Porting Disaster / Multi-Platform

The more ports a game receives, the likelier it is that one of them will suffer from a Porting Disaster. Sometimes, however, a game may end up butchered across multiple platforms.

A No Recent Examples rule applies to this trope. Examples shouldn't be added until six months after the ported program is released, to avoid any knee-jerk reactions. However, examples may still be added even if the port was fixed during the six-month period, so long as the port had clear issues on its initial release.

Consoles

• All three console versions of Batman: Arkham Origins suffer from some form of issues. Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions suffer from some nasty Game-Breaking Bugs that apparently Warner Bros. simply has no interest in patching, which involves the game randomly crashing when trying to enter certain areas, along with both versions having a somewhat inconsistent framerate. The 360 suffers from even more freezing issues, occasional black screens, and save data corruption. The Wii U version seemed to not be hit as hard, as its main issues mainly just involve a somewhat choppy framerate like the other versions, and the gamepad features feel a bit bare-bones compared to the Wii U port of Batman: Arkham City (likely the result of the Wii U version being handled by Human Head Studios, the people behind Prey (2006), instead of the game's primary developer, WB Montreal, who handled Arkham City's Wii U port in-house), but otherwise the Wii U game actually seems better by comparison due to higher-quality graphics and much less game-breaking bugs.
• Call of Duty: Black Ops III on the PS3 and Xbox 360 was clearly an afterthought thrown together to milk the last remaining dollars out of those who hadn't upgraded to a current-gen system at the time. The obvious detail is that the entire single-player campaign from the PS4, Xbox One and PC versions was cut, leaving only the game's multiplayer and Zombies mode. But it gets worse - the graphics look horrendous with art designs that would barely have gotten a pass in the early PS2 era, there are numerous bugs that aren't present in the main versions of the game, it has a very frequent tendency to crash, and the framerate is capped at 30 frames per second, when even the last-gen versions of Advanced Warfare ran at 60. And while the first two pieces of DLC were released (them being the Zombies map The Giant, and the first full map pack Awakening) much later than the current-gen versions got them, following that, Activision quickly abandoned these versions of the game, and no further DLC or patches were released. On the bright side, this also means the Black Market was never added to these versions.
• Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition has some issues regarding its performance that's even worse than in the original on the PS1, despite being on the PS4, PS5, Switch, and Steam, particularly its bad framerate and choppy animations. A common explanation for this game's issues is that it's not actually ported to these platforms at all, but rather is the original game with a PS1 emulator packed in that it's played on.
• Congo Bongo had bad graphics or missing levels in all ports. As the game is presented in 3/4 isometric perspective, it was actually put on consoles that could not handle that view such as the Atari 2600. The sole exception was the SG-1000 conversion handled by Sega themselves, which ditched the isometric perspective completely in favor of a semi top-down view.
• CD Projekt RED delayed Cyberpunk 2077 eight months due to the problems they had getting it to run on the older hardware of the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One, and by all accounts, it wasn't nearly enough. Textures would take upwards of twenty seconds to load in, pop-in was so bad that it was not uncommon for players to get into car accidents because other vehicles materialized right in front of them, and the consoles frequently crashed out to the dashboard. Many fans were left wondering both how things went so wrong^note It should be noted that when the game was initially announced in 2012, the PS4 and Xbox One were about to be released as the next-gen consoles themselves and the game went into proper development in 2015, well into the systems' lifespans but also well before the announcement of the next generation, with the obvious expectation being that it would be able to run on the two generations just fine. Indeed, the trailers released in 2018 all seemed to suggest as much. and why the developers didn't just cancel the PS4 and Xbox One releases entirely and make the game a next-gen and PC exclusive. It was bad enough to prompt the company to publicly apologize for these versions and offer refunds. To further illustrate how badly the last-gen versions were botched, at the time of launch, the Metacritic scores for the console versions were a dismal 47 (for PS4) and 51 (for Xbox One), whereas the PC version had a significantly higher score of 90/100. The release was so bad that less than a week after release Sony pulled the game from its online store and offered refunds, the latter of which was something they rarely offered to customers who already downloaded the game from PSN. Ultimately, the PS4 and Xbox One versions had development support dropped on September 2022 following the release of Patch 1.6, with the development team focusing on just the PS5, Xbox Series, and PC versions with future content and updates, starting with the "Phantom Liberty" DLC.
• Dark Castle was a hit on the Mac, being possibly the first game ever designed around WASD movement and mouse aiming. It was then ported to systems that lacked a mouse, making it a miserable experience.
• Doom's many console ports suffered in one way or another:
  • While the SNES version even existing is indeed a marvelous achievement, the pros are far outweighed by the cons. The graphics of the original were greatly downgraded; enemies are no longer gibbed when suffering from close-range explosions, many textures have been simplified or removed outright (as have many enemy sprites, leading to the infamous "crab-walking" baddies that always faced you), the framerate is rather uneven, and the frames can even skip some sprite animations if more than three enemies are on-screen at close-range. The lighting was also significantly altered, making certain lit walls where secrets are hidden like any other wall, which can cause frustration if you're trying to remember which freaking panel that upgrade was put behind. To make it worse, they even had the gall to add Easy-Mode Mockery; if you're playing the easy difficulty levels, it only lets you play the first episode, Knee-Deep in the Dead. If you want to play the third episode Inferno and see the Final Boss, you were forced to play on Ultra-Violence or Nightmare!, the two hardest difficulties. The Super Famicom version fixes this. The sound effects are muffled as well, a good portion of the levels have been excised, and it's impossible to turn and sidestep at the same time—something that even the SNES port of Wolfenstein 3-D could manage. The only truly good part of the game is its soundtrack, which is fun to listen to because the SNES's sampler makes the MIDI soundtrack sound much more like real instruments than the Sound Blaster's FM synth ever could.^note Unless you cut your teeth with the PC version of Doom on a PC with a Gravis Ultrasound (or if you were really rich, an actual MIDI synth like the Roland SC-55), then the SNES version sounds absolutely muffled compared to its glory. Because, like the SNES' SPC700, the Ultrasound was a sampler-based sound card, which Doom had full support for and would load its own custom soundfonts if one is used, and unlike the SNES' SPC700, it had at least four times the amount of memory compared to the SPC700 (256kb upgradable to 1MB, vs 64kb). And the AWE32 (another sampler-based card) ain't too far behind either.
  • The Sega 32X port was inexplicably inferior to the SNES version despite running on superior hardware. Despite the graphics being better, the entire third episode, including the Cyberdemon, Spider Mastermind, and BFG are all missing (the game skips straight from the penultimate level of episode 2 to a version of the episode's secret level repurposed as a finale), beating the game would load up a DOS prompt if the player cheated or used the level select, and the soundtrack was butchered. Especially unforgivable because the FM chip in the Genesis^note the YM2612; the 32X uses 2 PWM channels is very similar to the YM2608 (the FM chip used on later versions of the PC88 and PC98), and it even has an additional PSG chip for sound effects.
