Porting Disasters Thread

[Agent Slacker]

I'm seeing a lot of slander against the Xbox port of Half-Life 2. Sure, it's not the best way to experience the game, but at least the framerate can hit 30 FPS at times, and the image doesn't look like smeared ass. You want to know a port that shouldn't have existed? The Outer Worlds on Switch.
I love the Switch. The fact that games like Wolfenstein Youngblood and DOOM Eternal can run at a near rock solid 30 FPS is a testament to the marvel of id Tech and Panic Button.
The Outer Worlds on the Switch runs like molasses. There are cutbacks to a TON of assets, from foliage to the LODs of objects in the distance. The resolution is also pretty awful. As mentioned in this Digital Foundry video, all of this would be fine if the game at least hit a consistent framerate. It doesn't. At all. I've played it firsthand and can confirm that it sits below 30 FPS about 80% of the time spent exploring the world. It gets even worse in combat.

 

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Count Duckula 2 - ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC: awful sound, bad graphics and platforms that don't move properly. The CPC version has a lower framerate, unresponsive controls and can't even be completed due to the problems unless you use cheats.

 

Mario Bros. - Amstrad CPC and ZX Spetrum: slippery controls in both versions. The Spectrum version is extremely broken, as it has horrible collision detection that sometimes doesn't even work and is ridiculously buggy, hence it has the tendencies of crashing during gameplay.

[AmethystViper]

Resident Evil 4 - PC (2007); Ubisoft gets blamed so much for this port despite not actually developing it, that dishonor should go to SourceNext whom ironically made better PC ports of Biohazard 2 and 3 in Japan, but this port of RE4 it is a total mess compared to the GameCube and PlayStation 2 versions. It was touted as having all of the GameCube version's graphics with the PS2 version's new content, but fails to deliver on those promises and then some. It was ported from the PS2 version and somehow made the graphics are horrendously worse than the console versions at the time (environments looks worse, lighting is virtually non-existent, models and textures are lower quality), the FMVs are taken from the PS2 version and looks even worse on PC, has piss-poor keyboard support and doesn't even support mouse controls like in many third-person shooting games on PC, lousy gamepad support, and uses generic number prompts instead of what your controller/keyboard uses, so it's more than likely going to get you killed in the game's QTEs. It's surprising that this port still gets mods being made for it despite how shoddy it is.

 

 

Rockman X7 -  PC (2004); putting my opinions about this game in general aside, this Korean-only PC port by Multi-Enterprise is an absolute farce. No video options, uglier graphics, missing effects, incorrect sound looping, compatibility issues, NO CONTROLLER SUPPORT on a game that is generally played on a controller, terrible keyboard controls that you can't rebind at all, and no in-game way to quit the software unless you use Task Manager or Alt+F4. After seeing the travesty this port turned out, it's no wonder why Capcom decided to port Mega Man X8 to PC in 2004 in-house and turned out much better for it.

 

 

GTA: The Trilogy - The "Definitive" Edition - PC, PS4, PS5, XO, XS, Switch; I'm not a huge Grand Theft Auto fan, but these "remasters" infuriate me on so many levels. Ugly and hideous graphical "enhancements", simplified and missing effects, new features that are poorly implemented, a litany of bugs and glitches, many cut music tracks, and so much more. The fact that Rockstar and Take-Two decided to witch-hunt modders with lawsuits and DMCA takedowns while also delisting the previous downloadable versions off Steam and consoles only makes it even worse. Calling this a "dumpster fire" is a gross understatement. It also irks me that this travesty of remasters sold millions... [facepalms]

 

 

[Daytime Waitress]

1 hour ago, AmethystViper said:

It also irks me that this travesty of remasters sold millions... [facepalms]

 

The entire internet was lit up on the remaster's release with how it was a rushed, bugged heap of trash?

Rockstar out here rewriting digital history to maybe score one better quarterly report?

Doesn't matter for the same reason EA's sporting division is still in business: peoples' monkey brains just see BRAND NAME and put down that cash.

[Wyrmwood]

On 12/4/2022 at 10:57 PM, Agent Slacker said:

The Outer Worlds on the Switch runs like molasses. There are cutbacks to a TON of assets, from foliage to the LODs of objects in the distance. The resolution is also pretty awful. As mentioned in this Digital Foundry video, all of this would be fine if the game at least hit a consistent framerate. It doesn't. At all. I've played it firsthand and can confirm that it sits below 30 FPS about 80% of the time spent exploring the world. It gets even worse in combat.

