Porting Disaster: Difference between revisions
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[[File:pacman port 5470.png|link=Pac-Man|frame|In six weeks, Atari turned [[Pac-Man Fever]] into [[The Great Video Game Crash of 1983|Pac-Man Cancer]].]]
{{quote|''"Actual games shots taken from a version you haven't bought."''
|'''''[[Only You Can Save Mankind]]'''''}}
Porting a program to another system is seldom an easy task. If you had the good fortune to be able to consistently use cross-platform libraries while writing the original program, you might be able to get away without having to do any code rewriting. Otherwise, you're looking at significant rewrites ahead. [[Multi Platform]] development ''can'' help avoid this, but if the developers are rushed, the version for system with which they're least-familiar will likely suffer.
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** Inconsistent or perpetually slow frame-rates.
** [[Loads and Loads of Loading|Ridiculously long loading times]], given the complexity of the program.
Keep in mind that many of the so-called "ports" are, strictly speaking, not true ports but are more properly classified as "conversions" or "adaptations". Such "ports" were commonplace during the late 70s to the early 2000s due in no small part to drastic differences between consoles from different manufacturers (with some exceptions such as the [[Colecovision]] and [[Other Sega Systems|SG-1000]] being essentially identical to each other; while most systems do share the same main CPU, they very greatly in terms of graphics and sound generation). You'd often hear many a YouTuber conflate the word "port" for a mechanically-unrelated version of an existing game on a different platform, like in the case of one channel describing a [[Game Boy Color]] adaptation of a ''[[Mortal Kombat]]'' game as a "port" of the arcade original, despite sharing next to no code or assets with its arcade sibling. For a game to qualify as a port or conversion in a strict sense, it has to share assets with the original game if the game's code was rewritten for the target platform, albeit adapted or edited to account for any limitations, c.f. ''[[Doom]]'' for the Super Nintendo which used a wholly different engine but with assets taken from the original incarnation.
See also [[Polished Port]], where a game is greatly improved during the development of a ported version.
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* The [[PlayStation 2]] port (of the [[Xbox]] version) of ''Rainbow Six 3'' took a major hit, given the hardware limitations. The levels were, according to IGN, "cropped like a butch haircut, stripped like a captive terrorist, and given a facelift like Michael Jackson".
* This seems to be the case of ''[[Arcana Heart]] 2'' for [[PlayStation 2]]. The game suffers extreme lags in both sound, game speed and graphics (on the note of that last one, the sprites are also horribly pixelated). Though some can still enjoy if they adapt to it, but since most of the audience (Japanese) have been playing on arcades, disappointments occur. The weird thing is, it works better in a [[PlayStation 2]] emulator if the computer spec is good enough.
* ''[[Vantage Master]] Japan'' has a [[PlayStation 2]] port where, every time you move the cursor, [https://web.archive.org/web/20131125183305/http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/vantagemaster/ps2-blegh.jpg the screen pixelates heavily]. It also doesn't possess any of the extra contents that were released for the PC version.
* ''[[Mushihime-sama]]'' for the PS2 doesn't properly emulate the slowdown of the arcade version, causing the game to be more difficult than intended and moments where the game suddenly slows down or speeds back up. In addition, it doesn't run at its native resolution—playing the game in vertical mode reveals that the game's resolution has been scaled down.
* ''[[Guitar Hero]] III''...the [[PlayStation 2]] version, which can't cope with some of the busier songs and suffers from clear lagging and skipping issues—absolute death for a [[Rhythm Game]]. (See ''[http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=Guitar+Hero+3+-+Knights+of+Cydonia Knights of Cydonia]'' and ''One'' for examples.) It's pretty clear that the Xbox 360 version was the one people intended you to buy, and everything else was hacked up out of that (the PC version is, save for some controller modifications, a direct port of the 360).
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* Valve tried their damndest to make ''[[Half-Life 2]]'' work on the Xbox but it is clear that the Xbox simply did not have the horsepower to make the Source engine shine. Fuzzy textures and some REALLY noticeable frame rate problems plague this port.
