised over more direct reissues, and that the more authentic reissue initiatives they have been pursuing are primarily about maintaining general brand awareness and are not especially concerned with the games themselves, nor are they expected to be hugely profitable or to reach outside of certain select demographics... so, when I see games like not-Daytona 2 or Fighting Vipers 2 show up in this manner, I don't think this bodes well for the future of Model 3 reissues or fleshed-out standalones or compilations or whatever, I think welp, that's the best these games are ever gonna get.
This is especially frustrating because Sega's not only been reissuing their older games but explicitly pushing legacy games as a brand since the friggin' Saturn, and yet all their efforts have remained anchored on a very small sub-section of their output for far, far longer than it ever should have been. I'm as dismissive as anyone else towards all the Sega's re-releasing the same five Genesis games again blahblah nonsense that repeats whenever they do anything with any older game of any kind, but I do sympathise with the notion that so much of Sega's 3D-era arcade library, not to mention Saturn and Dreamcast, has been off the table for so long, and that the initiatives towards larger-scale reissues of all these libraries, which ideally would have been figured out many, many years ago, have essentially been leapfrogged to the point we're at now—they've somehow manage to skip straight to the part where they're casually throwing in these games as novelties inside other games, without ever getting to the bit where they just let people play them in a no-nonsense manner that recognises their enduring individual appeal and not just their nostalgic cache.
I should also add that the most common retort thrown at me is, "every Sega maniac's gonna buy the next RgG so this is win/win", and I'm here to tell ya that not all of us check for RgG like that
