Bad ports don’t necessarily mean bad games, but they’re inexcusable nonetheless. From the lazy to the straight-up weird, poor ports can cost companies a pretty penny in sales and reputation. Below, Twinfinite lists 8 terrible ports that were practically unplayable.
8 Terrible Video Game Ports that Were Practically Unplayable
Dark Souls PC
Back in 2012, gamers were enthralled when news that Dark Souls: Prepare to Die would be coming to PC. After the game reignited popular interest in non-linear storytelling and challenge, fans spitballed about the improvements a PC version would make. Sadly, the port was, at best, shoddy. Even though Dark Souls didn’t exactly run perfectly on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 – Blighttown was plain nasty to wade through – the PC port made those versions look pristine.
Having performance and graphical drawbacks in every possible way, the version was made salvageable by a fan-made patch which cleaned up its horrid framerate issues. Mainly due to the efforts of the game’s player-versus-player community, the title enjoyed a healthy number of players on Steam for the following years. Despite all of the FPS, durability issues, and miscellaneous bugs, the port stayed popular. Dark Souls on PC was a rare case of a terrible port being saved by the quality of its contents.
FromSoftware and Bandai Namco never really learned from this affair, though, with 2018’s Switch port being less than admirable. It was better than the PC port, but, well, that wasn’t hard.
8 Terrible Video Game Ports that Were Practically Unplayable
AC: Unity
Okay, AC: Unity ran terribly across the board. Looking back at Unity speaks volumes for Ubisoft’s rejuvenation in recent years. Compared to this year’s excellent Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Unity looks like it was made by an entirely different company. The game was riddled with a litany of performance issues, hilarious glitches, and a total absence of polish; the PC port, again, was the main offender, being reported as flat-out unplayable by significant portions of the player base. If Steam refunds were around in 2014 it would have been record-breaking.
Curiously, previous PC versions in the Assassin’s Creed franchise ran well but took a sudden nosedive with Unity. Thankfully, Ubisoft has brushed off its PC port issues for the time being, but Unity will go down as one of the most disastrous launches in the studio’s history.
8 Terrible Video Game Ports that Were Practically Unplayable
Final Fantasy I-VI PC Ports
Square Enix had one job: port the classic Final Fantasy games to PC. How do you screw that up? Well, the studio chose the mobile ports of the game, as opposed to the raw material. Yeah, those ports, the collection that changed each game’s unique, idiosyncratic art style with some generic, placid visuals. Not only that, but the mobile versions altered the game’s soundtrack and sounds, triggering purists everywhere.
The versions were not unplayable in a technical sense, but stomaching the art style changes was difficult. By opting for the soulless art style, Square Enix inadvertently doomed what should have been a run of the mill success.
8 Terrible Video Game Ports that Were Practically Unplayable
Mercenaries 2
Mercenaries 2 was the work of the talented Pandemic Studios who, around the release of the game, suffered an ill fate under its troublesome EA tenure. Oddly, the game was released on PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and, erm, PlayStation 2. While the other versions of the game had their own fare of issues, it’s a wonder the PlayStation 2 passed any sort of trading standards. To be fair, Pandemic did not handle the PlayStation 2 conversion, trusting newbie studio Artificial Mind & Motion with the port.
To say the studio did a bad job would be an understatement, it barely did a job at all. The PlayStation 2 version of the game perhaps has the worst integration of pop-in ever, along with a constant yellow fog blocking pretty much everything. The game looks, plays, and runs like a pre-alpha version of its next-gen counterpart, despite EA charging RRP at the time.
8 Terrible Video Game Ports that Were Practically Unplayable
Atari Pac-Man
Pac-Man is always remembered as an arcade game, for good reason. It became a cultural phenomenon on release in 1980, before a home version ended up dropping on Atari 2600 in 1982. On paper, the translation to a console should have been a runaway success, but it utterly failed to capture any of the arcade version’s charms.
The visuals were comparatively drab and lifeless, with the ghosts flickering oddly and the maze design was consistently simplistic. The power-ups were no longer recognizable, instead replaced by sickly colored pixels. Hampered by technological limitations and strict deadlines, the Atari Pac-Man had issues all over the place. Outside of the visual problems mentioned, the game’s controls were significantly worse, with no diagonal movement and poor response to player input.
8 Terrible Video Game Ports that Were Practically Unplayable
Resident Evil 4 PC
Resident Evil 4 is a high watermark for the action genre, but its 2007 PC port was just plain lazy. The port reeks of lost potential, with the initial release having significantly worse graphics than its Gamecube counterpart, along with a litany of problems with controls, mouse support, and general options.
Console-sensitive onscreen messages summed up the lack of love that went into the game’s transference. Thankfully, fans have piled a load of love into the game via fan patches, plus the HD re-release runs like silk on PC. On release, though, Resident Evil 4’s PC iterations was, well, a horror.
8 Terrible Video Game Ports that Were Practically Unplayable
Arkham Knight PC Port
PC ports do not get a lot of love, eh? Rocksteady’s relationship with the PC platform has been shaky at best, but fan apathy reached critical mass in 2015 following the release of Arkham Knight. The adaptation was so terrible that Warner Bros. literally pulled it from sale, following an ocean of complaints from players.
For most buyers, crashes left the game totally unplayable. For the (un)lucky few who could get the game running, they were met with no rain animations, FPS drops that were PowerPoint-esque, poor controls, as well as the knowledge that the game was locked at 30 FPS, despite being advertised to run at 60.
8 Terrible Video Game Ports that Were Practically Unplayable
Mega Man DOS
This game doesn’t even feel real, it looks like some sort of Mega Man fever dream. The port is just plain weird. The character sprite, at best, looks like an approximation of Mega Man, with dead black eyes. The game opens with Mega Man at a police checkpoint? He is then attacked by a, uh, dog? Not just any dog, mind you, an infinitely-respawning dog. The game opens with an invincible dog, which you need to flee from, basically. Yep, that about takes the cake.
For those who don’t believe the utter horror that can be invoked from this port, see below:
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