    • A fan-made hack, Doom 32X Resurrection, eventually showed that the system was plenty capable of a much better port.
  • Art Data Interactive's port on the 3DO. Small screen and low frame-rate ahoy! When put next to Interplay's port of Wolfenstein 3-D on the same console, this is inexcusable. The single bright spot, picked up on every review, was the awesome music, rerecorded specifically for this version. Just a shame that there were so few levels that some of the original songs were not present. The port was frequently rumoured to have been accidentally mastered from an earlier build, but as it turns out, it was programmed by one person, who was misled on the state of the port before her arrival, given little more to work with than JPEG images of assets and a copy of Ultimate Doom, and then only given ten weeks to actually port the game. Rebecca Heineman, the sole person responsible for the port (and whose work on the 3DO Wolf 3D having "won" her the opportunity to port Doom), recalled that she had to work under pressure at the time and whipped up a hastily-done port to placate Randy Scott with his unrealistic expectations for the port—it has been said that Randy grossly underestimated how difficult it is to develop a video game, more specifically converting Doom for a vastly-different platform, and thought that having it ported to the 3DO would make for a get-rich-quick scheme.
  • The Atari Jaguar port shockingly manages to mostly avert this. There's a couple issues like a handful of missing levels from the original and the lowered resolution, but on the whole the game runs just fine and is pretty fun to play. It's also notable as being the one game where the Jaguar's silly controller is actually a reason to recommend their port, as the keypad allows you to select any weapon on the fly, rather than having to scroll through them with the shoulder buttons. However, there's one big negative: due to the complicated architecture of the Jaguar, a lot of games used the 32 bit sound chip as a co-processor (more details can be found on the Jaguar's Useful Notes page), including this one. As a result the Jaguar port of Doom has no music during gameplay at all. Despite this it's still considered to be the best of the first round of Doom ports by a mile (the fact that it was the only one actually made by id Software probably explains why), and can make a pretty good claim to be the best game released for the Jaguar. It really says a lot when most other Doom ports all use a modified engine of the Atari Jaguar port, including the widely acclaimed PlayStation port.
  • The Saturn port is an absolute mess, being close to the 32X port despite being on a noticeably more powerful machine. The primary reason for its issues is that John Carmack was very strict about not allowing them to use hardware rendering, which with the Saturn's specs would have allowed the game to run at double the framerate of the PlayStation version, but came at the cost of texture warping, which Carmack considered a deal-breaker; the devs' quick-fix was to ditch the original high-performance hardware renderer in favor of hastily reprogramming the 32X port's renderer, which got rid of the texture warping but left them with completely random bouts of slowdown, sometimes even when looking at a blank wall, with the overall experience generally ranging from mediocre in the Doom I levels to nearly unplayable in the Doom II levels. It's further plagued with jerky, unresponsive controls that are mapped to a decidedly questionable control scheme and non-musical sound effects of low quality. There's also no multiplayer of any kind in the North American version, which takes half the fun out of Doom, while the European version is improperly optimised for the PAL video standard, which makes things even slower and jerkier.
  • The PlayStation port of Final Doom featured maps from Master Levels of Doom II and carries over the well-received changes of the Doom 1/2 PlayStation port, such as the coloured lighting, the improved sound effects, and the creepy ambient music, but overall is received much less favourably than the original release and the Doom 1/2 PlayStation port. The biggest problem is the majority of maps were cut completely, with the game only having 30 of the 85 maps between Master Levels/TNT/Plutonia, and of those, only a paltry six of Plutonia's 32 maps were included. The port also receives flak for completely lacking the Spider Mastermind (while she does exist in the game's data and shows up in the ending roll call, she wasn't put into any of the maps), for generally under-utilizing the high tier enemies (e.g. Barons and Mancubi each only show up in just one map, and Arachnotrons only show up in a few maps, while Hell Knights get overused in their place), enemies often being haphazardly cut out (e.g. some maps will have Shotgunners or Chaingunners removed without adding their weapon pickup, making their weapons unobtainable on a pistol-start run of the map), and for the back of its case lying about the number of maps included (with it claiming there were over 30 maps, despite having exactly that many). Fans would end up rectifying this by recreating all of the cut maps in the PSX style and with the PlayStation's limitations in mind, and would make a mod that makes these recreated maps runnable on an actual PlayStation. The fan-recreated maps also tended to do a better job at modifying enemy placement to satisfy the PlayStation's limitations, doing a better job at keeping variety with the higher tier enemies and not removing enemies who were crucial to the map.
  • While it's not a broken mess, the Xbox version of Doom and Doom II ported by Vicarious Visions, which is contained on the Collector's Edition of Doom³ and Resurrection of Evil, aren't flawless transitions. The music seems to run at a slower speed and the skyboxes for the later episodes don't render properly (which Activision curiously tried to write off as the game taking place on Mars). This is apparently because the game isn't a real port but rather a real-time emulation of the original DOS version of the game. On the upside, Doom and Doom II each have an exclusive bonus level.
  • The ports of the first two games on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and iOS/Android for the "Year of Doom" in 2019 launched with a great deal of problems. While better from the outset than any official console port done prior to the original Xbox version, the playable resolution was improperly scaled somewhere between 4:3 and 16:9, making everything appear stretched, areas were too bright because shadows were broken from the increased rendering resolution, music and sound effects were slowed down, Doom II was missing the No Rest for the Living expansion that was in the previous-gen console ports, and although split-screen multiplayer is available, online multiplayer is not. Most infamously, however, was the fact that the ports launched with a mandatory log-in to Bethesda.net, despite nothing else about the games at the time actually needing an internet connection.^note The purpose turned out to be enabling an Old Save Bonus that would unlock costumes in the then-upcoming Doom Eternal. Fortunately, patches were worked on to fix these ports; after removing the mandatory login, they also fixed the aspect-ratio, lighting and sound, bumped the framerate up from the original's 35 FPS to 60 or higher, 16:9 presentation with widescreen art assets, gyro motion controller support for systems that supported it, a weapon carousel to ease weapon switching (especially for controllers), a new Ultra-Violence+ difficulty, and adding not only No Rest for the Living as free downloadable add-ons, but also SIGIL, both halves of Final Doom, and curated versions of several high-profile mods such as both of the episodes of Back to Saturn X, ultimately turning it from this trope into one of the best ports of the games ever.^note The only hiccup, however, is that you need a Bethesda account to play those mods, unless you're on PC or mobile.
• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars on Xbox 360 and PS3 had badly downgraded graphics, missing features (including permanent stat growth, one of the main feature of the original version), was limited to 16 players instead of 32 and had ridiculously strong auto-aim. At least one id Software employee called it a textbook example of how not to port a game.
• Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 both have inferior versions compared to PC.