 

Yeah the Switch is the only current console I own and I love it but that game should never have been released. I managed as far as finishing the first planet/town area but the smeared graphics were really hurting my eyes and I'd not seen pop-up that bad since the Dreamcast. Made me feel ill playing it, it's a shame, kinda of my own fault for buying on Switch over PC but Skyrim and even Witcher 3 run fine. I expected lower res textures but not this. I may re-purchase on PC as I could see there was a nice game underneath but this port was a waste of time and money.

42 minutes ago, Daytime Waitress said:

 

The entire internet was lit up on the remaster's release with how it was a rushed, bugged heap of trash?

Rockstar out here rewriting digital history to maybe score one better quarterly report?

Doesn't matter for the same reason EA's sporting division is still in business: peoples' monkey brains just see BRAND NAME and put down that cash.

 

I'm afraid to say I was one of buyers, though only the Switch version. I actually didn't know the original versions had been de-listed, I bought them years ago, the thing is though I absolutely hated them. Played them all on Playstation first, then re-bought on PC 6-7 years later but I couldn't drive a car with a keyboard and mouse, not properly anyway. Tried Xpadder as no native Xbox controller support but after multiple configurations gave up. 

 

The re-masters on Switch are far more enjoyable in my opinion, the graphical upgrade is pretty lazy but I didn't buy them for that, just wanted to re-play some games I loved that I'd been unable to on my computer. There's the odd bug out, but there always was. Oh and again didn't take much work I expect but being able to just re-start a failed mission is so much less frustrating. Yeah they could of been better, but if they re-made them like that nice Mafia re-make they would of been $80 each game and San Andreas would be out in like 2028 or something. Never understood the hate for these, my monkey brain was happy with this purchase ;)

[PsychEyeball]

9 hours ago, Daytime Waitress said:

 

The entire internet was lit up on the remaster's release with how it was a rushed, bugged heap of trash?

Rockstar out here rewriting digital history to maybe score one better quarterly report?

Doesn't matter for the same reason EA's sporting division is still in business: peoples' monkey brains just see BRAND NAME and put down that cash.

I totally plead guilty in that regard, I bought it because everyone and their mom said it was trash. I had to experience it myself.

 

And it's every bit as bad as everyone says.

 

For starters, the game wouldn't launch at first because I have a multi-monitor setup and the available resolutions on each screen I own are different. But the game would attempt to set my resolutions on my two screens to the same resolution and since it wasn't possible, the game would crash on startup. Only when I set my resolution on both screens to something they could handle would the game start.

 

And finally, the games themselves are literally unchanged from their original forms. And this is actually really bad if you account the default settings the games carry. The devs thought that allowing the games to run on higher FPS would be swell for everybody so the frame limiter is set by default to 60 FPS. Problem is, the entire game logic is affected by FPS. Which means that if your car is on fire, if your game runs more than twice as fast as it normally would, the car will explode much faster. Faster to the point where escaping on time is almost impossible.

 

I only played GTA3 in the entire pack and the whole game just looks wrong. Liberty City is supposed to mostly be a run down dump but everything is so clean as if some waxing machine went over the whole streets and polished everything to a crisp. There also was the hilariously bad rain effect (which I heard was patched out at least). And finally there's all the AI upscaling jobs that everyone now know by heart which mostly look really off, as if no one even took the time to evaluate how the upsclaing process went.

 

Even as a player of crap games, it did not keep my attention for long since the big flaws are so obvious. 

Edited December 21, 2022 by PsychEyeball : plead and plaid are two different words oops

[AmethystViper]

Mega Man X - MS-DOS; the game's frame-rate is either incredibly choppy or unstable compared to the SNES original, worse sound effects and poor MIDI music, and removes the ride armors. The only saving grace is the ability to save your game, but in the world of emulation and the X Legacy Collection, there's hardly a reason to play this game on DOS.