* ''[[Myst (series)|Myst IV: Revelation]]'' had an Xbox version with [[Loads and Loads of Loading]]. Unfortunately, the loading lag comes into effect ''every single time'' the player moves to another spot. In a game focused on ''exploration'' and puzzle solving, this made it nearly unplayable for all but the most patient players.
* The port of ''[[Doom]]'' included in the Xbox version of ''[[Doom 3]]'' was actually the best console ports of ''Doom'' at the time of release on its technical merits, being the first console port ''ever'' to use the original level layouts (instead of the simplified ones used in every previous console port) and maintain a playable frame rate. Unfortunately, one very blatant problem destroys the port: The controls are setup in such a way (and not remapable) it's essentially impossible to play the game without cheating! Not that they make it so difficult you can't beat it without cheating, but that they're setup in a way the player has to make a conscious effort to ''not'' enter cheat codes since they're mapped to holding run (which a player would otherwise always want held since this is the last port to not include an auto-run option) and pressing any combination of four buttons (which combo determines which cheat).
=== Nintendo GameCube (GCN) ===
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** A patch that corrected the loading times was finally released...two years later...and by then, it was out of print. So much for waiting for a patch before buying it!
* When using an Xbox 360, you can download (official) emulators to play (selected) Xbox 1 games. While some of these work fine, others don't translate so well. In ''[[Silent Hill]] 2'' on the 360, parts of the graphics would randomly disappear and after you die in a certain area the game refuses to function unless you delete all of your save files. Sadly, this isn't a one-time case.
** Trying to play your Xbox games on the 360 is an iffy proposition for other games too. When played on the 360, ''[[Forza Motorsport]]'' demonstrates glitches not found when playing it on an original Xbox. The "official" "emulation" of ''[[Silent Hill 2]]'' had problems with the sound effects becoming muted too, in addition to horrible graphical glitches that rendered many textures flat like porcelain. A comprehensive overview of the numerous glitches is contained in [https://web.archive.org/web/20140208162046/http://www.the-horror.com/index.php?id=features&s=sh2360 this] feature from the-horror.com.
** In the ''[[Psychonauts]]'' port, Raz's outfit randomly turns blue when you press Start and has to be fixed by turning the game on and off.
*** The ''Psychonauts'' issue is more of an emulation error than a porting one; the exact same glitch happens when playing the Xbox version in your 360.
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* ''Turning Point: Fall of Liberty'' wasn't very good on any system, but the bomb-wiring mini-game in the PS3 version tells you to work by the colors of the buttons...or, rather, the colors of the corresponding Xbox buttons.
* ''[[Bayonetta]]'' was originally developed for the Xbox 360 with Sega doing the [[Play Station 3]] port. Despite the noticeable decrease in graphic's quality, the game is so unbelievably-slow it causes truly atrocious frame-rate drops and you'll suffer from [[Loads and Loads of Loading]] even when pressing the ''pause button'' (thankfully, the loading times were fixed by a patch from Sony, which allows players to install the game to the internal hard-drive).
* The [[Play Station 3]] version of ''[[Splinter Cell
** The next ''[[Splinter Cell]]'' went Xbox-exclusive. Presumably, [[They Just Didn't Care|Ubisoft Just Didn't Care.]]
** And when Ubisoft sold an [[Updated Rerelease]] of the first three games for the [[Play Station 3]], they forgot fundamental things like the option to invert look controls - which had been in almost every prior release of the same games. (After initially claiming that inverted controls were not an industry standard - and following a lengthy outcry from frustrated customers - Ubisoft patched it. Several months later.)
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* Remember ''[[Legend of Kay]]''? You know the [[PlayStation 2]] game with ''[[Ninja Gaiden]]''-esque fighting, racing levels, a solid plot and a soundtrack by Virt? The DS port rips all of that out for random spider jumping, a complete butchering of the script, crappy MIDI files and the ''complete elimination of the battle system that made the game fun to play in the first place.''
