This port tastes terrible
 

You can spit it out if you want! Porting games over to other machines long after the original version surfaced is nothing new, developers have done it since the dawn of time. The dawn of time I tell you! This often works well, like say, Resident Evil 2 for N64/DC/GC/Gizmondo/Phantom or Ecco for Master System. But sometimes, sometimes! .. It results in nightmares. Here's two I can think of off the top of my head, where they hurt my neck.

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A whole bunch of 16-bit games had been successfully ported to the GBA long before this came out (including the FIRST EWJ), so it COULD BE DONE on the hardware, but I guess someone was drunk. Holy craaaap. It suffered huge amounts of slow down and sprite flickering, the soundtrack was completely out of tune and scratchy sounding, most of the animation was cut, collision detection was totally broken, you could fall through sections of the ground and to top it off the level passwords DIDN'T WORK. It was pretty much unplayable.

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I know, it's Atari 2600. ;_; But it's still something that just shouldn't have existed in the first place. Who's bright idea was it to try and port this over? Especially in 1991. Just LOOK AT IT. That's pure rape. Like trying to shove an Xbox inside a sock. It was impossible to play, too. You'd be lucky to ever get past the first screen. Once an enemy punches you, THAT'S IT. You get frozen on the spot (with fear? "Oh no some purple guy has punched me whatever shall I do waaah wah wah!"), which means they can just keep punching until you're dead. One life. No continues. It did have full music however, something pretty fancy for the 2600.

I have a lot more to spew useless rage over, but everyone else go go go!

Wow. Someone actually ported Double Dragon to the 2600?! Are you sure that's not a hoax, like the DOOM for 2600?

Mortal Kombat on the Gameboy was a real shitty port. Absolutely God awful. It was missing Johnny Cage (fuckers) and only had two stages I believe. Plus it was dreadfully slow and in monochromatic green.

I haven't played many ports, since I usually already own the originals for the ones I'm interested in. But the PSX port of Chrono Trigger was pretty bad. The anime FMVs were nice, but the massive load times when you do ANYTHING were just unforgivable.

I used to own it. :( The furthest I ever got was the third screen, where some huge grey blob guy threw an endless stream of barrels. At least I think they were barrels.

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:tpg:

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You see MSPaint gone bad. I see a gold mine. Think of the possibilities with the wiimote slash nunchuck. Read any Nintendo related thread. Graphics are of no concern to the fans. It's about the MAD GAEMPLAY!


On another more recent note however, I think everyone will agree Gearbox (was it??) made a right pig's ear out of porting HALO to the PC. I mean here's a game that belongs on PC to begin with and instead of adding a bit of shine and content those fuckers decided to take the lazy road and make the game run in such a way even NASA's super computer with 18 million 7900GTX ULTRA SUPREME in SLI would cry mother.

The Ecco port for the collection on GBA sucked too; just repeating a handful of tracks many, many, many times totally ruins the experience.
And I'm sure many are already familiar with the doomed DS port of Lego Star Wars II. At least Splinter Cell Chaos Theory was playable, albeit 10fps when using the stealthy vision modes!

Not even flailing your arms about the room could improve that disaster! I wonder if anybody even owns the right to it anymore, Technos and Acclaim are dead. Mystery!

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There was nothing SUPER about this. When even the NES has a better looking port you know you're in trouble. But the game ran so bloody slowly, they even limited the amount of enemies on screen to about ten, which basically ruins the experience right there. Bosses caused your main character to flicker so badly you couldn't see where you were going. Only one song made it into this version, one. One song to listen to for hours on end. One. Flying Edge hurt the Master System with everything they did, but this was perhaps the worst of their efforts.

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Huh? Surely it's impossible to bugger these up. Oh wai- DSI found a creative way. Marble Madness wasn't even complete. After three levels, the game would take you back to the title screen. How the hell can something like that slip by the play testers? Maybe they hired a cat. A dead one. The Klax part wasn't bad (because it's Klax), but the Marble Madness goof up is fantastic. Good work!

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THE FUCK IS THIS? It isn't Pac-Man, that's for sure. Man, unlike Double Dragon, this could have easily been crammed into the 2600. Pac-Man isn't a very demanding game. The maze is like smeared car crash vomit, the controls were unresponsive and they didn't even get the sound effects right. Instead of "wakka wakka wakka" you were treated to "BONG BONG BONG BONG". They must have been using one during development.

Personally I've always kind of felt the Donkey Kong Country GBA ports to be pretty subpar to be perfectly honest. =\

Horrible music, washed out screens. The GBA was a pretty port happy device in general. When it came down to it many of them were really either hit or miss...

Yeah, they were pretty crappy. Especially DKC 3. Still slightly better than the eye straining/bleeding Game Boy Color version of the first DKC, though!