 

 

Acceleration of SUGURI X-Edition HD - PC (2012); while it's in a better shape now, I can still recount how Rockin' Android managed to ruin one of my favorite doujin games when it was a buggy mess at launch in 2012. It was based off the PS3 port but unlike that version you can toggle the original graphics back on and playing this game in native widescreen (PS3 version's is stretched) is a nice improvement, it couldn't save the game with the amount of bugs, crashes, and compatibility issues on Windows 8 they introduced compared to their original 2009 English release. Many SUGURI fans (myself included) were upset with how awful this re-release shipped. One of its biggest selling point, online multiplayer, couldn't even work when a friend of mine tried to play online matches the game refuses to connect us via Steam or IP. While it's mostly functional nowadays on Steam thanks to a patch in 2014 (sadly those who got this DRM-free via Indie Royale were screwed over as we didn't get a patch nor Steam keys for the game), it sadly has some issues leftover like broken replays on different resolutions, broken Achievements, and trying to play the game on resolutions above 1920x1080 with its config launcher will crash the game. Even the game's localizer and programmer has expressed she wishes she could fix this game if she could but she was laid off from Rockin' Android years ago. It's no wonder why the sequel was localized by Fruitbat Factory and still has an online community with players active, not to mention received better support with gameplay and quality-of-life updates.

 

 

Deadly Premonition - PC; Very lazy and half-baked PC port with locked 720p resolution, washed out colors, poor keyboard and controller support, buggy, and prone to crashing. Although fan-made fixes are available, it can't save everything from this PC port.

 

 

14 hours ago, Wyrmwood said:

Played them all on Playstation first, then re-bought on PC 6-7 years later but I couldn't drive a car with a keyboard and mouse, not properly anyway. Tried Xpadder as no native Xbox controller support but after multiple configurations gave up. 

There's already a mod for the PC versions of III, Vice City, and San Andreas called GInput that brings proper PlayStation 2-styled controller support with additional tweaks and its works much better than a third-party keyboard-to-controller software.

 

 

[Wyrmwood]

1 hour ago, AmethystViper said:

There's already a mod for the PC versions of III, Vice City, and San Andreas called GInput that brings proper PlayStation 2-styled controller support with additional tweaks and its works much better than a third-party keyboard-to-controller software

 

Damn wish I'd known about that before messing with xpadder for hours. Thanks for the heads up, I'll keep that in mind if I ever want to play on a big screen, lucky I bought those before being delisted then.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Rise of the Robots - Game Gear: the enemy AI is extremely broken, meaning you will be defeated every round and you'll barely have a chance to beat it.

 

Edited December 23, 2022 by Wadmodder Shalton

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Lego Rock Raiders - PS1: rather than being a strategy game, it's a generic action game, with a password system for each level due to lack of memory card support, unresponsive analog controls, lackluster sound and having differences in content for the NTSC and PAL versions.

Lego Racers - Game Boy Color: lack of customization options, no unlockable cars and characters, only three races on each track instead of four, overpowered powerups and frustrating difficulty.

Carmaggedon - Game Boy Color: unresponsive controls, broken AI and framerate issues. At least it's a bit better than Carmaggedon 64, I guess.

Microsoft Pinball Arcade - Game Boy Color: awful ball physics, unresponsive controls, bad sound and lackluster graphics

Edited January 1, 2023 by Wadmodder Shalton

[Wadmodder Shalton]

The Best of Microsoft Entertainment Pack - Game Boy Color: a mediocre compilation of 7 of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack with lackluster graphics, awful music, and frustrating gameplay. The seven games are Tut's Tomb, TriPeaks, FreeCell, TicTactics, Minesweeper, Life Genesis and SkiFree.

Microsoft Puzzle Collection Entertainment Pack - Game Boy Color: a slightly better but still lackluster version of Microsoft Entertainment Pack The Puzzle Collection with six games which are Jewel Chase, Spring Weekend, Lineup, Fifty Flush, Color Collison and Rat Poker. It's still better than the Best of Entertainment Pack port, I guess.

 

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Windows 98 and Windows 2000 - NES: both wierd ports and bizarre bootlegs for the many Famiclone systems that were out in Asia at the time, with the Windows 98 one having programs that don't even function, and with the Windows 2000 one having some functional programs.

I'd rather use a virtual machine of either Windows 98 or Windows 2000 than play these Famicom abominations.

 

There's even two variants of the NES Windows 2000 bootleg, the first being SuborWin 2000 and the other being Bravesoft Windows 2000 in which they added some extra programs that are functional.

 

On a sidenote, there is also a bootleg Famicom port of Windows XP made in 2003, but it has never been dumped as of today, so don't expect it to appear on eBay or Amazon anytime soon.

