Botched Ports

My pick is Silent Hill Origins on the PS2.

A not-so-good game tbh. So how did they botch this when they ported it to PS2 from the PSP? They screwed up the lighting. A game series that is known for being in the dark, is now so dark that's it's pitch black even when you're using the flashlight. There isnt even an option to adjust the contrast/brightness in-game. I tried playing this a few years back, and gave up because it was nigh impossible to see what I was doing.

I would post a clip of it, but all I can find is emulated footage, and that isn't affected by this stupid blunder of theirs.

Sonic GBA
Mortal Kombat GBA
Dead Rising Wii
Bayonetta PS3
Skyrim PS3
WWE 2k18 Switch
Pac-Man Atari 2600
Myst 3DS
Hard Drivin SEGA Genesis
Thunder Blade SEGA Master System
SEGA Smash Pack Dreamcast

Golden Axe and Strider for PC Engine are pretty bad, but at least the developer of the Golden Axe port was working without arcade assets. The number one priority for 2D arcade ports to 16-bit consoles should be running at 60fps. Then work from there.

Lord of Thunder for the Sega CD.

Why was the music replaced with more synthy stuff? Why are songs misplaced? Why is there slowdown? Why was the game made ridiculously easy? And my god what's with the sound effects?

Mega Bomberman is another disappointment. Ugly colours, missing special effects, strangely aligned field (which is also probably to save on palettes). Just not a good port in any way.

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

Lord of Thunder for the Sega CD.

Why was the music replaced with more synthy stuff? Why are songs misplaced? Why is there slowdown? Why was the game made ridiculously easy? And my god what's with the sound effects?

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Interesting.

I should check that out soon.
From what I've heard at least the gameplay is supposed to be superior on the Sega CD.

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Originally Posted by Kollision

From what I've heard at least the gameplay is supposed to be superior on the Sega CD.

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Yeah I dunno, I can plow through the Sega CD game like it's nothing, the PCE version makes me its bitch.

Hard Drivin on the Megadrive is a great port. It's just that the CPU can't keep up. Play it on a 13mhz emulator or a 10mhz OCed console and see

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Originally Posted by chilled

Hard Drivin on the Megadrive is a great port. It's just that the CPU can't keep up. Play it on a 13mhz emulator or a 10mhz OCed console and see

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I've played it a few times on my 10MHz 68010 system. The 68010 has faster multiply/divide, which speeds up 3D games. I only wish I could get that 68010 to run stable at 12. It isn't as good as some of the other ports, but It's not the worst.
A clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3VK6rNEUsM

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

Lord of Thunder for the Sega CD.

Why was the music replaced with more synthy stuff? Why are songs misplaced? Why is there slowdown? Why was the game made ridiculously easy? And my god what's with the sound effects?

Mega Bomberman is another disappointment. Ugly colours, missing special effects, strangely aligned field (which is also probably to save on palettes). Just not a good port in any way.

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You forgot the massive slowdown in Mega Bomberman. But it does have great music and is still a good game otherwise. Just a poor port outside of the music.

Saints Row 2 PC: An abomination. The performance is painful for how the game looks, inconsistent, and seems directly tied to your CPU speed. By that, I don't mean that the game is heavily reliant on CPU performance, no, somehow this game seems to want a particular clock speed. The further you wander from the Xbox360's clock speed of 3.2GHz, the more problematic things become.

Deadly Premonition PC: Doesn't seem too bad at first; it certainly runs better than the other versions. However, the resolution is locked at, IIRC, 720p without using a fix, and things go downhill from there. As the game progresses it becomes increasingly unstable, and can require arcane rights, prayers to Elder gods, rebooting your PC, etc, in order to avoid crashes at some points. It's also known to have speed issues on certain configs, and is an overall pain to get through as you spend as much time fighting the instability as you do the enemies.

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Originally Posted by Black_Tiger

Golden Axe and Strider for PC Engine are pretty bad, but at least the developer of the Golden Axe port was working without arcade assets. The number one priority for 2D arcade ports to 16-bit consoles should be running at 60fps. Then work from there.