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Aaaauuuuuuggggh. I love how he blends into the background colour.

The original GB version of DKC wasn't any easier on the eyes because it was so ridiculously hard to tell your character from the background. Ah, the days when ACM was so cool~


Anyway, I can immediately think of that Prince of Persia: Warrior Within PSP release. It wasn't so much a bad port as a completely pointless one.

One particular stinker would be the SNES/Mega Drive version of Worms. No battery backup for saving statistics or team/player names? What an absolutely wonderful idea, I would LOVE to rename every single character every time I start up a game!

No bungee, ninja rope or bridges? Blowtorch now only goes horizontally? All good, don't want to complicate things too much. Might as well remove some of those pointless weapons too.

No zooming camera? What an excellent improvement, now we don't need to bother wondering where we're shooting with the bazooka when the camera doesn't keep up (because the omega slow camera only has one movement speed and I can reveal it's slower than even the slowest bazooka shell speed).

Add the cheap computer AI that will keep shooting 100% accurate volleys at you from any corner of the map (no word generated maps either, btw), even through 20 feet of ground (just keeps shooting to get at you) and you have a worthy SNES classic. The single only game EVER to make me hit my console in anger. The poor thing ;_;

I can reveal that the GB edition of Worms is just as intertaining. Not the least big fun. Plus it had the added bonus on not being able to see which worm belonged to what team. Brilliant!

The SNES Street Fighter Alpha 2. Where as the game LOOKS fairly nice, the sound is horrible, and it has the worst loading of any SNES title I have ever seen.

Game loads, you press start. Thats a 2 second wait there, then you get to the char select screen, and wait some more. After your character has been selected, you get to wait on the screen showing the selected stage. Then the announcer shows up, yells "Round 1, FIGHT!", then the game just freezes completely for around 3 seconds.

There is rarely any lag during actual gameplay thankfully, but the framerate is so low that you probably wouldn't notice it anyways. By the way, get ready for your game to freeze again after you knock out your enemy.

The worst part is that even with its immense flaws, I actually own the game, and played it a lot as a substitution for the excellent arcade version whenever it was unavailable to me.

- WraithTwo -

The Serious Sam for the PlayStation 2. Oh my fucking god, THAT was terrible. Sure, mindless shooting fun, but his one-liners there were horrible. Sure, there were vehicles but come-on, who the hell needs THAT when you need is just guns and more guns? Blech.

On the contrary though, Battlefield 2: Modern Combat is a good, if not the best port right now.

Not unless you're using Sass' socks.

Well, I don't know if this game was made for the PS2 or was just ported to the PS2 from the Xbox and PC.

MAX PAYNE 2.

Qwarky and Infernal may now jump on me and rape me. This game runs so terrible you don't even NEED bullet time to slow things down. Awesome 2 frames a second. This is THE shortest time I've ever kept a game, 3 full days, I bought it Friday night at Best Buy for $9.99 and got rid of it at EB Games in Sunday for $3. LOL.

Talk about not reading reviews.

I played through Max Payne 2 on the PC. Then my friend got it on PS2.

PURE UGLY! I love the PS2 but the game looked like crap. I'll stick to the PC for that game thank you very much.

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Contributed to the crash of Video Gaming in the early 80s.

Final Fantasy V and VI and Chrono Trigger for the PS1. Mangle the music from the originals, add insane load times and slowdown and you've got all the more reason to buy the originals or download the ROMs instead. Just the fact that Chrono Trigger was included in a package called "Final Fantasy Chronicles" should tell you how much thought went into these ports.

I violently reject FFIV Advance as well for its' way of handling the battle system. No reason I should be clearing battles without getting so much as nicked. Also, the sound effects and music were bad even for a GBA port.

I somehow managed to clear 99 levels in Galaga for Atari 7800 when I was 6 or 7. I rock...But I can't get past level 34 in the "real" version even nowadays. HMMM....

Lastly...X-Men vs Street Fighter for PS1 was the game that made me buy a Saturn, RAM cart and the game for the system. A PS1 version should never have been brought up for discussion at a board meeting, much less attempted. I would have loved to have seen Capcom attempt Marvel vs Capcom 2 on PS1.

Although...I actually liked Pac Man for the 2600. Not a GREAT "port", but I liked it because the maze was different from the original. 2600's Ms Pac Man is still my favorite version of that game.

X-Men vs Street Fighter was alright on PS1. I played that quite a lot actually, it's certainly more fun than waiting 5 minutes for Alpha 2 to load anything in.

So was the port of the original Earthworm Jim pretty decent then? It's just I heard otherwise.

Yeah, the port of the first one's pretty good. They even chucked in the Intestinal Distress level which wasn't in the SNES version. Though they ruined the character animation (not as bad as the sequel, but still) which can make latching onto hooks a bit crap at times.