 

Even if that Windows XP Famicom bootleg port did resurface, I'd rather use a virtual machine of Windows XP than play that Famicom abomination.

Edited April 19, 2023 by Wadmodder Shalton

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Gorf - Atari 5200: programming issue with the system's awful joystick controller which causes the player's ship to go all over the place.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

The ports of Windows NT systems on anything other than ARM.

 

At its peak, Windows NT 4.0 supported x86 as well as MIPS, DEC Alpha and PowerPC. However, the alternative platforms suffered from poor hardware support as well as lack of available software, which lead to the discontinuation of all platforms but x86 in Windows 2000. Windows XP then added support for the newly introduced Itanium, a 64-bit processor designed by Intel purported to eventually replace the aging x86 family, however, its performance proved to be underwhelming. As a result AMD became the de Facto standard for 64-bit PCs, resulting in Microsoft killing off the Itanium version of Windows NT after five releases.

Edited January 4, 2023 by Wadmodder Shalton

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Wanted to bump my thread here.

 

The Nickelodeon licensed PC games developed by AWE Games which weren't perfect, as they were different than the console games developed by THQ's development studios during the 2000s. These were as follows:

SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom - a mediocre mini game collection separated into five sections.

The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie Game - a different version designed as a point and click adventure game that barely follows the plot of the first SpongeBob movie.

SpongeBob SquarePants: Lights, Camera, Pants - a different version designed as a point and click adventure game, where the objective is to make a TV show.

SpongeBob SquarePants: Nighty Nightmare (AKA Creature From The Krusty Krab) - The PC equivalent to the Creature From The Krusty Krab console game that is designed as a point and click adventure game.

Avatar - The Last Airbender - a different version that utilizes most of the same mechanics as Nighty Nightmate but with the addition of minigames.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

On a side note, regarding the Dingo Pictures movie ports for the PS1 and PS2 by Midas and Phoenix Games, it's possibly that they weren't properly licensed by Dingo Pictures to begin with at all, but were seemingly licensed from a Dutch company called T.R.S. Media B.V. To add insult to injury, not only were all of these actually sold in stores for real money, they were officially licensed by Sony.

 

T.R.S. Media B.V. probably published Dingo movies through CD-ROM games on Windows PCs sometime around 1999 (or maybe earlier), though so far regarding the Windows PC ports of Dingo's films, nobody has found them as of now.

 

What the direct connection and relation between T.R.S Media B.V. and Dingo Pictures was is currently unknown, but it seems to have licensed the films from either Dingo themselves or one of the distributors.

I've found out about this when watching Phelan Porteous's video on the Dalmations E-book made by Edutain4Kids, an ebook distribution company based in Ipswich, England. That company also has very close ties to Danish Video Duplication/Kids Only in Denmark. On a side note, the art style in these E-book adaptations of Dingo Pictures films is completely different and really weird, and barely resembles the original with different looks of the characters.

 

Wanted to get this side note out of the way.

[AmethystViper]

Silent HIll HD Collection - PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 (2012); An utter disgrace to the original source material on both artistic and technical level. The "HD" ports of Silent Hill 2 and 3 were handled by a mobile game company that has never made a console game before while using unfinished beta code because Konami lost the source code of the original finished version and could be bothered to hire Bluepoint Games or some company that was more capable of porting these games to newer consoles, and boy does it show. Rampant slowdown issues, glitches, crashes, and audio problems up the wazoo. That's not even getting into the whole voice-acting fiasco with the original voice cast and the condescending attitude the then-at-the-time owners of the Silent Hill IP and new voice actors were acting. Personally, I'd steer clear away from these ports, especially now that Silent Hill 2 has the fantastic Enhanced Edition community project to make it playable on modern systems and fixing the old PC port's issues among so much more without compromising the game's original vision, though sadly Silent Hill 3 doesn't have something like that to fix its PC port.

 

 

Tales of Symphonia Remastered - PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch (2023); Another Bamco disaster of a classic RPG game. As someone who grew up with the original Tales of Symphonia on the GameCube, it's shocking that this game is been ported to newer consoles in this day and age with next to no effort or care into it. Lazy AI upscaled textures, buggy, still locked to 30 FPS since it's based off the PS3 version (which itself was based off the PS2 version) and they can't be bothered to make the later ports run at 60 FPS like in the GameCube version, and performance issues of varying degrees, which are especially bad on the Switch. An insult to "remasters" when hardly any effort went into these miserable ports.