* The ''[[Il-2 Sturmovik]]'' series is considered one of the best PC flight sims available. The ''Birds of Prey'' title for consoles is also a solid game. On the DS, however, the controls are sluggish and the D-pad is ill-suited for controlling a plane in three dimensions. some stages are [[Unwinnable]] because the enemies can't be damaged, and the campaigns are just a series of missions that can be played in any order the player wants (which is just as well, considering the last flaw).
=== Nintendo Switch ===
* The Switch conversion of ''[[Mortal Kombat|Mortal Kombat 1]]'' was critically panned for poor graphics, long load times and numerous technical issues. While some don't actually mind the inevitable graphical cutbacks expected for a port of a ninth-generation game to smartphone-grade hardware of 2015 vintage, the game was so riddled with bugs that it became a sore spot in reviews, though patches have been released to alleviate at least some of the concerns.
=== Other Handhelds ===
* A significant amount of the Game.com's library was made up of horribly done
** ''Sonic Jam'' was practically in [[In Name Only]] version of the Saturn original. There was nothing from the original ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog (video game)|Sonic The Hedgehog]]'', and only two levels each from the other three Genesis titles. On top of that, the graphics were barely adequate, the music sounded like a drunk guy playing a keyboard for the first time, and Sonic handled more like an actual hedgehog than his speedy self.
** The best thing you can say about ''[[Mortal Kombat 3|Mortal Kombat Trilogy]]'' is that it wasn't ''too'' much worse than the Game Boy version of ''Mortal Kombat 3''. There were more characters and the graphics were slightly more detailed, but the game was a total jerkfest, making it even more annoying to play.
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=== Microsoft Windows ===
* ''[[Resident Evil 4]]'' on the PC is a particularly hated example of this. The game was supposed to tout [[Game Cube]]-quality graphics with the Playstation 2 content, something that wouldn't happen until the Wii version. Instead, SourceNext (whom Capcom commissioned to develop the PC version, along with the PC ports of ''[[Onimusha]] 3'' and ''[[Devil May Cry]] 3'') ported the [[PlayStation 2]] version of the game as it was, with grainy pre-rendered cutscenes and all, but without the shading and lighting, meaning every environment in the game was lit at 100% brightness with no shadows, thus no atmosphere, and had to have that patched. The game's controls were gimped to boot, to the point where the game could be played on a keyboard and ''only'' the keyboard, without mouselook like most PC shooters, and on top of all that, the quick-time events were near-impossible to complete if you weren't using a gamepad
* ''[[Guitar Hero]] III'' for PC. Touted to be playable on laptops, for the first ''Guitar Hero'' portable experience (until the DS version). Too bad that on some computers the game chugs down to unplayable speeds, apparently unrelated to the computer's specs. The [[Copy Protection]] seems to at least be co-responsible, too. And that's why ''[[wikipedia:Frets on Fire|Frets on Fire]]'' exists.
* The PC version of ''[[Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty|Metal Gear Solid 2:]] [[Updated Rerelease|Substance]]'' (ported from the Xbox version, making it a port of a port) would have been better had it actually been compatible with anything. To play it, it needs to be patched to Hell and back. With ''fanmade patches''.
** It's worth remembering that the Xbox is
*** Then there
* The PC port of ''[[Gears of War]]'' had one horrible, horrible flaw. Occasionally, your saved games would disappear, never to be seen again.
** And then, Epic forgot to renew the certificate on the game's copy protection, leading everyone's copy to declare that the game was pirated and refuse to boot on January 28, 2009. This was fixed just over a week later, on February 6. [[Sarcasm Mode|Talk about prompt!]]
* ''[[Bully (video game)|Bully]]: Scholarship Edition'' for the PC looks like something the [[Warhammer 40,000|Orks]] dropped out of the sky, The outside areas are 100% washed out, the graphics, while sublime, glitch often, the sounds glitch horribly, the control scheme is god-awful (particularly when the player is told to "press <mousewheel up> and <mousewheel down> together") and the mouse control is like moving a joystick stuck in cold porridge.