Plenty of 2D fighting games were awful on the PSX, Samurai Shodown 3 being the worst offender. The loading times were extremely long and frequent and the screen would have "NOW LOADING" in orange letters stretching vertically and horizontally. The game also felt a lot slower, so it was often called Samurai Slowdown or Crashdown, seeing as it could crash halfway through the game. The special effects were also heavily pixelated and lots of animation was missing from the arcade version.

There are plenty of other bad ports I know, but I felt like mentioning this one in particular.

I haven't played it, but I hear the GBA port of R-type 3 is awful (hmm, the GBA sure got a reputation as a port machine, and it wasn't even a good one at that). The collision hitbox around your ship is supposedly much larger than the ship itself, there's no 2-player mode, and it just has a number of random quirks for no reason like forces that don't behave properly, and the music was turned into Gameboy-quality midis. Plus the screen had to be cropped to fit on the GBA's low resolution display.

I have to say though, I didn't expect to hear about so many terrible ports in this thread. When I hear "bad port" I think of Splinter Cell on the PS2/Gamecube or that WWF game on the PSP with the horrid loading times or something. A lot of these games sound downright unplayable...how the hell did they even get through alpha testing if apparantly noone is even able to play it because of all these issues?

Mostly all Takara ports of SNK games to SNES are really insane, specially Fatal Fury 2... that got more bugs than Ultimate Mortal Kombat III for the same machine (another horrible port too)

Um, Chrono Trigger's port was released alone in Japan. Square, I'm sure, didn't want to release it based on the Chrono Trigger name here when they could shove it into a Final Fantasy-themed release (You know, for Sales ++).

The only reason you guys have a problem with the damn port is because it has similar load times to EVERY OTHER PS1 RPG whenever you get into a battle. I didn't hear any music issues when I played it, and I actually played through the port quite a bit in my attempts to get more endings. And you've gotta admit those anime cutscenes are pretty hot.

And let's not forget that Final Fantasy IV in that collection was a retranslated version, that's much harder and more faithful to the original Japanese version. It also has fewer technical issues than Trigger, if you're more inclined to that.

Heheh, I remember seeing that Double Dragon game in stores before (once)... I asked myself how that could even be possible, until I looked at the back of the box and noticed it looked nothing like the arcade game. Went for the Master System version instead ~,~

Ironically, I didn't enjoy Pacman until I played that horrible port (where somehow the whole pellet collecting business finally made sense---don't laugh!).

Horrible ports:

Ninja Gaiden Trilogy/Ninja Ryukenden Tomoe: On the surface, this looked like a dream come true. Initially, that seemed to be the case. But then one would notice how certain effects from the NES version are missing, some music is missing, there's no end credits (which had kickbitchin' music in the original games), some cutscenes looked worse than they did before, etc... personally, I don't like the "improved" music either, since the tracks are a bit too different in style from the original classic tunes, and rarely in a good way.
On the plus side, it was far more colorful.

I'll also add the GB versions of Mortal Kombat >__>;
Not that I like the originals they're based on, but the ports did away with stages, stage fatalities, bosses, characters, blood, etc etc etc... leaving you with fighting games that aren't very good to begin with.

Not so horrible ports but could have been better:

Ibara on PS2: I don't understand why the game loads so much o___o;
Otherwise, I love it. But geesh (lots of other arcade ports could go here as well, mainly of the PS1 era).

Street Fighter III 3rd Strike PS2: Well, I could complain about this very same thing on many 2D ports for the system... but for some reason it bothers me here the most. Everything is so blurry while in the arcade it's so... not.

Do the SNES ports of Valis IV and Dracula X count? (considering that instead of porting the games, they made them entirely different). They weren't really bad, but they did remove many of the elements that made the originals special (in both cases, being able to use more than one character, stages, story/cutscenes).

How come no one has mentioned Mortal Kombat Advance yet? COMPLETE AND UTTER FAILURE ON A CART, that one was.

Everything about it was wrong. EVERYTHING. ANimations, moves, controls, music, the works. NOTHING was done right. It deserves the 1s and 2s it got from most reviewers.

Seriously. I don't understand all this bitching about FFVI on PS1. The loading times weren't any worse than the other PS1 RPGs (much shorter than most) and for a person who doesn't have access to the SNEs originals (which is quite lot, ok) that's fine. But no, UUUUGH DON'T BUY THAT GAME IT'S FUCKING AWFUL 2/10

The small pauses before each battle in Chrono Trigger bothered me a little, not because I masturbate over the SNES game daily, but because the transition between movement and fight was designed to be smooth and non-interruptive, and the pauses make each encounter stick out more. I still woudn't call it a bad port, since a bad port of a game would actually have to do something offensive and practically ruin the game.