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To be fair to Golden Axe, as bad as the game was, IIRC it was playable on the stock PC Engine CD with no expansion cards. That thing had a pitiful amount of RAM.

Grand Theft Auto IV (PC): I could barely run that game with a 3.6 Ghz Core2Quad and a GTX 670. The game just hammered the CPU for no apparent reason.


Metal Gear Solid 2(Xbox): The game was a stuttering mess.


Super C (Amiga): The game had all of the music and graphics of the arcade game. It also ran into frame rate dips in the single digits. The 1st boss battle is a slide show.


NBA JAM (SNES): The game had no music playing during the matches. You could try to blame the hardware for limiting the cart's size, but the devs went cheap and used cart with less memory than the Genesis version.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

Grand Theft Auto IV (PC): I could barely run that game with a 3.6 Ghz Core2Quad and a GTX 670. The game just hammered the CPU for no apparent reason.

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I bought the PC release years back. The worst part was the DRM. The Games For Windows LIVE DRM it used was literally broken. Getting stuck in an infinite update loop and never actually working. I eventually managed to get the game to launch after tons of frustration and workarounds. It would probably have just been easier to pirate that crap, rather than to the right thing and pay for my games.

Imagine my surprise when after all that, I was greeted with a poor unoptimized port that ran poorly on my PC that exceeded the requirements.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

Grand Theft Auto IV (PC): I could barely run that game with a 3.6 Ghz Core2Quad and a GTX 670. The game just hammered the CPU for no apparent reason.

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Oh yeah, that wasn't too pretty. I haven't tested since I upgraded to a GTX1080, but since it was so CPU bound I suspect GTA V runs significantly better than it on my rig.

As for Metal Gear Solid 2 - the PC port was iffy as well. It was clearly a direct port of the Xbox version, and the original release only ran properly on Geforce 3 and 4 cards (the ones most closely related to the Xbox GPU). It may have ran on the FX series too with earlier drivers. There was a patch released for Radeon cards that was later hacked to apply to all kinds of cards, but there are still some small graphical glitches or missing effects. I'm assuming Konami learned their lesson because their ports of Silent Hill 2 and 3 were far more solid (the PC version of 3 is probably the definitive version).

Batman Arkham City on PC.
Maybe it runs better now but Fallout 4 on launch hit 0 FPS on Xbox.
Dragon Age Origins PS3. I love the game and overlooked the piss poor frame rate and low res textures but boy it's a rough port.

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Originally Posted by ComradeOj

I bought the PC release years back. The worst part was the DRM. The Games For Windows LIVE DRM it used was literally broken. Getting stuck in an infinite update loop and never actually working. I eventually managed to get the game to launch after tons of frustration and workarounds. It would probably have just been easier to pirate that crap, rather than to the right thing and pay for my games.

Imagine my surprise when after all that, I was greeted with a poor unoptimized port that ran poorly on my PC that exceeded the requirements.

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It gets even better than that. I tried to play the game when I got a 2500K. The game didn't recognize the graphics card, looked at the memory of the integrated graphics of the CPU and thought it didn't have enough memory. I even tried turning off the IG of the 2500k and it still looked at it as the GPU. Things got even worse when I upgraded that rig to Windows 10. One day MS decided to do an update that wiped out all of my XBox live game saves, including a Fallout 3 (GOTY) that I had nearly completed 100%.

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Originally Posted by Silanda

Oh yeah, that wasn't too pretty. I haven't tested since I upgraded to a GTX1080, but since it was so CPU bound I suspect GTA V runs significantly better than it on my rig.

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I've only played the game on my living room (Secondary) PC. That rig currently had my old GTX 780 Classified in it, paired with the 4.7Ghz 2500k. My current rig in my office has the EVGA 1080 Classified paired with a 4.7Ghz 4790k. I'd much rather use it for GTA V, the Witcher 3 and other modern games. The living room PC gets the older games that I can play with a controller from the couch.