Candy Crush, Angry Birds…whatever. My longtime mobile gaming go-to has been vintage Sega, as the company behind my first home video game console has proven surprisingly eager to port its classics to mobile as part of its Sega Forever program. Unfortunately, now that the program has been shut down, it seems that these titles are set to go the way of the Dreamcast. The upside? For a shot time, you can snag them for free—and keep them forever.

The games were part of “Sega Forever”

Sega Forever started in 2017 as a vehicle for the company to produce mobile versions of select titles, released for free. The catch was that the ports all came with ads, but you could pay around $2 (the exact price depended on the game) within the app to remove them. While there are other ways to play retro games on mobile, the Sega Forever program was certainly among the easiest. Technically, the program shut down in in 2023, and while it’s delisted a few games since then (RIP Gunstar Heroes), other titles have stayed on storefronts and even gotten regular updates.

Now, Sega’s pulling the plug on Sega Forever (almost) entirely. Across its suite of remaining Sega Forever titles, players are seeing new pop-ups warning them that support for the games that have yet to be delisted is being discontinued, meaning that they’ll likely be leaving app stores soon. On the plus side, the pop-ups also tell players that they can “continue playing offline,” which means that they will not only keep the games, but that, at least according to my testing, the ads will be gone too, even if you didn’t pay to remove them.

It’s a bit of a win/lose situation, but if you act now, you can get a good selection of pretty competent, ad-free mobile ports to keep for free. And based on the previously delisted games that I have on my phone, you’ll still be able to access them even after they get removed from app stores (although that’s not the case if you delete them from your phone, judging by my experience with Beyond Oasis).

Sega hasn’t made any official announcements about this change, so the in-game pop-ups are all we have to go from for now. With that in mind, it’s unclear exactly when the remaining Sega Forever games are set to leave app stores, so you should act sooner rather than later. Also note that while mobile ports of Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 were eventually added to Sega Forever (they had an upfront price beforehand), they don’t seem to be on the docket for delisting, due to a lack of warnings when opening them.

Here’s a full list of the free Sega games you can now get now, on both Android and iOS:

Crazy Taxi Classic

• Android

• iOS

Golden Axe Classics

• Android

• iOS

Shining Force Classic

• Android

• iOS

Sonic CD Classic

• Android

• iOS

Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Ep. II

• Android

• iOS

Streets of Rage Classic

• Android

• iOS

Streets of Rage 2 Classic

• Android

• iOS

Super Monkey Ball: Sakura

• Android

• iOS

Virtua Tennis Challenge

• Android

• iOS

Landscaping is powerful stuff. Not only does a nicely designed yard become a haven for your family, but good landscaping choices can increase your home’s value by as much as 30%. That’s because well-designed and maintained outdoor spaces allow people to imagine themselves enjoying the property, and signal that the whole place has been cared for.

Unfortunately, poor landscaping decisions—even if they’re expensive and maintained—can actually hurt your home’s value by a similar amount. If you ever plan to sell your home or access its equity, you might want to reconsider any of these choices in order to avoid taking a bite out of the property’s valuation.

Too many trees

Trees usually add value to a property. Aside from their natural beauty, they also provide shade and a sense of stability to a yard. But too many trees can negatively impact the aesthetics of your outdoor space as well as the value of the property:

• Blocked sunlight. Too many closely planted trees can turn your yard dark and gloomy.

• Dead lawn. That lack of sunlight can also inhibit everything else in your yard, resulting in bare ground.

• Expense. Every tree represents a cost in terms of upkeep and (eventual) removal, so seeing a forest growing in the outdoor space around the house will cause buyers to quietly lower the amount they’re willing to pay for it as they imagine the future arborist bills.

Additionally, if the trees are planted close to the house, the potential for damage to the roof and siding will also lower the perceived value of the property.

Overwhelming hardscape

Hardscaping serves a purpose in a well-designed outdoor space: It provides walkways for bare feet, clearly defines distinct areas of the yard, and offers design opportunities.

But turning your entire outdoor space into a concrete or paver jungle will lower property values because prospective buyers often find hardscaping to be impersonal. It’s also much more difficult to change and personalize than a more natural approach, and the lack of ground cover or natural canopy can turn that stone into a griddle during the hotter months.