 

 

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Adobe Flash Player - Android: a port of the then widely used browser plug-in that was released in 2010, and supported in Android version 2.2 Froyo until 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. It was Adobe and Google's ill-fated attempt at bring the "Full Web" experience to Android Smartphones and Tablets after Apple refused to support Flash on their iOS devices.

 

However, all it did was add in more positive sheds to Steve Jobs' Thoughts on Flash open letter, resulting in poor performance, rapid battery drainage, unresponsive touch screen support, lack of compatible websites and an underwhelming web browsing experience that paled in comparison with HTML5, which was still in its infancy at that time and was become more accepted as the mobile standard. The end result was that users stopped seeing Flash on mobile devices as a good thing, and developers quit trying to support the framework on those devices.

 

As a result of low usage of the plug-in on Android mobile devices, Adobe discontinued the development of the Android port in 2011, and delisted Flash Player off the Google Play Store. The discontinuation of the mobile version of Flash Player also resulted in Adobe cancelling plans for a Windows Phone version as a result of losing the battle of mobile web standards against HTML5.

 

As Flash Player no longer works since 2021 outside of the HARMAN enterprise and Mainland Chinese variants, many indie developers have moved on to creating games on PC digital distribution platforms (Steam, GOG & Epic Games Store), consoles (Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo Switch) or mobile devices (iOS or Android), which are now powered by Unity, Game Maker or RPG Maker.

Edited June 29, 2023 by Wadmodder Shalton

[Herr Dethnout]

On 12/21/2022 at 12:13 AM, AmethystViper said:

It's surprising that this port still gets mods being made for it despite how shoddy it is.

It has something to his favor, having a better framerate than the HD.

 

Talking about that, the HD remasters manages to be even worse, poor perfomancr even meeting the requirements, Bugs (thankfully most fixed through updates), poor 60 fps support, and even has a worse controller support than SourceNext.

 

The only thing that makes it interesing is thanks to the HD Project. If only the 2007 ver has a in-game cutscenes mod would be perfect with the other enhancing mods.

[SuperPIter_DoomWorldthe2nd]

...So... uh, SMB Special.

I know it's not even a port, but it's still a disaster of a product made for something that literally just couldn't handle it at all.

 

At least there are people who ported over the SMBS levels over to SMB1 itself, so it's nice knowing that that stuff isn't locked behind a catastrophical attempt to bring SMB1 to two different PCs in the Japanese market.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Street Fighter 1 - Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, MS-DOS & ZX Spectrum: each of these either had awful controls, low framerate, and little to no special moves. Street Fighter 1 in the Arcade was pretty lame and quite choppy to play, as the first installment itself is considered a black sheep in the franchise with really dated mechanics compared to its sequels which came later.

 

Despite scathing reviews of the ports, they were a hit with publisher U.S. Gold which prompted Tiertex to develop the infamous Human Killing Machine a year later, which was touted and advertised as being called the supposed sequel to the home computer ports of the first Street Fighter, hence why it has often nicknamed the unofficial sequel to Street Fighter 1, an Arcade game which was already lame to begin with.

 

Fighting Street - TurboGrafx CD: and even lamer port of the above mentioned Street Fighter 1 Arcade game but they renamed the title to "Fighting Street" which doesn't even make any scene, which was made as a launch title for the TurboGrafx 16's CD-ROM addon. It has even choppier controls and gameplay compared to the Arcade original.

[Individualised]

On 7/2/2021 at 4:33 AM, JustCallMeKaito said:

Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis (GBA Port)

 

Butchered sounds, music, a framerate that tanks on a whim, glitchy physics, and a screen so insanely tiny that you can't react to any hazards in time.

In other words, yes, they somehow made Labyrinth Zone worse.

 

This is probably the laziest thing Sega has ever done, and it came from Sega's low point in 2006 to "celebrate" the 15th anniversary of the franchise. Sonic Advance for the GBA came out at the tail end of 2001 with none of the issues this port has, so there's no excuse for why this bootleg quality port exists.

