History Main / PortingDisaster

* Acclaim's port of ''Winter Games'' sucked. You had to watch a long subpar animation sequence you couldn't skip, and a lot of things were removed: it was worse than the Atari version.

* Acclaim's port of Winter Games sucked. You had to watch a long subpar animation sequence you couldn't skip, and a lot of things were removed: it was worse than the Atari version.

* While the MasterSystem[=/=]GameGear port of ''{{Lemmings}}'' was much better than the GBC version listed below and did its best with the technical limitations of the systems, it still had its fair share of problems, mostly in its level design - many traps (to wit, the 10-ton weight, crushing boulder, bear trap, wall spikes, Tesla coils, and suction trap). This of course made quite a few levels markedly easier. [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C14th70XOcs This video]] showcases a number of poorly-remade levels, including a now-misnamed "Watch out, there's there's traps about" due to the above-mentioned trap removal and the excruciatingly difficult "Save me!" being replaced entirely with a much easier level.

* While most NES ports of Midway's arcade games were at least decent, Tengen and Mindscape dropped the ball with ''720 Degrees''. Horrible graphics, ear-bleeding music, broken play control (for example, spinning and other moves are frustrating to pull off, and the ramp event is now nearly unplayable). To add insult to injury, they took out the expert mode. Inexcusable -- the NES can do considerably-better than this. This is about as bad as the Taiwanese pirate ports. And it was '''licensed''', made when Tengen still had a contract with Nintendo. Their unlicensed ports (including ''{{Tetris}}'', ''Rolling Thunder'' and ''{{Gauntlet}}'') were ironically better.
** The Famicom ''Rolling Thunder'' was a licensed port released by Namco in Japan. Tengen simply inherited the rights to publish the NES version in North America after Atari did the same with the original arcade game.
* Falling into the "Why?" category is Konami's NES port of ''{{Kings Quest}} V''. They tried their hardest to cram 256-color visuals into an 8-bit cart and quick mouse actions onto a controller, but it just couldn't be done well. [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG2FwiK5diE Have a look.]]

* The [[SoBadItsHorrible god-awful]] Super NES port of ''Pit-Fighter''. It was originally a port from the arcade game. However, the SNES port was pretty much an ObviousBeta. It features: stiff and unresponsive controls, [[MostAnnoyingSound a repetitive soundtrack and muffled sound effects]], [[FakeDifficulty a game that is very hard for the wrong reasons]], and TheComputerIsACheatingBastard. There are also no continues, one life, Ty being a GameBreaker when used correctly (which, of course, is a GuideDangIt), and beating the game [[spoiler: only gives you [[AWinnerIsYou an ending with only text]], followed by the game over screen]]. Its Genesis port, ironicially, turned out to be better.

** The funny end-game sequences no longer existed. You just got a message reading "Congratulations. You have completed OutRun. Now try a different route".

* The SNES port of ''PrinceOfPersia 2: The Shadow and the Flame'' featured bad controls, mistimed and glitchy gameplay, a GameBreakingBug in the form of one specific mook that crashes the game when he dies, and screens that scroll only because the display tiles are too wide. The true final level went missing. It reeks of pure atrocity next to Konami's amazing re-imagined SNES port of the first game. The developers of this PortingDisaster went on to make ''Superman 64'' and ''Carmageddon 64''. Enough said.