  • The PS3 and Xbox 360 versions have poor anti-aliasing, low-res textures, a framerate that struggles above 20, and severe screen tearing with the PS3 getting the worst of it. The 360 version also has overcompressed audio voices and sound efffects in order to fit into a single DVD-DL.^note XGD3 (Xbox Game Disc 3; used in Fall 2011-end of lifespan X360 games): 8.3 GB of usable space (both in-game data and firmware updates), leaving 200 MB for anti-piracy measures. It should also be noted that the PC version has compressed audio.
  • The Classic Edition of Far Cry 3 (both base and Blood Dragon^note ironic on the latter which runs worse than the PS3 nor X360 ports.) on the PS4 and Xbox One is not based on PC, but the inferior console ports with performance issues, in addition to removing co-op multiplayer and Blood Dragon.
• Gauntlet: Dark Legacy was ported to the Xbox from the PS2 version and gained some new features (such as the ability to store powerups and use them later), but also gained new glitches. The GameCube version was even worse, having glitches, slowdown, and missing health meters on bosses, though a later release fixed these.
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and its "remastered" version on Xbox 360 and later PlayStation 3, which were actually based on the 2013 mobile version by War Drum Studios, except much worse in many ways. On top of the contentious visual aesthetic changes, these direct mobile-to-console ports are rife with various glitches, such graphical corruptions (which is especially prone to happen on the Xbox 360 version), broken and/or missing effects (even moreso on the PlayStation 3 version), random voice-overs cutting off mid-sentence during cutscenes, sound effects compressed so badly to the point of being ear-grating, radio stations glitching out in bizarre ways thanks to the developers removing the expired licensed music tracks very poorly, mission-related bugs and crashes that can render the game unbeatable, broken or entirely missing local co-op features on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 respectively, and a poorly implemented checkpoint and auto-save system that can hinder you more than help. The only issue that was addressed in the "remastered" version was the initial optimization issues in the Xbox 360 version and they didn't bother to fix the rest of the problems introduced with these ports. Adding insult to injury, Rockstar used the broken remastered version to outright replace the downloadable PlayStation 2 version on PlayStation Network and the older yet functional original Xbox port on the Xbox Store, without warning players or giving owners of the original versions the option to re-download them if they had it on their platform's respective accounts. Things would only get worse when War Drum Studios (now rebranded as Grove Street Games) went on to develop...
• The Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The "Definitive Edition", a remaster consisting of Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, and San Andreas that launched with numerous problems, up to Cyberpunk 2077 levels of problems. While talking about the calamitous remaster, Jim Sterling accused the developer Rockstar hired of "cheaply and hurriedly cobbl[ing the collection] together with duct tape and jizz". To make matters worse, Rockstar also pulled all previous releases of the three games from digital storefronts shortly before the release of the "Definitive Edition", making these inferior versions the only legal way to play the games. Rockstar eventually apologized for the atrocious state of the games and promised a No Man's Sky-esque series of patches to bring the ports to "the level of quality that they deserve to be", as well as restoring the original Windows versions of the games to their Rockstar Launcher store, but it'll be difficult to overcome the bad first impression since the internet has immortalized the following issues and more after the fact.
  • The character models. While the series is not known for outstanding character models, the ones here look worse than the original games to terrifying levels.
  • Fog and high draw distance issues. Older games use fog to cover up unpolished areas when loading them, but the Definitive release removed this, unintentionally revealing how glaringly unpolished it is combined with the port's high draw distance, especially in San Andreas when you use a plane.
  • Many visual and weather effects from the original console or PC versions of the games has been overly simplified or cut entirely, especially in San Andreas, making all three games look identical to each other, while other effects introduced in this collection causes bizarre rendering issues with the already atrocious character models and interiors. Vadim M goes through the visual downgrades and errors introduced in the Definitive version of San Andreas in this comparison video.
  • Broken, eye-searing rain effects to the point that, prior to Patch 1.03 replacing this Sensory Abuse with proper rain effects, it made several missions impossible to complete. To make matters not so much worse as even more unacceptable, the potentially seizure-inducing rain was drawn behind bodies of water. It was also possible to manipulate the rain effects while flying in San Andreas prior to Patch 1.03, causing it to speed up, slow down, or stop in motion.
  • A lot of Game-Breaking Bugs that can cause the game to crash often. And there are some other glitches as well, like a car being able to randomly flip over at any time which will cause it to explode. The framerate in these games dips to low levels a lot.
  • The game apparently used a machine learning algorithm to enhance billboards and signs without human oversight, leading to hilariously bad spelling errors that, at best, ruin a joke and, at worst, produce complete nonsense up to and including Perfectly Cromulent Words. Particularly memetic examples^note so memetic, in fact, that they were among the earlier errors to be fixed include Air Guitars From $199 becoming AR Guitars From $199, The Taste of a Real Man's Meat becoming The Taste of a Real Man's Heat, and Guitarwank Booths Available becoming Guitarhenk Booths Avaiable. While not a spelling error, the hexagonal nut on the roof of "Tuff Nut Donuts" became a hexadecagon due to the same algorithm overcorrecting for the low polygon count of the original.
  • The game had to be pulled from PC storefronts due to a number of "unintentionally included" files, such as programmer comments, unlicensed music that wasn't even used in game, and, allegedly, the files for the Hot Coffee minigame. You know, the Dummied Out minigame that got San Andreas slapped with an AO rating until patches removed files necessary for the mod that unlocked it to work and intentionally made the game unmoddable, sixteen years before these versions came out?
  • It also doesn't help that, other than the unnecessary inclusion of the Hot Coffee files, said remasters were otherwise based on the mobile versions of the games instead of the console or PC originals, and was even done by the same developers as the mobile ports, now known as Grove Street Games. Many people have already declared this port to be the new Silent Hill HD Collection or Warcraft III: Reforged.
  • And as Joel demonstrates, you can permanently destroy the game and make it unplayable simply by chugging a bunch of Sprunk canned drinks. While the glitch isn't actually new to this version (it involves the game's memory and prop limit), this version includes a poorly implemented autosave that (like in, say, the also-problematic HD version of Ratchet: Deadlocked) can accidentally corrupt the save if autosaving happens to occur while the game crashes, and doesn't make backups. In this case, the game tries to load into a broken autosave, and crashes immediately instead.
  • The Nintendo Switch has many problems of its own, such as an atrocious frame rate, the graphical settings being massively cut back to the point of losing some details and effects that were present on the PS2 version, the resolution being unimpressive, and vehicle pop-in being so bad that it's possible for cars to spawn right in front of you, leading to unavoidable collisions and potential mission failures. Digital Foundry named the Switch port as the single worst version of the trilogy ever to be released, even worse than the PS2, original Xbox, and mobile ports.