So would you recommend spending $24.99 on the FFV and VI game for the PSX? I never really got that far in V, actually. Similiarly with IV.

Those other PS1 RPGs also had high quality 3D graphics and shit. :| But as someone who's used to the SNES versions of FFVI and Chrono Trigger, the loading times bug me a a lot. I'd recommend emulation much more highly than those ports.

The SNES ports for Doom and Wolfenstein 3D were pretty horrible. The GBA port of Wolf3D is marginally better, but it's still not that good.

Quite, because occasionally glitchy sound and keyboard controls is somehow more playable than 1.5 second loading times.

Oh, I don't know, Breath of Fire III and Wild Arms had similar loading times and those didn't bother me. Hell, Another World on the SNES had 6-9 second loading times between levels and no one seems to complain about those. One shouldn't even be talking, much less complaining, about loading times if they're so short you don't even need a loading screen.

The issue with Square's SNES-to-PS1 ports is that THEY SUCK. This isn't about comparing the ports to games on the same platform, it's about comparing the port to the original. And in doing so, it's obvious as night and day that the SNES originals had better music and exponentially shorter loading times. The translations were also questionably stupid in the PS1 ports.


And if you get sound and keyboard control glitches in your emulation... buy a new computer, new keyboard, download a better emulator, or download a proper ROM. I seriously have no idea how you can have these glitches, because they don't exist.

Are you emulator people so freakishly blind to your hobby that you choose to not notice the occasional skipping in both sound and frames? There's no such thing as perfect emulation, you can just stop kidding yourself there.

And I'm not talking about glitching on a keyboard, I'm talking about the very concept of playing a game designed for a joypad on a keyboard, which, again, is somehow magically more playable than 1.5 second loading times. I am in a hurry in this turn-based RPG, I have no time for absolutely massive loading times that render the game unplayable!


The PS1 ports of FFIV and VI are fine. That the SNES versions are superior is an obvious given since every port is somehow inferior to the original. But to say they suck is blowing things way out of proportion.

Metal Slug on the PS1 is a flawed port. It removes many of the things that made the arcade original so appealing in the first place, which PS1 FFVI does not. DonPachi on the PS1 is a flawed port. In changing the playfield because of the different shape of the display (TV as opposed to coin-op cabinet), it breaks the gameplay of the game entirely, resulting in an inferior game even in its own right.

I don't know what equipment you've been using to test the music in both versions, but the PS1 version did a good enough job reproducing the music in my ears, making it a decent port. Not great, not perfect, but certainly not "Don't buy this game, spend $300 on the SNES original instead!" bad.

After reading all this, I think I'll get the FFIV Advance for my DS. I'm not so much inclined to play a title like that at home, but I'll probably get more enjoyment out of it away from "@ home" consoles.

I definitely agree on this one. Worst port I've ever played.

I'm well aware of all of that. If I had something as lucrative as the FF license, I'd whore it out that way as well. Ethically, I have an issue with taking a fine stand-alone game and including it in such a misleading title. Shows either $$$ was more important or they really didn't care. Looking forward to Bahamut Lagoon, Seiken 3 and Rudra no Hihou (with FF Mystic Quest)coming over as "Final Fantasy Smorgasboard".

Chrono Trigger's music actually came out decently...They rerecorded the audio through the PS1 sound chip. There's differences (you can hear them between the 1-disc PS1 Chrono Trigger soundtrack and the 3-Disc SNES OST), but it's nowhere near as poorly done as FFV and FFVI. And FFIV came out fine, IIRC as well. The loading times for CT though are unacceptable when you consider:

1. It's a 32 bit system doing a 16 bit game.
2. The originals were fast.
3. You can play the original cart or ROM and not deal with the hassle.
4. With proper programming, they could've done much better.
5. It actually costs money for such a shockingly unprofessional effort.

And actually, yes, I find the majority of PS1 RPG's to have atrocious loading times, Square being the worst offender. Loading for FF6 and Chrono Trigger shouldn't be comparable (or even worse) to late-era PS1 games like FF9 and Chrono Cross. They probably could've used the Valkyrie Profile programmers, who managed to load four characters, plus enemies, plus music, plus voices (and let's not forget we're talking sprites, which PS1 has huge issues with) constantly lightning-quick.

I haven't "forgotten"...Notice I said nothing about FFIV being a shoddy port (at least...not the Chronicles version). I can live with a couple Mode 7 and load screen issues, which were about the extent of its' problems. The updated translation was reason enough for me to rent it. That was also where I almost died laughing seeing what they did to poor Chrono Trigger.