* The PC port of ''[[Saints Row]] 2'' performs badly even with a good enough computer to play decent PC games. Changing resolution into the lowest 640x480 didn't help with the frustratingly
** Thankfully ''Saints Row 2'' has a fantastic community that has not only brought the game back to its intended speed but added plenty of neat content. [https://web.archive.org/web/20131027164904/http://idolninja.com/ You can check it out here]
* The PC port of the ''[[Iron Man]]'' [[The Problem with Licensed Games|game of the film]] had graphics from the [[PlayStation 2]] version rather than the superior Xbox 360 or [[Play Station 3]] ones, just for starters.
* The PC port of Prototype is very picky about what qualifies as "recommended system specifications". This troper has a PC that can play Portal 2, Mass Effect 3 and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood with little trouble. Prototype struggles with maintaining a double
* In contrast to the excellent porting job of ''[[Halo]] 1'' done by Gearbox Software, the porting job of ''Halo 2'' by Microsoft Games Studios was damn poor. Many keys couldn't be bound to commands because they were pre-reserved by Games For Windows Live functionality (almost a big "screw you" to all non-WASD keymap users), and network connectivity was patchy (another big thank-you to Games For Windows Live). Worst of all, the game could only be played on Windows Vista. There is ''nothing'' in the game code that requires Vista to run; there's just a small line in the installer that prevents people from installing and running the game on XP. Way to whore, Microsoft. Thankfully, it doesn't seem like they've pulled this crap with any of their later GFWL releases.
** To compound the issue, the Halo 2 Editing Kit was extremely gimped. The ability to modify vehicles, weapons
** ''Shadowrun'' for the PC also required Windows Vista, and again only checked a single line of code. Especially egregious as the game was released prior to Vista Service Pack 1, when the OS was still ridiculously buggy and ''expensive'', and was multiplayer-only.
* Sadly, Ubisoft's new [[Copy Protection]] has officially made things worse with the PC versions of ''[[Splinter Cell
** In addition to the above, the copy protection is extremely clunky; users who legitimately bought AC2 and then used the crack to get rid of it anyway consistently report that the game runs ''exponentially'' better, going from a chugging slideshow at low or medium detail settings to completely smooth while maxed out and running at 1080p. Those who simply pirated the game get a product that is not only less annoying but actually ''works better'' than those who paid for it.
* Just like the aforementioned Ubisoft games, ''[[From Dust]]'' shipped with the same maligned DRM scheme, even after the developers had previously announced that it wouldn't, deleting and rephrasing their original announcement on the game's own forum. Coupled with minimal visual options (no choice for anti-aliasing or any way to disable the 30-frames-per-second limit on the display) and some baffling performance issues and [[Game Breaking Bug]]s (one level is very nearly [[Unwinnable By Mistake|unwinnable]] because the tides change much faster than on the console version), the PC release was a public relations disaster for Ubisoft, with Steam giving out refunds to disgruntled players for the first time since ''[[Grand Theft Auto IV]]''.
* Speaking of ''Conviction'', on top of DRM woes, the PC port was maligned for having very poor multicore optimization, making it impossible to run at a straight 60 FPS even on a ''modern'' system.
* The PC version of ''Sonic Mega Collection Plus'', the [[Compilation Rerelease]] of the [[Sega Genesis]] and [[Game Gear]] ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog]]'' games, has broken gamepad support (i.e., you can't even get past the menu selection). For a collection of games originally designed to be played with a console-type gamepad, this is a significant (and still unpatched) oversight.
* The PC port of ''Grandia II'' has cutscene encoding problems similar to the [[PlayStation 2]] version (needlessly-duplicated frames, creating the illusion of "hanging" attack cutscenes), badly downsampled and compressed cutscenes (resolution somewhere around 256x192 or similar, with countless artifacts) and on top of that requires an obscure codec to play them.
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** This is true of GameTap PC games in general. ''[[Civilization]] IV'' and the ''[[Sam and Max]]'' games suffer similar fates.