• Ports by High Voltage Studios:
  • Zone of the Enders HD Collection had its problems on both PS3 and Xbox 360, but the former got the raw end of the stick, even more so with The 2nd Runner. It had very inconsistent frame-rate issues that were never present in the PS2 originals (at most it ran only about 30 FPS) and visual effects went missing, all of which is inexcusable running on superior hardware. As it turns out, Konami hired High Voltage Studios to handle the porting job rather than doing it in-house or hiring Bluepoint, the studio that handled the HD Editions of Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3. And to put icing on the cake, due to the negative reception the Zone of the Enders HD Collection received, Ender's Project has been put off indefinitely and the dev team dismantled as a result. Thankfully a patch for the PS3 version of 2nd Runner was developed by Hexa Drive and released a year later, which upgrades the resolution to full 1080p with much smoother frame-rate. Unfortunately, like the Silent Hill HD Collection, Xbox 360 owners were left out from this upgrade.
  • The studio has been responsible for a number of other terrible ports since then: Mortal Kombat 9, Injustice: Gods Among Us and Mortal Kombat X were all optimization disasters. Their PlayStation 4 and Xbox One ports of Saints Row IV were missing several effects and possessed a janky frame rate. Their PlayStation 4 port of Injustice, however, left the game completely intact with no noted issues.
• Lichdom: Battlemage on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One has two huge problems: atrocious performance, with the game always staying between 10-20 frames per second, and Loads and Loads of Loading, clocking in at several minutes, while having the audacity of still needing to stream in textures afterwards. But on the bright side, a patch was later released, showing astronomical improvements in performance over the earlier build. The Xbox One version stays at a near-constant 30FPS with vertical sync. However, the PlayStation 4 version has an unlocked framerate up to 60FPS, making it inconsistent but still playable, especially compared to the stock version. The only sacrifice made was a drop from a native 1080p to 900p on both consoles.
• The Life Is Strange: Remastered Collection has been widely criticized for being prone to bugs and having graphical, lighting and framerate issues, among other things. The game's "subtitles", more often than not, appear as a line of code calling the name of the subtitles file instead of the actual subtitle content. The lighting glitches a lot and is inconsistent, with objects looking different and sometimes being hard to spot. Some character models suffer bizarre changes for no given reason, or items float in the air. It's entirely possible, if you get the "You can't rewind" message, for the screen to freeze and force you to restart the game. Additionally, it has been reported that some people got a black screen after completing episode 2, forcing them to restart the game and having to redo all of episode 2. Framerate issues abound, with the performance for the PS4 and Xbox One versions in particular dipping as low as 15 FPS.
• The Lion King for the NES was a disaster, with sluggish and unresponsive controls, physics and jumping mechanics that are broken beyond belief, and short levels (the game can be completed in under 20 minutes) which are presented without any kind of story context. On top of that, the game only covers the young Simba levels from the 16-bit games, meaning that not only do you not play as the eponymous Lion King, but the film's villain Scar is completely absent from gameplay (outside of the Easy-Mode Mockery ending screen). What's sad about this port is even the bootleg port created by Super Game is superior to it both gameplay-wise and aesthetically (musically as well, since all of Super Game's ports are done with the Konami sound engine) and resembles the original game more. North American and Japanese gamers were at least spared from seeing this exist in their region, as it was only released in Europe and Australia. There's evidence pointing towards this port being an unfinished release, as the Game Boy version of the game manages to include every level from its 16-bit counterparts except Be Prepared while polishing up some of the rough spots.
• Magical Night Dreams Cotton 2, Magical Night Dreams Cotton Boomerang, and Guardian Force, three games that already have about five frames (or 1/12 of a second) of input lag on Sega Saturn, somehow managed to achieve even worse lag when they were included in City Connection's Cotton Guardian Force Tribute Compilation Re Release for Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4, bumping up the input lag to 10 frames (or 1/6 of a second). In a genre where even just two or three frames of input delay can make a world of difference, 10 frames is just straight up not acceptable. While the Switch is known for having a couple more frames of input lag than its contemporaries, even the PS4 version has roughly the same amount of delay. As it turns out, the games use the SSF2 Saturn emulator, which is already known for its share of input lag. Inherent lag + emulator lag + console-induced lag + likely lag on the porting team's^note Zerodiv, the team that previously ported Psikyo games to Switch with 7-8 frames of lag and which was later acquired by City Connection port = what many players consider a steaming pile of Fake Difficulty.
• Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 was a completely different game on the Xbox, PC, and GameCube, all designed by a different development house from the PlayStation 2 version. While there are some track similarities, the sense of speed is all but gone, the handling is worse, the game in general is far more boring, and the menus don't look as nice. These versions of the game aren't "bad", per se; as games, they're fundamentally sound and could even be fun if you weren't familiar with the superior PS2 version, but that's just the thing - they're considerably inferior to the PlayStation 2 version.
• Online play in Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is problematic on the Nintendo Switch and Xbox One X. Though the PlayStation versions allow up to four players to a match, the Switch version can only accommodate two. In addition, despite much hype about the game having rollback netcode that should make lag imperceptible, online play on the Switch suffers from unpredictable but severe lag and slowdown that, after multiple updates, has not been alleviated at all. The most common theory from players is that the game's netcode was designed strictly for wired play, whereas the Switch, by nature as a partially handheld system—and the Switch Lite as a fully handheld system, which Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is compatible with—would have the majority of people playing over Wi-Fi, which requires different netcode rules and that rollback notoriously struggles with. The Xbox One X version is worse, as it shipped with a glitch that causes players to be unable to find each other online at all. Instead of having some people start lobbies and others join them, everybody gets their own lobby, effectively preventing anyone from meeting each other. In both cases, as this game is a Platform Fighter, its central modes are effectively scuttled.
• While not a "disaster" in the "this utterly shames the original product" sense, Primal Rage has a unique issue: it cannot be ported correctly. The original game has a very strange encryption scheme which has never been decoded, and all related parties who created it have never been willing to help out with breaking it. So all the ports are based on code that has been DRM'd by this encryption, resulting in various glitches, missing effects (such as blood color) and being unable to perform certain combos and fatalities properly.
• The "HD Remasters" of [PROTOTYPE] and [PROTOTYPE 2] for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, which were uneventfully churned out by Activision, actually run worse than their PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 counterparts. Seeing how the games run worse on more powerful hardware is inexcusable and it shows that these are just lazy ports rather than actual remasters.
• Redout has pretty mixed results across its console ports. The PlayStation 4 Pro version averts the trope pretty nicely, looking and playing almost as well as the PC version. The original PlayStation 4 doesn't do quite so well, with occasional slowdown, but is an overall decent enough port. The Xbox One X version is also pretty nice, boosting the resolution all the way up to 4K, albeit at the cost of slowdown comparable to the original PS4. The real disaster is the original Xbox One version, which runs at a lower resolution, has several noticeable cutbacks in graphics quality, and has the peak framerate cut down from 60 FPS on the other versions to 30 FPS, and can't even always manage that framerate smoothly. The Switch port of the game (which was handled by Nicalis as opposed to the original developer 34BigThings), despite being pitched as a launch title for the system only to be delayed for two years, has similar problems to the original Xbox One version with muddy variable resolution issues (especially when undocked) in an attempt to maintain 30 FPS gameplay.