* The Macintosh versions of ''SimCity 3000'' and ''SimCity 4'' were not made in-house by Maxis, and the games reflect this. [=SC3K=] was ported by a Ukrainian company which left all the PC interface (such as the file hierarchy system) intact, all while leaving out other features (such as the Building Architect Tool). SimCity 4 suffered as well...the Mac ports were months behind the PC versions, were terribly slow, left off the official tools that PC users got, and exhibited behaviors that you would only get if you had a plug-in conflict.
** ''Terribly slow'' doesn't do it justice. ''Utterly unplayable'' is more like it. One can only imagine the frustration felt by people who ''paid'' for it.
** In fact, running the Windows version via Wine / Crossover Games is much more responsive than the native Mac app, it's really sad.
*** Running on Intel does make it particularly awful, but that's not to say it was great on PowerPC. Even on a G5 it ran sluggishly.
* Although the HalfLife games being ported to Mac is undoubtedly a good thing, slightly less good is that anecdotally they run less well under OS X than they do under Windows on the same hardware.
** This doesn't just apply to HalfLife; every Valve game that [[Tropers.TheAppleFreak this troper]] knows of is like that. Portal has it especially bad; my framerate dropped to single digits and an "update" killed all in-game sounds. When I downloaded/installed Steam in Windows 7 on the same computer, framerate was about 15 frames faster and there was sound. So much for using a Mac for computer gaming.
*** The fact that real Macs have hardware that are pretty much a year or two behind the PC counterparts, all desktop systems except the extremely pricey Mac Pro are practically not upgradable aside from RAM and hard disk, and even on the Mac Pro you can't have GPU parallel processing of any kind (i.e. no SLI, no CrossFire, not even MultiChrome) and audio accelerator cards are practically unsupported, really says a lot about Macs and gaming.
**** Macs aren't "a year or two behind PCs". That's a myth that's been propagated for several years, and two reasons are the reason for the perception. Number one, people seem to take speed in gigahertz (or megahertz in the old days), which actually is not an indication of clock speed. Benchmark tests have shown they are quite comparable. Number two, most modern Mac games are PC games with CIDER layers, not true ports. While CIDER allows fairly painless porting and will run, it does take a significant performance hit.

* The PSX port of ''{{Descent}}'' is a piece of absolute @#$^. Though it features the awesome soundtrack from the Macintosh version, as well as remixes of the licenses songs(by Ogre of SkinnyPuppy and TypeONegative) from ''Descent II'', it is completely ruined by blocky graphics(so you can hardly see enemies at a distance), slideshow-level framerate(making firefights in large rooms nearly unplayable), and awkward controls(no analog support unless you have the rare Analog Joystick or the original Dual Analog pad, and even then it still kind of sucks).

* The SNES port of ''PrinceOfPersia 2: The Shadow and the Flame'' featured bad controls, mistimed and glitchy gameplay, a GameBreakingBug in the form of one specific mook that crashes the game when he dies, and screens that scroll only because the display tiles are too wide. The true final level went missing. It reeks of pure atrocity next to Konami's amazing re-imagined SNES port of the first game. The developers of this PortingDisaster went on to make ''Superman 64''. Enough said.

* ''Donkey Kong Country'' for Game Boy Color. The tasteful graphics were downgraded, the music was rewritten (including a total rewriting of the Game Over tune), it was slow, and they somehow managed to destroy the balance between Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong. As a result, Donkey Kong had no weaknesses at all, and Diddy did less (and was ugly at that)

* The Xbox port of ''{{Unreal}} 2'' had terribly downgraded graphics, a jerky framerate, and very long loading times.

* ''{{Psychonauts}}'' for the [=PS2=], with controls that were apparently dipped in molasses during the port. And woe betide you if you live in Europe and got the PAL version. Sound effects playing a random length of time after the trigger, the cutscene camera being in the wrong place, event triggers occurring out of order, Raz randomly getting stuck ''on thin air''...

* Placing thoughtless graphics filtering on pixel art, rendering it nigh-unrecognizable. Common for new ports of old, old games.

[[folder: MultiPatform]]

*** The fact that real Macs have hardware that are pretty much a year or two behind the PC counterparts, most of the desktop systems are practically not upgradable (aside from RAM and hard disk), and even on the high end models you can't have GPU parallel processing of any kind (i.e. no SLI, no CrossFire, not even MultiChrome) and audio accelerator cards are practically unsupported, really says a lot about Macs and gaming.

* Any console port of SimCity 2000 (including the poor attempt to pass off SimCity DS as a port of SimCity 3000 when it's really SimCity 2000 with SC3K's skin applied and some minigames slapped on). The control responsiveness on these are unbelievably bad. And oh, for something that stores data on flash or battery-backed RAM instead of magnetic media, the save game loading times on those are unbelievably slow.

*** "Takes some getting used to" is hardly a disaster, more a case of [[Damn You Muscle Memory]] than anything else. This Troper would like to note that his first experience with the series was with the Anniversary Collection and had no real problems with it.

*** "Takes some getting used to" is hardly a disaster, more a case of [[Damn Muscle Memory]] than anything else. This Troper would like to note that his first experience with the series was with the Anniversary Collection and had no real problems with it.