What is the worst port of a good game?

Video Games
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Sometimes, games are ported by people who just aren’t very skilled.

Sometimes, games are ported to a system that’s way too underpowered for the developers’ ambitions.

Sometimes, both occur!

What’s the worst port of a game that’s otherwise good?

A very infamous example is the DOS port of Mega Man 2, which is missing a lot and completely botched all the graphics.

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I mean, that looks better than the vast majority of arcade to C64 ports.

And while I’ve never played them, it looks like the situation on Spectrum and Amstrad was even worse.

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As much as I greatly enjoy the packaging and the intent behind the ports, the NES Classics on GBA are not great to play and have always bothered me. I mean, they run pretty well, but they look terrible. At least with, say, Super Mario Bros DX on Gameboy, they put a (not very detailed, but extant) world map in there, along with the Lost Levels.

Absolute worst, though… For me, it’s those old mobile ports of the Final Fantasies (not the Pixel Remasters), the ones with the terribly cheap art. Why play those old FFs with horrible art and animation?

Oh wait I know. Sonic Jam on Game dot com. Go look it up - it sounds and runs absolutely horribly.

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oh man, i figured if i saw final fantasies here, it’d be the ones poorly ported to those PSX collections

prolly not as grievous a sin as that one disc that added loading time to chrono trigger, that shit was unforgivable

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Prior to the mobile versions, those would be the worst ones, yeah. They’re still pretty bad, I’ll play the GBA versions any day over the extremely slow PSX versions. And that’s before you get into the awful translation of FF5 on PSX, too…

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DOS Mega Man isn’t a port. It’s its own game.

One that pisses me off is the Dreamcast port of Slave Zero. For the privilege of playing the game on your fancy Sega box instead of a PC, you get

-Awful framerate
-Cut enemies
-Glitches galores
-NO MUSIC

Even now I see videos slamming the game off for this dreadful conversion, ignorant that the PC game is much better! A video I watched made a compelling case this version ruined the future of the game by merely existing because Accolade took money from Sega to make this port and hold off the original PC (but without letting the developers improve the PC game in the meantime), leading it to beign released in an unfavourable windows and with its engine outdated. Maybe if Dreamcast Slave Zero didn’t exist, I’d instead be grumbling about how Slave Five ruined the franchise.

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What bothers me a lot is how inconsistent the GBA NES/Famicom classics are:

  • Some games like Takahashi Meijin’s Boukenjima have completely reformatted artwork and perspective correct sprites, and are the gold standard. Input lag is also mercifully low.
  • Other games squish the view to the GBA’s wider low res display, but use the built in flickering of the screen to add antialiasing and fill in the gaps
  • The worst…well.

The last two games I played were Kid Icarus and Super Mario Bros 2, and would rank them in the best category. Super Mario Bros. and (iirc) Mappy got done a bad deal. Star Soldier is in the middle category.

And if we thought these were bad, Hudson’s own collections are even worse! There’s a Takahashi Meijin no Boukenjima collection and all the games have audio and speed issues. The third game in particular runs so slowly it’s practically unplayable.

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