[General Discussion] This port tastes terrible

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?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Infernal Monkey

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.

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).

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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.



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. =/

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).

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

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.

There's nowhere I can't reach.