• Revolution X. Half of the reason for its checkered reputation comes from its abysmal SNES and Genesis ports, which are better-known than the original coin-op light gun game.^note The other half is because of its sheer absurdity, but that's not for this page. The arcade game had digitized graphics of higher resolution than what those two consoles could handle (here's a comparison) and actual Aerosmith songs for BGM (which cannot be realistically implemented without the use of extremely large ROM chips and custom co-processors). Also, the ports lacked support for the consoles' respective light gun controllers for no reason whatsoever.
• While Rise of the Robots is abysmal on any console, some ports managed to make it even worse. The two only elements of the game that people generally agree are good are a well-done techno soundtrack (and depending on which port you're playing, an alternate soundtrack by Queen's Brian May) and very fluid pre-rendered graphics. While the Genesis and SNES ports had lower quality music, the Amiga original and MS-DOS port had no music at all; the Game Gear port completely tanked all of the game's only redeeming qualities, with understandably the worst graphics and musical quality of them all, while somehow managing to play even worse than the other ports (it's stuck on permanent hard mode, which in the other ports meant that the game resorted to blatant cheating and button-reading to win). The unreleased arcade version had marginally better gameplay, but "compensated" with increased difficulty.
• Saints Row IV is a trainwreck on every console. Occasional lag refusing to blow up cars one by one on Veteran Child's boss fight will inevitably cause him to create a chain reaction of exploding cars that are practically guaranteed to freeze the game, tends to lock up on the crazier end-game missions (really any over the top usage of the black hole gun or tons of explosions cause a hard lock) and to top it off, if you're an achievement/trophy hunter/completionist, all versions have the achievement/trophy "Where is my Cape?" glitched to a point that if that glitch happens, you must start a new game and follow a specific set of requirements while recollecting all 1,255 Data Clusters just to be able to buy every single superpower to qualify for it, and even if you followed those requirements, the game more often than not won't give it to you. Have fun replaying the game over and over just for 100% or a Platinum Trophy!
• SimCity 2000 has the same issues in every single console or handheld version, the vast majority of these caused at least in part by porting to systems that couldn't begin to match the specs of the PCs or Macs the game was originally designed for. Control responsiveness is unbelievably bad, and for something that stores data on flash or battery-backed RAM instead of magnetic media, the save game loading times are incredibly slow. Also, looking for help? You're instructed to press shift + enter!
• The Silent Hill HD Collection, an Updated Re-release of Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The job of remastering these games was outsourced to Hijinx Studios, a mobile/handheld game developer that, on top of having never done a console game before, was forced to use source code from the unfinished betas of both games due to poor archiving, and to complete the project under a horribly strict and looming deadline. It shows, with both games suffering from many bugs both major and minor, and overall being noticeably worse than the originals on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. There is rampant slowdown to the point of rendering the games (particularly SH3) virtually unplayable, the voices fall out of sync with the characters' lips, some of the texture work looks unfinished and recycled from the original versions (clashing badly with the redone sections), the lighting is actually worse to the point of making navigation almost impossible in some parts, and most damningly, SH2's famous fog effects are so broken as to render certain parts of the game laughable. This is to say nothing of them replacing the font for the "Silent Hill Ranch" sign with COMIC SANS. While a patch was later released to fix at least some of the performance issues, it was only released for the PS3 version.
• Sonic Colors Ultimate seemed like it would be a return to form for the Blue Blur, only to fall into this category again despite the port being on more powerful consoles. When the game was released for early access Digital Deluxe players, it came with a lot of bugs and glitches compared to the original release, including crashes, audio & visual glitchs, save data corruption, and seizure inducing glitches, too. The Nintendo Switch version is considered the worst of them, amplifying all of the problems much more frequently. And it doesn't help that the developer who did the port is the same one who did the WWE 2K18 Switch port, which is widely considered to be among the worst ports on the Switch. The devs scrambled to patch the game and fix the issues after much feedback.
• Sonic Origins, a compilation of the mobile remasters of Sonic the Hedgehog 1, 2, CD, and a long-awaited updated version of Sonic 3 & Knuckles was touted as the definitive versions of the Sonic's 16-bit roots. This collection, however, has shipped with a litany of inaccuracies and bugs that never occurred in their original Genesis releases or the mobile versions due to Sega rushing the development of these ports in time for Sonic's 31st Anniversary. The issues in these games range from characters being able to reach places that were not intended for them due to unlocked speed cap which also broke the physics, visual glitches, missing sounds (such as Sonic's and Amy's voice in CD), scripting errors (often Tails would get stuck in places when he's too far from Sonic and doesn't respawn within Sonic's vicinity, resulting in Tails constantly jumping around for no reason), and broken collision detection. The collection also has a persistent smoothing filter applied to every game that can never be disabled for those who prefer sharper pixel graphics^* (although this issue isn't new to this collection; it has been implemented since the mobile releases, as well as the Steam port of Sonic CD to prevent shimmering while scrolling the screen). Sega also pulled the original Genesis releases of these games from digital distribution ahead of this collection's release, leaving the mobile versions as well as the 3D and Sega Ages ports of Sonic 1 and 2 by M2 on Nintendo 3DS and Switch respectively as the only surviving versions. Fans generally agree that while the collection works and the games are still fundamentally good (the ports are certainly not Sonic Genesis levels of unplayable), they're less than ideal, and quite far from the "definitive versions" of the games they were touted as. Simon Thomley of Headcannon has expressed disappointment over how the collection turned out on his personal Twitter. That said, most of the collection's flaws have been ironed out with patches, while various mods were made for the PC version, such as a mod to restore the original soundtracks (with a multitude of alternate soundtracks to choose from, to boot!) and a mod to either disable the smoothing filter or replace it with the much sharper filters from Sonic Mania, including Retraux CRT shaders.
  • Stealth and his team at Headcannon returned a year later to develop the content featured in Sonic Origins Plus, and they took the opportunity while returning to fix as many bugs in the base game as possible, such as the buggy Drop Dash implementation in Sonic 1 and 2 and various other physics goofs. Later patches eventually fixed some of the other egregious issues such as the game crashing while playing as Tails in Labyrinth Zone, the Game Gear games' atrocious audio quality for the Plus DLC, and giving players the option to disable the smoothing filters. While not perfect, the end result is definitely a very decent improvement and can be considered more of a Polished Port than before.
• Starfighter 3000, the Saturn and PlayStation ports of the 3DO game Starfighter, has terrible draw distance and less graphical detail than the original, quite baffling considering how much weaker the 3DO is. The original version made heavy use of the 3DO's ARM RISC processors, but even there the port could have turned out much better than it did. The Saturn version is especially bad.