Qwarky: I'm wondering why you're so intent on defending the PS1 ports, while making PC emulated versions out to be horrible (the PS1 games are running on emulators on the PS1 hardware, so that's why they differ very little from their counterparts, performance issues aside). My computer is hardly on the high-end side of things (new, but definitely not high end) and I can run all of the games in question with no noticable differences (and I'm well familiar with the originals...at least for FFVI and CT). FFVI for the PS1 is completely riddled with slowdown and load times (to be fair, I didn't remember slowdown being an issue with FFV and I didn't play CT long enough to see)...And I find the music aspect completely unacceptable, just based on what came out of the TV. I don't even want to see how Dancing Mad or the Ending for FFVI came out. I had to play FFV with the music completely off. No need to worry about keyboards if you plug a cheap controller in the USB port.

If the PS1 ports were given away (say, as preorder bonuses), I wouldn't have an issue with them. The fact that they were "professionally" made (compared to PC emulation, which is a fan hobby and superior in every way), represent some of the best games of their time (and in some people's cases, some of the best games ever) and charged good money for gives me every reason to loathe them and think less of the people that allowed them on the market. If you want to suffer through it, be my guest. But please don't come out and tell those of us used to the originals (or near-perfectly emulated versions) that these ports even approach "good". More like "last resort if the better versions aren't available".

You must understand I am not defending the PS1 ports because I think they are the pinnacle of game production. I am defending them whenever this issue comes up because there are people calling them awful products which they clearly aren't. Either these people are flaunting their "expert" knowledge on the original title or they have their SNES pads rammed high up their asses. Besides the pad, they are, in effect, full of shit.

To tell someone interested in the titles "no, don't buy that, it's an awful port" would require the port to be a completely hideous attrocity, something so bad it ruins and warps the original experience, be it drastic alterations to content, gameplay or game flow, not just "slightly longer loading times and IN MY OPINION inferior emulated SNES era chiptune music (1120kbs instead of 1130 like the original)".

I am not attacking emulation either, god knows general, non-specific title emulation only works well enough on the PC. But I've played enough emulation (on my relatively high end PC) to know it's not perfect and anyone trying to claim it is is merely fooling themselves.

I bring up the issue because these same people then say that instead of playing a decent enough port (for someone who, again, does not have access to the originals at ridiculous ebay prices), they should instead play them on their PC, not in front of the TV, but in front of their monitor, not on their joypad, but on their keyboard, and somehow manage to convince themselves that this is a far better option than "slightly longer loading times and IN MY OPINION inferior emulated SNES era chiptune music (1120kbs instead of 1130 like the original)".

The thing is, I have an absolutely terrible computer. It's rather old and very low-performance. Despite this, I have never really had any problems with SNES emulation. Sound, for the most part, is perfect, and I don't experience any lag whatsoever unless I'm running millions of programs. Furthermore, I have a PC controller, so I don't experience any negative effects from using a keyboard to play a game designed to work with a controller.

You're right, emulation isn't perfect, but SNES emulation has reached the point where it's damn near close. Sure, I have plenty of problems when emulating GBA or Playstation, but I've never experienced much of a problem with SNES emulation, and if I did, it was usually ROM-specific. I own Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, and Final Fantasy IV for the SNES, but at this point, I'd much rather just play those via emulation, since there's absolutely no quality in gameplay lost, in my point of view.

The loading times in Chrono Trigger may seem like a minor irritation at first glance, but once you play for long periods of time, it becomes extremely annoying, especially if you're accustomed to the original. To me, emulation seems like a much better gaming experience in this case.

Well, sorry you're offended by my own disliking of Square's shoddy products. I don't believe I said anything to the effect that people shouldn't play them...I was expressing my own displeasure with them. If you want to play them and minimize how bad the ports are in favor of the overall game, be my guest. You would do well to be aware of the view some of us hold these things in and why, because I don't appreciate being told I have an SNES pad rammed up my ass for being offended by what I consider to be lazily-made "official" ports of some of my favorite games. If I had said, "LOL, UR a fucking newb for playing the PS1 versions", then you have every right to get offended. I don't think I said anything that warranted the follow-up "people have an SNES pad shoved up their ass" posts.

I bought FF Anthology for FFV. I finished it, but it was more to get to the end than because I was having any kind of fun with it. The music was completely off (I turned it off after the first encounter with Gilgamesh) and I just used an FAQ to blow through it, because the load times were beyond the point of being annoying. I would sooner shoot myself in the head than deal with the mangling that poor game went through again.

So how can you have no real issues with the PS1 ports, then criticize the minor imperfections of the PC emulations? That's outright hypocritical. No one's saying they are perfect, but they're damn close and much moreso than the PS1 versions. And also, one is an "official" version, the other is all fan-made...And the fan-made one is easily the better of the two. I think that counts for a lot.