*** Early versions of ''Civ IV'' do this with or without GameTap unless you patch it.
** ''Silent Hill 2'' has other problems on the PC. On Radeon 9000 series graphic cards (which were the ones produced by ATI when the game was released and were very common), the flashlight doesn't work; turning it on means watching many textures disappear, making it ''harder'' to see. The solution could be downgrading to older drivers or adding some lines to a file dedicated to graphic devices, which are equivalent to a hack,
*** There was also the "skipping music" glitch, although there was a patch to fix this.
**** Which did not fix anything. Unpacking the patch exe reveals...exactly nothing. [[Shaped Like Itself|The entirety of the patch's size is its own exe.]]
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* ''[[Mass Effect]]'' was ported from the [[Xbox]] 360 to the PC. While there were actually gameplay improvements, rumor has it that the game was tested on one graphics card and one sound driver. The released game was exceptionally buggy, with sound effects and background music dropping out and it regularly crashing between the transitions of unskippable cutscenes (which were made unskippable because skipping them crashed the game!). It took over a year and a combination of game and driver patches before the game was stable.
* For a good while, the PC version of ''[[Grand Theft Auto IV]]'' was considered particularly infamous, not only thanks to noticable performance issues and a clumsy mouse-and-keyboard interface, but particularly because Rockstar decided to package the game with an extra piece of software known as the Rockstar Social Club, a utility created to handle the game's multiplayer connectivity, which in its original iteration would run on top of the game (along with SecuROM and Games For Windows Live) and nag you to log into it not only whenever you wanted to play, but on startup as well. The controls can't be changed (A feature that has been standard even in the DOS era). It was so bad that [[Steam]] gave out ''refunds''<ref>To clarify, Steam NEVER gives out refunds.</ref> to angry gamers. Since the game's launch in December 2008, many of the game's performance issues have now been ironed out, and Rockstar Social Club has been integrated into the game software itself...almost a year and a half after launch.
** Said performance issues still linger on to this day though, as even on a ridiculously powerful system with an RTX 3070 and a modern Core i7 or Ryzen 7, the game still suffers from massive frame rate dips to the mid-40s especially when traversing through the boroughs.
* The Windows version of ''[[Sonic CD]]'' wasn't one of these to begin with, but turned into a case of this over time. It was released when Windows 95 was the newest thing. And then, years down the road, Windows XP came out, rendering the game unrunnable without the use of a fan-made patch. The problem? The game was ''still being sold on store shelves'', in unpatched form, well after Windows XP was released. Oops.
** Ditto for ''[[Sonic R]]''. That port also dropped the transparency effects on the final tracks
* The long-awaited/delayed Windows version of ''[[Star Wars]]: [[The Force Unleashed]]'' was inexplicably over 30 gigabytes, and has very few options for scaling the game down. It runs fine on a fairly decent rig, but there are no options to tone down the graphics for older machines. The game isn't very well optimized, so while a decent computer will run it with few problems, a mid-range system will choke. In case you were wondering, the port was handled by Aspyr, who
** Not to mention that the keyboard+mouse controls are extremely clunky and cumbersome. Want to play with a gamepad? Well, it does support the 360 controller...''Only''.
* The PC port of ''[[Red Faction]]: Guerrilla'' would run far too fast on Windows 7 computers (which is quickly replacing Vista as the go-to Microsoft OS), forcing the player to use a third party hacking program to slow down the game's refresh rate. Furthermore, the game carries an infamous bug where Games for Windows Live informs the player that a patch is available and is mandatory for online gameplay (even if the game itself is already up to date). Every time without fail, should the player accept the patch download, the game's framerate is reduced to a crawl (in the MAIN MENU, mind you) and eventually freezes. Even Volition's release of a manual patch to fix this didn't work for many, making online multiplayer completely unplayable.
* The PC version of ''[[Final Fantasy VII]]'' had SEVERAL issues when it came out in 1998. The music was all converted into midi format (the most jarring result is that One Winged Angel doesn't have lyrics!), which sounds bad enough without a then top-of-the-line soundcard. The pre-rendered cutscenes - which didn't
* Even though Square ironed out most of the problems with the PC version of ''[[Final Fantasy VIII]]'', there is still one issue: the game does not work with video cards newer than a Radeon 9000 or
** Most of the problems are corrected with
** Both this and ''[[Final Fantasy VII]]'' above have a major aesthetic flaw; the CG-rendered backgrounds, very much a selling point of both games that have aged fairly well even today on the console versions, were not re-rendered for higher resolutions. They'll still 640 x 480 (at best) and on what would be a large monitor at the time of release, the backgrounds all looked extremely pixelated and lacking in detail. Playing these today on a monitor with a much higher native resolution will make the problem exponentially more pronounced.