• While not as problematic nowadays after receiving a patch, Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition for the Playstation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC was this when it first released. The dialogue boxes are marred by run-on sentences, typos, grammatical mistakes, as well as the framerate constantly stuttering and numerous bugs (such as Patty and Flynn randomly switching to their Japanese voices if played in English). The newly localized lines also have inconsistent writing when compared to the polished dialogue of the original Xbox 360 version, with occasional factual errors like writing "west" when the correct word is "east" and the description for one of Rita's Mystic Artes telling the player the wrong way to execute it, and so on. But worst of all, the newly dubbed dialogue and extra skits have atrocious sound mixing that is simply inexcusable in today’s world. Except for Patty’s audio (mostly), the new audio is either too low in volume, or WAY too high- which is heavily distorted by the background music, and it's something VERY notorious when you have new and old dubbed skits play back-to-back. The Switch version also had game-breaking bugs and glitches that were not present in either the PS3 or Xbox 360 editions, and it can also shut down at random. After a few patches that were sent to fix many of the problems the ports have (mainly the random crashing on the Switch version), it's now considered a fine enough rerelease while still feeling a little undercooked for a game that's supposed to be optimized for the latest gen (some of the typos and the occasionally inconsistent sound quality still remain in the game).
• Unreal Tournament on the PlayStation 2 and Sega Dreamcast includes some entirely new arenas that the PC version never got and some much-needed fixes to item placement on some existing levels, but are otherwise rather poor ports. Several of the more open levels drop frames like crazy, the new maps tend towards simple and uninteresting layouts, several more levels didn't make the cut, and the gamepad controls - especially the Dreamcast with its single analog stick - simply aren't as good as using a mouse and keyboard (which is thankfully an option on both consoles). The Dreamcast version also lacks the Assault game mode entirely, and neither port includes any of the content of the Bonus Packs that were released for the PC version during their development.
• The North American PlayStation 2 port of Taito Legends 2 features Bust-A-Move Again, which is the original localization of Puzzle Bobble 2 (see Bad Export for You for details on what's different between these versions of the game). The developers behind the compilation erroneously gave Bust-a-Move Again the sound data of Puzzle Bobble 2, resulting in audio errors.
• Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions heavily suffered when it was ported from the original Xbox to the Gamecube and Playstation 2. The original release fully leveraged the Xbox's hardware for advanced post-processing effects that gave the game a very distinctive look - it can almost pass as a game for the next generation of consoles beside the low rendering resolution. By contrast, the later versions look almost a generation behind, with very crude lightning and low-resolution texturing. The issues are more than skin-deep, as various changes made to the gameplay play havok with the original design. The PS2 and Gamecube versions add the ability to shoot rockets from your cars: the mission timer was reduced in many instances presumably to balance this addition, but the problem is that the rockets do barely any damage and can't be replenished. Add to that that the overal speed was slowed down and that traffic no longer blink out of existence after you hit and you get an already-Nintendo Hard game made harder for the wrong reasons. While the port does try to make up for its downgrades with a (ill-conceived) multiplayer mode and a generous heaping of bonus missions and vehicles, most who played both versions agree this does not make for these flaws.
• XCOM 2 has pretty bad performance on both PS4 and Xbox One. The Wrath of the Chosen expansion, instead of fixing it, made the performance ten times worse, to the point where many players would consider it unplayable. An awful frame rate that frequently dips into the single digits, controls that jerk and tend to randomly delay, and hanging and crashes galore. The console port was not done by the same development team that created the original PC game^* Blind Squirrel Games, the team of BioShock: The Collection, WWE 2K18's Switch port and the remastering process of Sonic Colors Ultimate)., and it really shows.
• RPG Maker MV received a port to the PS4 and Switch in 2017, and while playing games made with it is good enough, actually making anything is an unbearably clunky experience. Unlike past RPG Maker games on consoles, which simplified the UI to be more compatible with a controller, the port of MV is basically a copy-paste of the PC version, which is ultimately a double-edged sword - while it's theoretically just as powerful as its PC counterpart (bar the total removal of the plugin system for obvious reasons), using it quickly becomes tedious due to the simple fact that the interface was clearly not made with controllers in mind. The Switch version fares slightly better due to its touchscreen, but the interface wasn't resized to match, meaning that unless you have a stylus you'll likely end up misclicking and fumbling about anyway. The port also suffers from several Game Breaking Bugs (ranging from locking controls to losing progress and even being forced to redo the tutorial), a profanity filter that repeatedly stumbles over the Scunthorpe Problem, and incredibly loud music and sound effects during the edit screen that cannot be turned off.

Computers

• BreakThru, a jeep-based Shoot 'Em Up by Data East, had three computer ports published by US Gold. The Commodore 64 version had dishwater-ugly backgrounds, stupid sound effects, terrible hit detection and enemy vehicles that did things like drive over water. The ZX Spectrum version had awkward keyboard controls, barely any sound, bad collision detection, and a lack of enemies, though the graphics weren't terrible for the system. The Amstrad CPC version had programming similar to the Spectrum version, but the game window was inexplicably much smaller; it received the lowest score for any game reviewed in AMTIX! magazine.
• Double Dragon I:
  • The game was ported by UK-based Binary Design to home computer platforms in 1988, who were ordered by Mastertronic (the publisher that commissioned them) to finish these ports under a strict deadline, resulting in most of them turning out to be total rushjobs. A common problem all of these ports shared was the fact that the developers attempted to adapt the arcade game's three-button combat system to work on one-button joysticks that were standard for PC gaming back then. This meant that instead of having dedicated buttons for kicking, jumping and punching, players only had a single fire button for everything and performing anything other than a standing punch required rather counter-intuitive joystick/button combinations (e.g. Down-Away+Fire for a backward whirlwind kick, Down-Forward+Fire for a jump kicks). The uppercut and roundhouse kicks were also missing in these versions, since enemies lacked their stunned animations — instead they simply fall down to the floor after a few hits. On top of all that, these versions had non-existent music and sound effects due to the floppy disk format they were released on.
  • The Amiga and Atari ST versions, with both of them running on 16-bit hardware, could've theoretically reproduced the arcade version's visuals — instead they feature laughably amateurish art assets in which all the male character (except the Abobos and Machine Gun Willy) are recolors of the same generic guy. The IBM PC version looked even worse, as it only supported the already dated CGA and EGA graphic cards. Double Dragon II and 3 fared better visually on these platforms (especially 3, which resembled the arcade version pretty closely), but still suffered from the aforementioned controls and sound issues.
  • The Commodore 64 version used a sprite stacking technique for its graphics that resulted in all the characters having an invisible waist. The manual for this version actually featured an apology and explanation from the developers for using this technique. When Ocean Software got the rights to re-release Double Dragon on the C64, they chose to create their own conversion instead of re-releasing the Binary Design one, which was considerably better looking, but was one-player only and lacked the final boss battle against Machine Gun Willy.
  • The Amstrad CPC actually had two versions of Double Dragon. The version distributed in the UK was based on the ZX Spectrum version, while the version distributed in other European countries such as France and Spain used art assets similar to the Amiga version and is generally regarded to be the better of the two versions, although it's only compatible with CPC 6128 models.
• Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition on PC features poor optimization, random crashes, and questionable system requirements among many other problems, including lack of a replay feature and custom soundtrack support, which were present in previous GTA PC ports. All of this is not helped by the fact that Rockstar's parent company, Take-Two Interactive, became increasingly hostile towards fans and modders who had developed their own reverse-engineered source ports of III and Vice City that were viewed favorably by comparison and taking them down with DMCA claims and lawsuits.
• Salamander for the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC (the latter being a cheap conversion of the former, as was all too often the case). The majority of the screen was taken up with the HUD. The action was slow — you don't get a speed up until halfway into the first level, and need it well before then. There are one or two bugs that make one of the boss battles a Luck-Based Mission. Only the first stage has an actual layout; the rest of them just have the odd enemy floating across the screen.
• Street Fighter II received home computer ports of the original World Warrior for the western market in 1993. Aside from the fact that World Warrior was already considered vestigial by that time (the 16-bit consoles were already receiving ports of the previous year's Champion Edition and Hyper Fighting editions), the conversions were all handled by U.S. Gold, a company with a spotty track record when it came to porting arcade games to home computers.
  • The IBM PC port was a total trainwreck. Everybody moved like they were paralyzed, combos were impossible (the sprites were invincible while taking damage), if you won while in mid-air your character would stop and do his/her victory pose defying all rules of gravity, and there were only three songs — Ken's theme (which became the title theme), the character select theme (which was the only theme to play during gameplay at all) and Zangief's ending theme (which was now everyone's ending theme).
  • The C64 version had the large, detailed character sprites become tiny, unrecognizable messes of pixels and five-minute loads to move on to the next stage. On top of all that, instead of three-punch and three-kick buttons, it was played with a joystick which only had one button.
  • The ZX Spectrum port, er... technically functions, and that's about all you can say about it. The most obvious issue is that there were only two colors for both the fighters and the background, which makes the entire experience a visual mess. There's also no music whatsoever, the game can take minutes to load properly, and the framerate is so low as to qualify for a slideshow. Oh, and control-wise? You have one button and a joystick, to play Street Fighter II.
• Turrican qualifies in every 8-bit computer version not on the C64 (the computer it was originally programmed for). While most other computers at the time lacked the C64's hardware-accelerated sprites and scrolling, it makes one wonder why they attempted it at all. Broken controls, choppy scrolling, and missing level features abound, and the graphics take strange liberties with the original material. The exception is the Amstrad CPC version, which is well-regarded and highly playable; despite the scrolling and smaller game screen, the graphics are far better than the C64 graphics (but then the C64 has a horrendously drab palette to pick colors from).
• Ports of the Clam antivirus program to Microsoft Windows do not have a real-time scanner. The original UNIX versions started including a real-time scanner some years back, and the OS X version, while unable to get the original real-time scanner working, compensated with a completely rewritten real-time scanner called ClamXAV Sentry. However, the Windows version lacked this basic amenity, because apparently the devs lack the manpower. It took Cisco taking ownership of the project and adding more manpower to it that the problem was resolved with the birth of the Immunet antivirus for Windows, which uses Clam Antivirus as it's backend.
• While not a "disaster", per se, certain PC games around the early and mid-2000s (the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time trilogy and Need for Speed: Most Wanted 2005 spring to mind) have process threading issues on multi-core systems, which can cause jerky performance. This is because these games buffer information for preprocessing on the assumption of operating on a single-core system. In a multi-core environment, the process scheduler will grab queued threads and assign them to the cores for simultaneous processing. This in turn screws up things like order of execution and output scheduling, which the games aren't coded to handle, hence the jerkiness due to having to compensate for possible out of order data (and can occasionally cause crashes if the engine doesn't handle it right). The solution is to typically shut off all but one core for the game's executable to run its requests through (this can be done at runtime in the Task Manager or by using a hex patcher to modify the game executable directly).
• The 2015 Steam releases of Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI are direct ports of the mobile versions, which have clunky interfaces that weren't meant for PC gaming. Entire chunks of the battle screen are taken up by needlessly huge menu options, and although the "run" and "fast-forward battle" icons had their functionality removed and assigned to keys/buttons, they inexplicably weren't removed from the interface. On top of that, Final Fantasy VI had bad lag, sound problems, and it couldn't even be played in offline mode. The issues were resolved quickly, but the clunky interface remained. Luckily, they were later replaced with new ports as part of the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series, which uses Final Fantasy Record Keeper's FFVI-inspired artstyle.
• Jet Set Radio's Steam port only lets you configure keyboard controls, and it was a straight port of the X360 port (a port of a port), thus using the 360 buttons as reference (e.g. "Hold down LT to center the camera"). You can, in fact, use a controller, but the controls will most likely be screwed up (for example, if using a PS3 controller, the A button will be Triangle, or the Start button will be R2), and there is no option to configure them anywhere. If you want to have proper gamepad support, you have to use a third-party wrapper to make DualShock controllers compatible. The Steam version of the game also infamously and inexplicably refuses to save on some copies. Re-downloading it... doesn't really help, and the main way of fixing it is to use a hex editor to modify the executable file. Even that doesn't always work.
• A tie-in for the film Beverly Hills Cop was released on several platforms, including the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and PC, among others. The Amiga version has smashing music due to the Paula audio chip. The Atari ST, Spectrum 128K and C64 version was bearable thanks to the PSG sound systems of the former two and the SID chip of the latter. The PC version, however, is this trope played straight. Using only EGA graphics and PC speaker sound, despite the AdLib and Game Blaster, and indeed the first generation Sound Blaster, being already released when the game came out and VGA was already picking up steam. And even then the PC music was often described as someone strangling an ice cream truck. (The music speed is also tied to the CPU speed, so the faster the computer is, the worse the music sounds - using DOSBox with the default CPU cycle setting produces the most painful result.) However, when properly emulated, there is a still a harsh, but now-warm intonation to the music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuzGlNWsLAA
  • While it's generally agreed that the PC version's music is terrible, the Spectrum 48K port's music isn't too far behind given that the platform too only had a beeper for the game to work with (along with a title screen with what appears to be Eddie Murphy suffering from second-degree sunburn). The only thing that makes it bearable is that it sounds less like someone strangling an ice-cream truck and more like someone autotuning their farts.
• The Microsoft Windows port of The Lion King was cited by some to have been the reason why game developers initially stuck to MS-DOS, and as one of the reasons for DirectX's inception. The game used WinG, a graphics backend library Microsoft developed in an attempt to address issues with game development on Windows, as the latter operating system added unnecessary overhead and did not allow for close-to-metal access to hardware the way DOS did. While the Windows port did work to an extent, it caused quite a PR disaster when millions of Compaq Presarios came shipped with incompatible graphics drivers, leading to BSODs, tantrums among children, and thus disgruntled parents.