 

 

Some notes about this port:

• The reason that this performs so poorly is because the game uses the official Nintendo sound driver known as "Sappy". Remember, apart from PSG channels which were more or less the same as the DMG/GBC's sound hardware, the GBA had no real sound hardware, so you had to generate everything in software which caused quite a bottleneck for most games. There were multiple solutions - some developers just didn't take advantage of GBA sound at all and solely used the PSG or used software-generated audio sparingly (see GBA Doom 1), others wrote their own software sound drivers with various levels of efficiency, but many developers ended up using Nintendo's official sound driver which was included in the GBA SDK... and it's not exactly the greatest GBA sound driver. It has a very tinny sound regardless of the quality of samples you use (giving the GBA a reputation for awful sounding games) and it is inefficient as fuck - it's an evolution of the sound driver used in some first party Nintendo 64 games and it's just not optimised for the GBA hardware. As such many games that used it were limited at how much CPU time they could run their game logic in, and if a game needed to do a lot of processing or was just poorly programmed (the latter probably applies to this game), Sappy became a huge bottleneck if you were using it. If you disable sound in this game, it performs much better.
• However, even if it weren't for the sound driver, this version is still shit because for some reason it's a conversion of the J2ME version. I have no idea why as they still had the Sonic 1 source code at the time (they gave the company who the J2ME port was outsourced to it for reference) but I guess they thought it would be easier to translate from one high level language to another (no one was writing GBA games in assembly at this point, this game was likely done in C) rather than going from the 68k assembly code of the original game. Ironically if they just ported the original game code it would have probably performed fine even with the Sappy sound driver. On a mobile phone running Java at the time it was a fine version of the game but on a game console you definitely expect a bit more - especially one much more powerful than the original console (the Sega Mega Drive) that this game was designed for.

[Maes]

Continuing my (much) earlier rant about the Playstation version of Pinball Fantasies, I was surprised to find out that there existed a SNES version as well, which could be used on-the-go with an X7 Plus console. Hmm... maybe that will be better? Turns out, not really:

 

 

Most of my complaints about the Playstation version also apply here, especially the very fast ball, weird physics, and delayed flipper response time, so practically it's just as crap to play. Pity... Now, the guy in the video does a quite passable job playing it (I couldn't last more than a minute on each table), but that's probably just practice. I'm just afraid that "practicing" on that version of the game will kill all the fun to be had from other, better versions. Other questionable features are the introduction of horizontal scrolling (well, the SNES can't manage a 320-px wide screen... or can it? Wasn't there a hi-res mode?), and the menu that seems ripped off straight off the Gameboy port of the game (yes, it exists, and probably merits its own review. If only it worked with the X7 Plus's emulator.... grrrr)

 

 

As for the rest, the art looks needlessly cut down on a lot of places, the tracker music has lost some finesse after being ported to the SPC, but at least it doesn't have the lame SFX of the Playstation version. There's also a Pinball Dreams port (BTW, all of these are made by Spidersoft and licensed by Gametek... ugh...) but seeing how the physics weren't quite there yet with that one, even on the Amiga/PC, that's an easy pass.

[PsychEyeball]

33 minutes ago, Maes said:

Most of my complaints about the Playstation version also apply here, especially the very fast ball, weird physics, and delayed flipper response time, so practically it's just as crap to play. Pity... Now, the guy in the video does a quite passable job playing it (I couldn't last more than a minute on each table), but that's probably just practice. I'm just afraid that "practicing" on that version of the game will kill all the fun to be had from other, better versions. Other questionable features are the introduction of horizontal scrolling (well, the SNES can't manage a 320-px wide screen... or can it? Wasn't there a hi-res mode?), and the menu that seems ripped off straight off the Gameboy port of the game (yes, it exists, and probably merits its own review. If only it worked with the X7 Plus's emulator.... grrrr)

 

The SNES native resolution is 256x224. While the system had a hi-res mode which supported 512x448, it was very sparsely used since it could cause slowdown and flicker, plus it would further limit layers and colors due to the increased memory needed to render the screen. Typically, hi-res mode would be used for text, still images, menu screens or games that are not processor intensive (but then again the SNES processor has never been known for being powerful).

 

Apparently, only RPM Racing (Blizzard's very first game!) ended up using hi-res mode for the full game, and well... it offered a good case for developers to never do this again. 

 

 

Later on, when the game got ported to Japan, the developers actually downscaled the whole game back to 256x224, which in turn allowed the devs to make the tracks look much more detailled and less empty. 

 

 

The ideal solution for SNES Pinball Fantasies would have been to downsize the graphics a bit so that they'd fit under 256 pixels horizontally, but then again we'd still have to deal with the bad physics, the awful coloring (usually SNES games lose detail when ported to the Amiga, not the opposite!) and the somewhat spotty sound.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Metal Gear for MS-DOS - if you thought the NES version was bad, well the MS-DOS version is even worse. It's basically the same NES game only with bad graphics, poor AI, lack of music and almost no sound.

