Porting is one of the coolest things in the video game industry, allowing the entire community to enjoy the best titles on their favorite platform. But, unfortunately, the mediocre performance of some ports sometimes negates all the advantages. Tons of bugs, flawed controls and lack of patches are just some of the things you sometimes have to put up with. Today we will look back at ten of the worst examples of adapting console games to PC … and try to forget about them as soon as possible.
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Resident Evil 4 – From Developers Who Can’t Read Instructions
When information appeared on the network that Resident Evil Village would be, in a sense, the ideological successor of Resident Evil 4, I felt a little uneasy. Those who played the first version of the RE4 port on PC should understand me. It’s hard to think of a more sophisticated way to distort and hate an overall great game.
To begin with, the PC version of Resident Evil 4 is actually a port. The original was released on the GameCube, from there it was transferred to the PlayStation 2, significantly lowering the graphics quality, and this version was already adapted for personal computers. But this is far from the most interesting. Even the fact that Studio Sourcenext somehow fantastically managed to further degrade the visual component pales against the background of the management …
Resident Evil 4 on PC did not have mouse aiming. Just think about this phrase. One of the most important advantages of PC gaming, forcing millions of users to play shooters on this platform, was not only poorly implemented – it was completely absent! Add to this crooked keys, displaying gamepad buttons instead of the keyboard in QTE and we will get a graceful instrument of torture. Seven years after the release, Capcom released the Ultimate HD Edition, which fixes the main shortcomings of the original port, but all PC players still have a sludge.
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Dark Souls – Fear Your Desires
The PC version of Dark Souls would fit perfectly into the plot of Blinded by Desire or any tale of malevolent genies. The fact is that PC owners have long and persistently persuaded the studio FromSoftware and the publishing house Bandai Namco to release the legendary RPG on the best platform. But they didn’t even know that a dream come true would hurt them so much.
In general, fans of Dark Souls are considered to be video game masochists who adore suffering in all forms, but even to them this PC port seemed to be something completely unhealthy. Disastrously poor optimization, frame rate limiting, and mediocre keyboard and mouse controls made an already difficult game almost impassable.
That’s because FromSoftware had little or no PC experience. The developers apologized for the state of Dark Souls and admitted that they wanted to release the port as soon as possible and add additional content. Fortunately, most of the major issues have been fixed by modders. The bright spot in this story was that FromSoftware saw interest in its games from the PC community and began releasing its new titles on this platform too. With DS2 and DS3, things have gone much better.
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Marvel Ultimate Alliance – Break the Working, Break the Broken
Not fixing something that already works is a great principle that not only justifies procrastination, but also saves you a lot of problems. It’s a shame not all developers follow it. Illustrative examples are Activision and Marvel Ultimate Alliance.
The original Marvel Ultimate Alliance was released in 2006 and lacked stars from the sky, although it was very solid entertainment for fans. The same can be said for the original PC version – it was a lazy adaptation of the console title, but it worked, and that’s the main thing.
That all changed with the release of the remaster in 2016. Usually, when you are offered to re-buy a game that celebrated its tenth anniversary, you expect some kind of large-scale improvements: graphical and / or content. In the case of Marvel Ultimate Alliance, exactly the opposite happened: the re-release did not include all the DLCs, but instead of them, buyers received a bunch of bugs, optimization problems (a ten-year-old game!) And the absence of half of the sounds. Marvel Games promised to fix everything, but instead the title disappeared from sale without explanation.
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Saints Row 2 – the most shameful (until recently) page in the history of CD Projekt
Until recently, CD Projekt was considered almost the best publishing house in the world. A kind of unicorn among the greedy goblins represented by Electronic Arts, Take-Two, etc. However, even before the release of Cyberpunk 2077, the company managed to get into a puddle a couple of times. The publisher dived deepest with the PC version of Saints Row 2. To be fair, the porting was done by CD Projekt Localization Center, which specialized in localization, but who remembers such little things?
The main feature of Saints Row 2 on PC was that it was actually a clean version for the Xbox 360. The game was sharpened for the console processor with a clock speed of 3.2 GHz, so it started to lag at any deviation from this value. It literally worked worse the better the PC you had.
On top of this curious detail, mediocre optimizations and unclear why the degraded graphics on the PC version of Saints Row 2 had a locked frame rate of 30 FPS. It would seem that the problem is scanty – such restrictions can be easily removed. But this is still half the trouble, because the whole logic of the game turned out to be tied to 30 frames per second. That is, if you ran it at 60 FPS, then the game accelerated twice. That is, again, the better the computer, the worse the experience of the gameplay.
Since publishing house THQ has made a living and no developer will ever admit to having worked at CD Projekt Localization Center, for a long time the source code of the Saints Row 2 port for PC was considered lost. However, in 2019, the authors of the original from the Volition studio announced that the necessary files were found. Therefore, there is some possibility that the game will still be repaired, although there was no news on this topic.
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Spider-Man 2 – and the port is not real
It is customary to call porting the adaptation of a game released on one device to another. That is, roughly speaking, this is a transfer of a title between platforms. That is why Spider-Man 2 cannot be called a port with a clear conscience. However, this incident at one time spoiled the blood of so many Spider-Man fans that it is impossible not to mention it.
So, Spider-Man 2 was released in 2004 based on the movie “Spider-Man 2”. The action not only became a great game based on the movie (which doesn’t happen very often), but it was also recognized as one of the best comic book titles. After hearing the praise from the press, many bought Spider-Man 2 on PC, but they were terribly disappointed, because it was a completely different game. Literally.
The PS2 version of Spider-Man 2 was a web-based open-world action game with a thrilling combat system for 2004. A stark reminder that Treyarch once knew how to do something outside of Call of Duty. The PC version was developed by the Fizz Factor studio. It was a simplified bitemap with several levels instead of an open world.
It is clear that there was no correction of the situation and could not be. If you want a cool Spider-Man 2 – buy a PlayStation 2. Now, when versions for different platforms come out almost identical, the situation looks wild. However, it used to be quite common for games with the same name to have very different content depending on the console or country.
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These were the ten worst examples of porting console games to the PC. Which of these titles have you gotten the most out of? And if your most hated port didn’t make the list, tell us about it in the comments.