* The PC version of ''[[Dead Rising|Dead Rising 2]]'' requires Games for Windows Live. Most Games for Windows Live titles run fine and players who don't care about GFWL see it as a minor annoyance. ''Dead Rising 2'', however, often has problems talking to the GFWL wrapper; it may not even realize its there, in which case, the most you can do is play the game ''without saves.''
** And very much like ''Blur'', you can't change the
* ''[[Call of Duty|Call of Duty: Black Ops]]'' is infamous for its disastrous PC launch. On release, a line in the servers' config file that hadn't been set properly caused ''every'' online game played to lag terribly. This was fixed after a few days, but the game still had some obvious problems with its renderer (not present in any of the previous current-gen titles that use the same engine) that cause ridiculous framerate drop when shadows are enabled and when sounds are played for the first time. Still, the game was much more playable, especially if you were willing to live without shadows. A few days after that patch, a second patch was released that was supposed to improve server browser functionality and fix several bugs with the browser. The patch did this...but also reintroduced all the problems the first patch fixed.
* The PC ports of ''[[Oddworld]]: Munch's Oddysee'' and ''Stranger's Wrath'' are horribly unoptimized for ports of five+-year-old [[Xbox]] games, to the point where people with competent gaming PCs (ones that can run ''[[Crysis (series)|Crysis]]'' smoothly at high graphic settings) regularly get less than 30 FPS - and the actual graphics are unchanged. ''Stranger's Wrath'' has no visual customization options apart from the resolution settings, ranging from "Low" to "Medium", to "High", and "Ultra", with the latter three being 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200 respectively. Both games also have
** ''Stranger's Wrath'' is now fixed as of the 1.1
* SEGA recently released a collection of 4 Dreamcast games for the PC, with updated graphics and widescreen support. ''Space Channel 5 Part 2'' looks gorgeous! But the gameplay and music sometimes (often) go out of synch (which can be fixed by turning on triple buffer and Vertical Sync in your graphic card's settings), making the game absolutely unplayable. ''Sonic Adventure'' looks okay, but it does not support widescreen even though it claims it does (instead you get a border on the left and right), it's lower resolution than the earlier SADX port from years ago, it has absolutely no aliasing, and it crashes. ''Crazy Taxi'' similarly has issues with the graphics. And all four games can't save your game without the user creating a few folders in their documents folder, which SEGA apparently forgot to tell the game's installers to do for you. SEGA has not released any fixes whatsoever.
* ''[[Star Trek Legacy]]'' must have literally been copy/pasted onto a DVD and shipped for PC. Even with a good graphics card, the game lags badly on the lowest settings even on the ''menu screen''. None of the controls can be remapped, in fact, there isn't even an ingame guide to the controls. This is horrible because the default control set up forces an [[Egregious]] use of the mouse in situations where buttons should be (And in the 360 version, were) used.
* Valve has had a few issues porting No Mercy from ''[[Left 4 Dead]]'' into ''Left 4 Dead 2''. The 3rd map in the No Mercy campaign has a shutter door that can be opened only from the inside of the building so that any survivors that managed to get yanked outside can go through the door without having to climb up to the rooftop again. While a Tank can bust the door down, survivors were able to do the same thing with melee weapons, allowing them to bypass the crescendo event. It still took Valve several patches to fully squash the problem, but the Grenade Launcher can still destroy the door. Thankfully, this is not a problem in VS mode since survivors can't carry over weapons from the previous map and the Grenade Launcher never spawns before the event.
** The elevator from the fourth map regularly causes players to fall through the floor randomly (can mostly happen if a player goes idle) even today despite several attempts by Valve to fix it. Considering that everything in the first game got fixed very quickly or was not even present, that looks rather pathetic.