I can sympathize with that...I HATE playing games on a PC because of the set-up. But...I never said anything of that nature and I'm not going to pretend I'm happy with the version of FFV I got saddled with and I honestly would've been happier if they hadn't released it (or at least taken more time to make it more palatable).

If you're going to flip and take offense everytime someone mentions their displeasure with the ports, be prepared to do it a lot. But don't try to pass it off as people being elitist about it either. It's pretty ignorant and I get more than a little annoyed reading how I have an SNES pad rammed up my ass or how minor my complaints are because I have an issue with an (IMO) shitfest of a product Square put out.

Also realize this isn't about you specifically. When I say "people", I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about the folks who do this. Like you said, you haven't said "lol ur a n00b for playing ps1 ports", so it wasn't directed at you in the first place.

Again, I am not attacking emulation, for god's sake. I am arguing that with the default control and play setup of the average PC, emulation on a computer is just as flawed as it is to some people on the PS1, more so in my mind. Not everyone wants to take the illegal option, so trying to persuade them to do so is ridiculous.

GBA Jet Set Radio port, just LOL.

Hey speaking of words and SNES to PSone ports..

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y13...mes_pond_2.jpg

Actually the SNES version was a port of the Mega Drive one which was also a port of the original Amiga game.. so um. You think slight pauses before you do stuff in the FF menus are bad. =o James Pond for PSone took a good two minutes or so just to load up the title screen. Sometimes the jumping sound effect would never stop, enemies would be stuck on the spot and if you were lucky the game would just freeze up on you. It launched at only $10, more than what Play It spent on porting it over.

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y13...ap/9181445.jpg

Thrown onto PlayStation a full year after the awesome N64 version. Who knows why. I mean, the N64 port was a damn sight crappier looking than the original arcade one, with a whole heap of thick fog, but the gameplay was spot on. Hey! Here comes PlayStation!

http://image.com.com/gamespot/images..._screen004.jpg

Wow, it's got the extreme N64 fog and new exclusive vomit textures! The frame rate was so horribly low, the entire game lost its sensation of speed. It was like racing with snails. Hitting a jump just made things worse, Rush on PSone could have been the introduction of bullet time in gaming. The CPU cars had a nasty habit of transporting all over the damn road, too. What, couldn't load cars turning? Just have to make them vanish and turn up again in the new spot? What a bag of urine infested pool water. Whoever was in charge of this should be punched in the face with a bee hive.

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y13...oom_32x_us.jpg

Wow, 32X! I mean surely with all the AWESOME new power this add-on gave the Mega Drive, a port of the three year old PC game would have been kinda okay.

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y13...p/Doom32X3.jpg

Except not. The game had to run in that tiny little window the whole time (that bar across the bottom took up a massive amount, too). But even with all this eye strain, it STILL didn't run smoothly. The music was quite bad, too. They didn't even try here. The bloody SNES version ran better. =\

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y13...blemission.jpg

This version had a crippling error in it that really did make it an Impossible Mission! Some crucial items were placed behind the computers for reasons unknown to anyone with a brain. This means there was no way to pick these items up, because everytime you went to, it'd activate the computer. To make matters worse you could make out the edges of these items. They'd sit there. Taunting you. "Stay forever" indeed. I don't think they ever recalled the game or anything.

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y13...p/sonic2gg.jpg

AUGH. SO MUCH RAGE. The Master System Sonic 2 is my favorite game OF ALL TIME. To see such a God awful port makes me want to listen to Linkin Park all day. This came out a few months after the SMS one, and Sega being completely lazy fucks, simply chopped the screen image. Rather than resizing sprites or whatever. So Sonic himself took up a huge amount of the screen, leaving you to go for blind leaps of faith. WHAT'S COMING UP? Oh it's a hole. This shit also made the very first boss extremely difficult to beat, as you could no longer see the bouncing balls, they'd just smack into you out of nowhere. I have even more rage for the GG port of Sonic Chaos but maybe for another post dunno dunno dunno. =)

Probably because these publishers don't give a crap, they just want a quick buck. ;_;

Hmm, that actually reminds me of Sim City 2000 for the Saturn (and probably Playstation as well). The port itself isn't all that bad, the gameplay was more or less intact, but the literally 2 minute long load time EVERY TIME YOU START IT UP was just ridiculous. There were actually 2 loading bars that come up, one after another, so just when you think it's FINALLY done loading after the first one, another loading screen comes up! Also, a single save game took up the ENTIRE Saturn memory from what I remember: unless Sim City 2000 was the only game you owned on the console, you'd need to get the memory backup cart just to save other games (or save multiple cities in SC2000).


You know, I actually thought the 32x version was decent for what it was. They at least managed to keep the game speed as high as the original game, something neither the SNES or even Jaguar game were able to accomplish, and the framerate was quite a bit smoother as well. I was also surprised that the border wasn't very noticable when you're actually playing, although the cut down screen area did reduce the resolution so much that distant objects were really blocky.