• The newer Steam version of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is not only missing about a tenth of its music thanks to expired licenses like in the mobile and remastered versions, it also ignores bugfixes from the previous releases and patches while introducing more bugs and problems of its own. It also has very barebones modern Xbox 360 controller support, lacks the colored lighting from the PlayStation 2 version, poorly implemented widescreen support which squishes the image to look flatter than it should be, and a sudden update caused some players from certain regions to lose their progress thanks to incompatibility with their save files. The Steam version would also serve as the basis for the Rockstar Games Launcher version, which is also marred by an even worse mouse bug and anti-modding measures to undo changes or prevent players from being able to play the game at all if they try to mod it. Thankfully the modding community has not only made tools available to downgrade these versions to the original v1.0 release, but can also be fixed up with mods such as SilentPatch, GInput, SkyGfx, Widescreen Fix, and much more, along with efforts to restore the original features of the PlayStation 2 version or porting the genuine improvements from the mobile port to the PC version.
• If you're looking to get Fallout 3, get the GOG.com version. The Steam version was practically left for dead - not only does it still try to install Games for Windows Live (which can potentially brick the networking stack in Windows 10 machines), but also has bugs galore that have been patched in the GOG.com version and are practically nonexistent in the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions. Even on release, the PC version already ran badly for those who bought the then top-of-the-line Core 2 Duo or Athlon64 x2 dual-core CPUs, as the game was developed for single-core CPUs running Windows XP in mind and had not been tested with the then-new multicore PCs whose owners may have opted to also adopt Windows Vista^note the latter is probably justified as Windows Vista was reviled when the game came out. Still, it continued using libraries that have been deprecated in Vista and by Windows 7 have also been abandoned, and thus had even more bugs pertaining to radio music in Windows 7.
• Sonic Adventure:
  • The 2004 Windows port, though maintaining the extras of the GameCube's DX port, is marred with other problems. It suffers from grainy-looking visuals, poorly re-sized HUD/UI elements, bad horizontal stretching, a tendency to crash when switching out to another window in fullscreen, keyboard controls that can't be reconfigured, poor implementation of mouse controls (thankfully, they're optional), and poor optimization (at most, it will run at 30 FPS). The Chao system was heavily butchered as well — there is no equivalent to the GBA's Tiny Chao Garden or the VMU's Chao Adventure, leaving the Chao Transporter's sole functions as naming and deleting Chao; while the removal of the Dreamcast version's breeding mechanics and the Tiny Chao Garden meant that every jewel-color Chao except for gold and silver, along with most colors that are obtainable by breeding jewel Chao with shiny Chao such as translucent Chao, were rendered unobtainable. In all versions of DX, the Chao are generally unresponsive to being petted, the main way to increase happiness, and the only way to align them into Hero or Dark typing is with fruit bought from the Black Market, an expensive endeavor given how it's harder to earn rings in this game than it is in its sequel.
  • The game was re-released in 2010 on Steam, based on the Xbox 360 port but introduced new problems such as the game's launcher not saving your settings, the game running at a locked resolution, a poor framerate despite the Xbox 360 version being capable of running the game at 60 FPS, and the game being presented in a pillar-boxed 4:3 aspect-ratio. A patch was released in 2014 that fixes the issues with the game's launcher not saving settings, fixed the controls (keys are rebindable), better support for higher resolutions, V-Sync, and FXAA. However, the issue with the game's framerate remains unaddressed, it still runs in a pillar-boxed display, and despite supporting controllers, the analog triggers and D-Pad of an Xbox 360 controller do not work at all despite being based on the Xbox 360 version.
  • The Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Steam ports of DX also removed all of the unlockable Game Gear games. Since they made up 95% of the rewards for completing missions and collecting emblems, there are no short-term incentives to collect emblems (aside from unlocking Metal Sonic by getting all 130) and no incentive at all to complete missions beyond getting 100% Completion.
  • Nowadays, fans have created patches and mods to help fix the Steam version significantly, not only by downgrading it to the original PC port so mods can work on it, but by also improving the original PC port in various ways, such as restoring and fixing certain graphical and audio problems (though some are hardcoded and would need a lot of work to fix them) and re-instate the unlockable Game Gear games. On top of all this, being able to play at widescreen resolutions, improve the game's controller support, and modern operating system support!
• While Sonic Adventure 2's ports are nowhere as bad as Sonic Adventure DX's ports, they still suffer from many technical issues.
  • The Chao system is broken in many ways. Fruits tend to glitch into using other Chao Garden models when exiting the Chao Stadium. Everything exclusive to the Tiny Chao Garden in the GameCube port such as many fruit, jewel Chao and the official character Chao are unavailable in the HD re-releases. Planted trees render as if they were minuscule and float in midair. Shiny two-tone Chao's textures are glitched and render as a blinding white over most of their bodies.
  • The object models and character models suffer from either shading issues (Sonic and Shadow's mouths on their in-game models have weird shadows on them, looking like mustaches) or rendering issues (Tails and Eggman's mechs and Rouge's Treasure Scope suffer from this, making them lose details). Lost Colony and especially Iron Gate suffer from lighting issues, making the levels look too bright when they're supposed to be quite somber in tone and atmosphere.
  • The music and sound effects in the HD re-releases are even louder than in the GameCube port, which was already louder than the original Dreamcast version.
  • The cutscenes in Story mode have many problems. There are countless transparency issues, the character models look way darker than they're supposed to be (even compared to their in-game models), colors and effects are missing in some areas and replicated poorly in others (especially noticeable in one cutscene with Rouge and the last one in the Dark path storyline), many shadows are either misplaced or absent, and Amy's character model suffers from texture issues and her eyes and head not aligning correctly, making her look like she's cross-eyed.
  • The Maria menu theme, which was downloadable on Dreamcast and unlockable by collecting 180 Emblems and linking with a Game Boy Advance Sonic game on GameCube, is completely inaccessible in the HD release.
  • As with its predecessor, many fans have been patching and modding the game on Steam to fix it so it can be more like its Dreamcast version, with mods that restore the Chao system to its Dreamcast counterpart, fix the lighting and audio issues, correct issues with both character and object models and correct cutscene issues.
• The PC version of Sonic Origins, on top of having demanding system requirements for a compilation of remastered Sega Genesis games that can easily run on any smartphone made within the early 2010's, also suffers from many of the same issues seen in the console versions, along with poor performance even on high-end systems thanks to everyone's favorite DRM system Denuvo, frequent crashes at the title screen, and save data corruption. Some of these problems were addressed through patches similarly to the console versions.
• All of Tiertex's computer ports of Strider (Arcade) seemingly use the same code base, and manage to be even worse than the already dubious Sega Master System port by the same company. All suffer from oversimplified stage and boss designs, choppy scrolling, unresponsive controls, and are missing the Final Boss battle against Grand Master Meio, instead ending with a "Congratulations on completing the simulation" message after the boss rematches in the final stage.

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