Even Metal Gear Survive was better that this abomination of a port.

[AmethystViper]

With the upcoming PC release of the Ray'z Arcade Chronology coming to Steam this Fall, I guess it's only fitting to discuss these disasters...

 

Layer Section (a.k.a. RayForce) - Windows 95: This is a very subpar port of a Taito classic shoot 'em up and time has not been kind to this one. One of the biggest problems of this PC port is the game's screen being crunched down to fit in a messily square window to fit within a screen real estate of 640x480 and unlike the Sega Saturn version there's no TATE (vertical) display mode either.  Other problems include the game is missing visual effects from both arcade and Saturn versions, on certain setups the game speed can be ludicrously fast (although that can be fixed with DLL files supplied on the game disc), the music can sometimes play out of order (which I can attest to personal experience since I have the game myself), and if you didn't have the game disc, then have fun with no music playing whatsoever since this port reads off Redbook audio. I've been trying to find a portable solution to this problem with newer open source WinMM wrappers but this PC port's way of handling music streaming from the disc refuses to cooperate with them.

 

 

Layer Section II (a.k.a. RayStorm) - Saturn: An admirable, but tragic conversion of RayForce's 3D follow-up. While this version has some novelties over the much better PlayStation and PC ports, such as new CGI cutscenes in between stages and a playable R-GRAY 0 outside of the 13-Ship mode, but the pros are greatly outweighed by the cons. This version not only suffer from notable visual downgrades (e.g. worse looking textures, alpha transparencies are replaced with the mesh effect) to work on the Sega Saturn's limited 3D capabilities, but even with these cutbacks the game struggles to maintain a stable frame-rate and it causes some serious input lag problems, which is something you absolutely DO NOT WANT in a shoot 'em up game [cough]City Connection[cough]. Sound also didn't come out unscathed as the sound effects are tinny and muffled compared to the arcade and prior home ports. Still somewhat playable, but it's not hard to imagine why the PlayStation and arcade versions has been ported on newer systems unlike the Saturn version.

 

 

[Wadmodder Shalton]

On 6/28/2023 at 2:04 PM, SuperPIter_DoomWorldthe2nd said:

...So... uh, SMB Special.

I know it's not even a port, but it's still a disaster of a product made for something that literally just couldn't handle it at all.

 

At least there are people who ported over the SMBS levels over to SMB1 itself, so it's nice knowing that that stuff isn't locked behind a catastrophical attempt to bring SMB1 to two different PCs in the Japanese market.

Speaking of SMB Special, there's a rumor of a third release of this game in South Korea for a 1987 release on the Samsung SPC-1500 computer, but as of now, there is no evidence that it ever came out, making that version Lost Media.

[xScavengerWolfx]

On 4/19/2022 at 4:10 PM, Wadmodder Shalton said:

Flatout 3 Chaos and Destruction - PC: while you might think this is an original third installment in the Flatout series, it's something more than that just that when you look at the graphics and assets which makes this a dead giveaway. Instead of taking assets from Bugbear's earlier Flatout games, Team 6 Studios instead recycled assets and ported over their own 2010 Flatout Wii game which means the vehicles, the tracks, the gameplay and such are all identical to Flatout Wii. That's not the only assets Team 6 Studios recycled either, the game mode "Speed" is a strange hybrid sequel to another 2010 Wii racing game Speed, the checkpoint system from the racing game Glacier 3 originally released on PC and Wii in 2010 is reused in the game mode "Offroad", and lastly a stage from the yet another Wii racing game Monster Trucks Mayhem originally released in 2009 is reused in the game mode "Splatout".

This means we were playing a secret Wii-centric Asset Flip ported to Steam on PC this entire time.

I remember the first Flatout game on the OG Xbox and man i loved it

 

[Wadmodder Shalton]

These ports for the following games that were covered by Game Sack.

 

Edited September 3, 2023 by Wadmodder Shalton

[Lila Feuer]

Saints Row 2 on PC. What's really wild is the ones responsible for porting it were none other than CD Projekt. It might be the crankiest game I've ever played on PC, even with the Gentlemen of the Row mod. Runs like shit, with a good likelihood of savegame corruption.