My biggest complaint about the 32x version was that enemies were ALWAYS facing you. You couldn't circle around them or ever see them facing any direction but toward you: no matter what they looked like they were looking straight at the player (ironically, the back of the box has a screenshot of enemies NOT facing you, so either it was from another version of the game or it was a feature they cut later on).


Sad but true...in a market where even games like Big Rigs can get released, I'm sure port quality is the least of most publisher's concerns.

The most recent one I can speak of is Spectral Souls. Being a port of a PS2 game to the PSP it sure has its handful of issues that render the game unplayable.

The graphics aren't all that impressive at all. They consist of very basic 3D basic backgrounds and sprites. The game still has major slowdown, especially when you walk through a town with 2 NPCs that aren't even moving. But the problem that makes this game unplayable would eb the loadtimes. It pops up the load text for 4 lines of in-game text. It loads in order to move one unit. It loads to bring up a basic meu and then the one after that. The game allows you to set up a multiple attack combo and once you set it off the combo goes through different pauses to load each attack one after another. You spend 75% percent of your game time looking at a loadscreen.

I have never seen such a sloppy port before.

I havn't beaten the first boss yet because it is so damn hard :( I got bored of playing the first two levels over and over before getting owned by random bouncing balls coming out of nowhere at high speeds

Sonic 2 for Game Gear isn't the worst Sonic game ever - its only the SECOND WORST. That honor of #1 awful goes to Sonic Blast for Game Gear which is ABSOLUTELY ABYSMAL. It is without a doubt THE MOST UNPLAYABLE SONIC GAME CREATED.

http://i97.photobucket.com/albums/l2...5257901-00.pnghttp://i97.photobucket.com/albums/l2...5257901-03.pnghttp://i97.photobucket.com/albums/l2...5257902-03.pnghttp://i97.photobucket.com/albums/l2...5257902-08.png

Stiff controls, terrible graphics. They tried to imitate the graphics for Donkey Kong Country (which was popular at the time) and failed all around. BTW - for anyone who wants to know how to beat the first boss in Sonic 2 Game Gear, its simple: don't do anything.

It's one the WORST ideas for a boss ever and thats why so many people fail at it because its so simple. No matter what you do, Sonic can't destroy the antlion at the bottom of the screen and he can't reach Robotnik at the top of the screen. All you have to do is avoid the balls Robotnik drops. If you notice, the balls hit the Robot Antlion. If you can stay alive long enough, the balls will automatically destroy the antlion boss.

Voila - Underground Zone defeated. A lot of Sonic 2 GG's bosses and stages are absolutely fucking bonkers. Its also infamous for being the game that introduced the fucking warp tube mazes that were prevalent in all the Game Gear games following it. -___-

Hey Dubble, no hotlinking. Go host those pictures on imagesocket or imageshack or something.

Er as for the topic. I don't play many ports. And if I do I make sure they're quality jobs. So sorry. :(

Sorry about that Acer, thanks for the heads up

Any Sonic DC/GC game that was ported to PC pretty much sucked. Sonic Adventure DX, Sonic Heroes, Sonic Mega Plus XXL Great Stuff Whatever Collection... Those games made me cry out loud.

Especially the last one mentioned - it was just an emulator with fancy video running as background images. Woopy-di-diddly-doo. Waste of space.

I agree as far as the first two games are concerned, but the Trilogy version of NG3's soundtrack is the only one for me. Stages 3-2 and 4-1 are so much better than the NES versions...but to each his own.

Now, then. All discussion of wretched ports must absolutely include:

http://www.geocities.com/dollydeux/3036.jpg

Resizing? We don't need no stinking resizing! Just zoom in! No adjusting the character speed, either! Just run like a bat out of hell into every enemy in the game...oh wait, you aren't Adol, are you?

P.S. Worst VG story rewrite ever.

I forgot that I own Crystalis...I was looking SO forward to that since I missed out on the NES game which still gets good reviews.

Man was I hella dissapointed -___-

I'd agree with the 3-2 theme being better on the SNES version... exept that that isn't even stage 3-2's theme >__>; the original was one of my favorite tracks, and it vanished from the SNES version. But for what it's worth, I do really like the SNES version of that theme! (while others, like the first stage's theme, I prefer on the NES).

Now that you mention that, I think I remember reading about it from a game magazine a looooooong time ago. Basically, that was a screenshot from the PC version on the back of the box, and the limitations of the 32x (and SNES) forced them to have all enemies facing towards the player.

I didn't think the port of Crystalis was THAT bad.

Great game though. I'm really thinking of digging out the old NES and playing Crystalis and Faxanadu now (Or grabbing some ROMs real fast, since I don't even know if the damn NES still works.)