Lack of light

Too many trees can make your space gloomy during the daytime, but not having enough lighting can make the space unwelcoming at night. While you don’t want your outdoor space to be lit up like a football stadium, soft, well-positioned lighting that’s brighter around a patio, deck, or pool area and dimmer further out makes the space feel homey, comfortable, and safe.

Skimpy lighting also means no one can enjoy your landscaping at night because they won’t be able to see it. Using light to highlight features, mark out pathways, and define spaces will make your landscaping more useful, preserving the property’s value.

Aggressive plants

When people appraise your home, they’re looking at a range of factors. One of those is how much trouble something will be in the future. An old roof covered in moss might not be leaking at the moment, but people will quietly deduct a large sum of money from the home’s value to cover the anticipated expense of replacing it.

Similarly, everything in your landscaping is a potential cost waiting to happen—and nothing is more alarming than aggressive, invasive plants like creeping ivy or bamboo. These plants spread quickly, which can give an outdoor space a quick sense of lush fullness. But they’re also difficult to control or stop, and can quickly transform a carefully designed garden into an overgrown mess.

And a house being slowly enveloped by vines is also probably being slowly destroyed by those vines. You might like the look, but all that ivy is going to make your house less valuable.

Water features

Water features like ponds, bird baths, and fountains can attract wildlife, mask road noise, and add a peaceful vibe to your outdoor space. They can also be a breeding ground for mosquitoes and other pests, algae, and bacteria, transforming into stinky messes over time. Additionally, fountains and other motorized features can break down—and there’s nothing less attractive than a broken, rusted water feature that no longer pumps any water.

As with other outdoor features (or pools, for that matter), water features might as well have flags on them announcing their maintenance costs, and all those costs make prospective buyers think twice about the value of your property. If the trouble of maintaining those water features exceeds the joy and beauty they bring to the space, your home value will go down as a result.

Statues

A whimsical gnome or other figurine can be a fun addition to a well-designed outdoor space. An army of them, or a rag-tag collection of disparate (and heavily weathered) statues makes your yard look like a hoarder is using it. Too many of any outdoor ornament (gazing balls, birdbaths, dreamcatchers, wind chimes, etc.) will make your outdoor space look cluttered and unmaintained—even if it’s otherwise tastefully done and in great shape.

Large lawns

A huge ocean of sun-dappled grass swaying in the breeze might seem like an ideal way to enjoy your property. Until you have to mow it. And water it. And weed it. And hunt critters in it. In other words, a huge swath of unbroken lawn is a lot of work to maintain, and fewer people will be willing to take it on, lowering the value of the property.

Huge lawns also inspire questions like: What is this for? Outdoor space without defined areas can be a blank canvas, which is great if potential buyers are looking for a blank canvas. Otherwise, it might look like a huge yard they’ll only spend time in when they’re mowing and weeding, which is not exactly a value-add for your home.

Lack of paths

A beautiful outdoor space also has to be usable, and a key facet of using it is being able to easily walk around and access different areas. Having to strap on hiking boots and socks just to amble over to the majestic tree for a nap, or to tend to the wildflower beds, isn’t fun. Having some simple but well-defined walking paths that make getting to and from the different areas of your yard is a key aspect of its perceived value—people only assign value to things they can actually (and easily) use.

Pathways also serve to define space in your outdoor areas and offer up dry walkways after a rainstorm so you don’t have to slog through the mud—both things that make the landscaping look thoughtful and refined instead of haphazard.

As it turns out, most companies aren’t cool with piracy. That’s pretty understandable: The company exists to make money from its products, and if you use their products without paying for them, that’s a rather unsustainable business model. How a company chooses to push back against piracy, however, varies wildly.

Nintendo, for their part, is quite hawkish when it comes to piracy. The company will ban your console from online play if it detects you playing an unauthorized (pirated) game. And last month, the company updated its terms of service for Nintendo Account Services, just in time for the Switch 2 launch. Essentially, the company says that if you do anything to modify your console or software in any way to bypass Nintendo’s policies and restrictions, Nintendo will not only ban you from online play, but reserves the right to render your console unusable.

That’s pretty intense, and is the first time the company has threatened to brick consoles that are modified or run pirated software. But that’s no sweat for you, so long as you don’t steal games, right? Well, if you happen to back those games up in a way that Nintendo doesn’t approve of, and run those copies on your Switch, that’ll count as a brickable offense. In fact, Nintendo has already taken action with some Switch 2 owners.