** There
*** Originally, The Sacrifice DLC was only going to be for the original Left 4 Dead, but Valve decided at the last minute to give the DLC to Left 4 Dead 2 players as well with No Mercy as a bonus. This caused the porting to be rushed out with almost zero bug testing.
*** In one of the updates, Zoey (and apparently only Zoey) regained her original animations - and lost ALL of her animations she uses in The Passing as an NPC.
*** Valve has at least attempted to remedy the survivor dialogue issues regarding Left 4 Dead 2 content such as being attacked by the new special infected and when they use adrenaline shots.
** There
** As part of the Cold Stream DLC, Valve planned to release all of the Left 4 Dead campaigns into Left 4 Dead 2. Like with No Mercy, the campaigns had numerous issues when they were released to the PC gaming public as a beta. Nearly all the maps had item density problems, which meant that instead of items spawning randomly by the AI Director, the game wound up spawning items at every single spot that they could appear in. This was fixed over time.
* [[DC Universe Online]] has but one egregious issue with the Windows version of the game: If you're planning to play the game with a gamepad, you'd better have an [[Xbox]] 360 controller. Have anything else (like one of those cheap USB DualShock 2-controller lookalikes or even a [[PlayStation 2]]-to-USB controller adapter)? You may find that the camera is stuck looking up, due to the fact that the right nub is handled differently from [[Xbox]] 360 controllers on these controllers. No thanks to the fact that the game does not provide a way to remap controller buttons and axes.
** You can still work around that problem with a 360 controller emulator, although since this is an online game it might be seen as a cheating tool.
** And this was also the case with numerous other games, too, as they now make use of the Xinput API. Especially the ones released alongside the Xbox 360 versions.
* PC port for [[Silent Hill Homecoming]]. Boy, where do we start? How about the random crashing? A lot worse when it will always happen if you simply want to change the resolution. Want to play it with a gamepad? Good luck because like the eponymous [[Silent Hill]], it has a mind of
* Like ''Sonic CD'' above, the Windows 95 port of ''[[Doom (series)|Doom]]'' became this over time - Windows 2000 and later do not allow the game mouse support, as the game communicates with the mouse through a file type (.vxd) which those systems do not support, as Windows 98 and later introduced the Windows Driver Model as a framework for future device drivers. For that matter, Doom95 won't launch ''at all'' in Windows Vista or 7. While the latter issue is very easy to fix, the mouse issue requires a fan-made patch which, likely due to the existence of source ports like ZDoom, was not created until 2010.
* The PC port of ''[[Dark Sector]]'' was actually a fan-made port that got adopted by the publisher and sold for cash on Steam. It definitely shows. The graphics are usually off if you run the game in widescreen or on anything other than the default resolution, and if you use custom key bindings the
* Big Huge Games is known primarily for two [[Real Time Strategy]] titles, ''[[Rise of Nations]]'' and ''[[Rise of Legends]]''. Curiously, their next big game, ''[[Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning]]'', was clearly designed exclusively for gamepad controls, because using your mouse to move the camera around your character causes the game to cut frames in an eye-gouging, almost epileptic manner. There is no known fix to an oversight that renders the game almost unplayable. (Weirdly enough, the game is programmed to support gamepad and mouse/keyboard ''simultaneously'', as [[Day Nine]] and [[Felicia Day]] discovered in [https://web.archive.org/web/20131025214204/http://blip.tv/day9tv/kingdoms-of-amalur-reckoning-w-guest-felicia-day-part-1-5941735 their] [[Let's Play]] promotional video.)
* While it's too early to decide, the highly anticipated port of ''[[Dark Souls]]'' for the PC (to be released August 24, 2012) [http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/04/17/dark-souls-pc-prepare-to-sigh/ may end up one of these ''by design'' due to being barely adapted]. When the publisher flat out asks you to buy a gamepad and tells no changes will be made to the graphics (which suffered from poor optimization even on the original console), things don't look well indeed. Critics already predict bad sales which will end up blamed on piracy and From Software not making another PC port ever again.