I didn't even know Crystalis was on GBC. I'm gonna have to download that for some self-infliction later on.

More fun with Game Boy!

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y13...crap/ga463.jpg

The console version wasn't very good at all, with a virtual Springfield that was boring as hell to drive around compared to the places in Crazy Taxi. SO LET'S PUT IT ON GBA MONTHS LATER IN MODE 7!

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y13...lcrap/srr1.jpg http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y13...lcrap/srr2.jpg

The WHOLE place was like a wasteland, buildings were PART OF THE GROUND, EVERYTHING WAS FLAT! Even the Crazy Taxi GBA port had crude 3D buildings. It was a nightmare trying to figure out where the hell everyone wanted to go. If you got close enough, some 2D buildings would spring out, but that was completely useless most of the time. Steer off the main roads and you'll get caught in a mess of ground texture, not knowing where to go and hitting invisble barriers non-stop. The game shouldn't have happened. The worst part is it became one of the top selling GBA games ever.

Concerning the PS1 ports of Squaresoft's classics (FFIV, V, VI, and CT) I can say this: PS1 Chrono Trigger was my first shot at the game, some 5 years ago, and it was good. I was halfway through the game when I started analyzing loading times and I calculated that for every hour of game time, 70 real-time minutes elapsed. Ever since I got to play the original, first on emulator and then on a real SNES, I never went back to the PS1 version, but I had a lot of fun with it while it lasted.

That said, loading times in those ports are hardly excusable. Tolerable if you can't play (and have never seen) the cart-based originals, but just inexcusable. I my experience, late PS1 RPGs such as FFIX and Chrono Cross had noticeable shorter loading times for menus. I can understand that battles, especially non-real-time battles, require some time to load, but the wait for CT's and FFVI's menus to open on PS1 is ridiculous. In CT, 10 seconds actually have to pass between a dialogue that prompts you to name a character and the actual character naming screen, a time longer than that required to open the menu (which, I repeat, is in itself longer than the time required in FFIX).

I could actually never play FFVI on PS1. I couldn't stand the idea of spending so much time waiting for infinite battles to load. CT had much fewer battles, but the encounter rate for FFVI is already intolerable on the SNES.
But in the end, I agree: they're not bad ports, only lazy ports.

Remembering EWJ2 on GBA again, i heard that the game hasnt ever got a quality test before the game was released to the public, even the game has some part on Level 5 that absolutely freezes the game... how can their sell something like that?

And now that Grawl speaks about Sonic Team ports on PC, i got Puyo Puyo Fever on my PC, im a Puyo fan and when i heard that the PC title got online mode i pick up the title, but when you are installing the game, the setup shows a message saying that the game NEEDS WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER 9 TO WORK, when i read that i just cant understand why, so i skipped it, when i started the game... the game was absolutely in silence, THE GAME RUNS WMP AT THE SAME TIME TO PLAY THE MUSIC, that was one of the most unprofessional thing i ever saw on a commercial PC title ever... even the songs doesnt have a proper loop... >_<

Final Fantasy Anthology for the PSX. Enough Said.

And if it wasn't, this has got to be, hands down, the most atrocious sin that Square-Enix has ever commited. They botched just about EVERYTHING about this release. Slowdown like holy hell has frozen over is the biggest problem with this. There's a loading time when you do anything, whether you enter a town, open up the menu, and for god's sake, everytime you enter battle, there's noticable loading, which is just unacceptable if you take into account the unbelievably high encounter rate that has stayed intact.

Even the sound effects took a hit. Most notably, KEFKA'S LAUGH. What the Fuck Square? WHAT THE BLOODY, BLOODY, BLOODY FUCK? My favorite game you ever released, only for you to rerelease it all botched up. And yet, you don't stop there, you attempt to botch up a game that we have never even seen before. WHAT THE FUCK?

Ok, I'm done.

Anybody remember Gauntlet Legends? Y'know how it was on the N64 and all? It's expansion, Dark Legacy, was ported to the X-Box. And it looks exactly the same. That being said, it is still a better game than Seven Sorrows.

I don't play too many ports, but the worst one was the PS2 port of the dreamcast game Grandia II. It plays just fine and everything like the old version, what gets me is the lag, and I mean LAG. There are parts of the game where it just creeps to a halt it's so bad.

The game also froze several times and there was nary a scratch on the disc. I still played through it, and beat it, but I never will play it again unless I can land the dreamcast version.

While I've never played Carmageddon on the PC, the N64 port was an awful game. When Nintendo said no to the gore and running over people, it was as if Tidus (the maker I think) went about changing the people to zombies with green blood and decided to take anything good out of the game for revenge, surprassing for shitness what people had held as the worst N64 game, also their effort, Superman 64.