Don’t use an MIG flash cart with your Switch 2

As reported by Android Authority, Nintendo has started bricking Switch 2 consoles that use MIG flash carts for any reason. For the uninitiated, MIG flash carts are like blank Switch cartridges that allow you to load games from a built-in SD cart slot. That means you can use these carts to play pirated games directly on your Switch as if it were a real game, but you can also use it to back up your purchased games.

While piracy is alive and well across tech, the latter is actually something people use these carts for, and it seems to have worked out fine for the original Switch. The idea is, Switch 1 games each have a unique ID—if you pirate a game, that means more than one of these IDs is active, so Nintendo knows someone stole the game. However, if you backup your legitimate game to a MIG cart, the ID is the same, and since only one ID is active, Nintendo lets it pass—at least, that’s how things seemed to work with the original Switch.

But that’s not the case with the Switch 2. Take a look at this user’s post on the subreddit Switch2hacks. They claim their MIG flash cart contained only backups of their purchased games, but after taking their Switch 2 online with the cart present, Nintendo bricked the console. You can see their now-defunct Switch 2, a console that isn’t even two weeks old yet, in the photo below:

Other users in that Reddit thread shared the same experience—using an MIG flash cart got their Switch 2 banned. Curiously, it seems Nintendo isn’t banning the accounts, only the consoles. One user said their Switch OLED can still run online services, which means Nintendo really is targeting the Switch 2 consoles themselves, rather then both the console and the account it’s attached to. I suppose the company is happy to let you buy another $450 console and try again to play by the rules.

Nintendo has moved pretty quickly against this practice, even when you consider how new the Switch 2 is. It was only last week that the company behind MIG flash cart got the tech working on the console, as the carts previously appeared to not function at all. My advice? Stay away from these. It’s tempting to to reduce your risk of losing your expensive Switch games, but getting your Switch 2 banned just isn’t worth it.

Can you back up your Switch 2 games without getting banned?

You can’t back up the games themselves, but you can back up your save data—as long as you pay for Nintendo Switch Online. Assuming you do, you can highlight the game in question on your console’s home screen, press the – or + button on your controller, choose “Save Data Cloud,” choose the relevant user, then choose “Back Up Save Data.”

Pokémon trainers, take heed: You need to be careful when transferring your save data from the Switch 1 to the Switch 2. While it’s a pretty simple process, some Pokémon fans are reporting losing their saves after making the switch, including pocket monsters they’ve had since the days of the Game Boy Advance. In a now-deleted Reddit post (as reported by Lifehacker sister publication IGN), one user said they’d lost over 1,000 hours of gameplay and two decades worth of Pokémon when moving their Pokémon Scarlet save file to the new system. Judging by a few other posts, it wasn’t an isolated incident.

While this definitely sounds like a bug, it’s a bad one. Not only is it easy to form an emotional attachment to your little digital friends, but Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet are two of a small handful of Switch titles that will delete save data from your original console while moving to the new one. So while you might be able to find your Super Mario Odyssey data on your original Switch if it gets lost or corrupted during a transfer, that’s not an option here.

How to protect your Pokémon before you move to the Switch 2

I’ve reached out to Nintendo for comment and will update this post with an official solution if I hear back. In the meantime, before transferring your save to a new console, there is one precaution you can take to make sure you don’t lose your monsters. Unfortunately, it might cost you: You can back up your Pokémon using Pokémon Home, Nintendo’s successor to the once-paid Pokémon Bank service for 3DS. Pokémon Home can store up to 30 of your ‘mons for free, and up to 6,000 if you pay. It’s not ideal, no—in addition to the price tag for larger backups, you’ll still lose access to any progress or items tied to your lost save. But at least keep your digital buddies will be safe.

If you’ve already lost your save, though, that suggestion is just a “shoulda, coulda, woulda.” I get it—all serious gamers have been there at some point. Unfortunately, Pokémon games aren’t compatible with Nintendo Switch Online’s cloud save feature, so no amount of going through your backups will help you here.

Maybe Nintendo can help?

However, you might not be totally screwed: A few Reddit users are reporting that reaching out to Nintendo support has helped them reclaim their lost saves, even if an official statement on the situation is still forthcoming.

Regardless, that there’s so much stress attached to moving your saves to Nintendo’s new console is a major bummer, especially because Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet are two of a small selection of titles that have received free (and sorely needed) performance upgrades on the Switch 2. Here’s hoping Nintendo has an answer for distraught trainers soon.