* The Windows ports of the first two ''Splinter Cell'' games eventually became this over time. They were straight ports of the original Xbox releases, carrying over a form of shadow mapping specific to GeForce 3 and variants such as the NV2A used by the Xbox. This however locked players with ATI cards out of the two games, though the original game did have a fallback mode for those who don't use an Nvidia GPU. The real issue came when later Nvidia cards broke support for the "shadow buffers" feature, making it nearly impossible to play ''Pandora Tomorrow'' as shadows are an integral part of ''Splinter Cell''{{'}}s gameplay. There is however a fan-made patch to fix said issues though.
=== Macintosh ===
* 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 to the point of unplayability, left off the official tools that PC users got, and exhibited behaviors that you would only get if you had a plug-in conflict. In fact, for owners of Intel-based Macs, running the Windows version via a compatibility layer such as Wine or Crossover Games is preferable in every way.
* Feral Interactive's port of ''[[Mafia II]]'' was just as disastrous as the [[Play Station 3]] version, not because of the lack of grass and blood, but because it was ill-
=== Amiga ===
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* ''[[Need for Speed]] Hot Pursuit 2'' on the Xbox, PC, and GameCube was a completely different game designed by a different development house to the PlayStation 2 version. While there are some track similarities, the sense of speed is all but gone, the handling is worse, and the game in general is far more boring.
* The 2016 [[PS4]] and [[Xbox One]] releases of ''Lichdom: Battlemage'', running on [[wikipedia:CryEngine|CryEngine 3]], have horribly sluggish frame rates, never going above 20fps and usually dipping into the 10s. Compare that with the PC version which runs just fine with 60fps. [[Loads and Loads of Loading|Loading times are insanely long]] for an eight-generation game. For example, it takes more than two minutes of waiting before a character selection screen pops up, with textures ''not fully loaded''. The Xbox One version gets the short end of the stick, with darkened brightness and lots of vertical tearing, but [[Damned By Faint Praise|at least]] it's [[Overly Narrow Superlative|the first game with its engine on Xbox One to run at 1080p]]. ''At least...'' DigitalFoundry deemed the ports as having [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6JXeX9sYYE the worst frame rate they have ever tested] in their eight years of existence.
* As if ''Lichdom: Battlemage'' wasn't egregious enough, the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions of the highly-anticipated open-world RPG ''[[Cyberpunk 2077]]'', whose PC version already called for hefty system requirements to run at full details and had a litany of bugs, was ridiculed both by the gaming press and players for having ludicrously low frame rates, and if that wasn't enough, the console versions crash at random as well. Adding insult to injury was that of CD Projekt RED's strict review embargo which forbade journalists from using their own footage to present reviews of the game, not to mention that said reviews focused more on the PC version, presumably in an attempt to shove the last-gen console versions' teething issues under the rug. Many fans have wondered as to why CDPR simply didn't cancel the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game and make them a PC and ninth-gen exclusive, even if that meant having a far narrower player base who haven't upgraded yet (especially due to hardware shortages and the state of the economy brought on by the [[COVID-19 pandemic]]).
=== Handhelds ===
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** The game supports a pathetically-low selection of resolutions, not even including full HD or 16:10 resolutions. This is remedied by editing the game's .INI file. Ubisoft's entire team of programmers apparently couldn't figure this out.
*** Some allege that the PC version is prohibited from maximum graphical detail to make the 360 version appear better, as editing the INI files can also result in improved graphics. Until a patch, it was not even possible to enable anti-aliasing (mind you, that's ''all'' that patch did).
** The "Kinshasa, Part 2" mission is almost guaranteed to crash every time you load a saved game. So ''you'd better be good at it.''
** The game would even freeze for no evident reason when viewing some of the training videos for the Versus multiplayer.
* The first two ''[[Splinter Cell]]'' games [[Technology Marches On|eventually]] became this, as the first game and ''Pandora Tomorrow'' were direct ports of the original Xbox releases, supporting a form of shadow mapping called "shadow buffers", first supported on the GeForce 3 and the NV2A GPU used on the console. Shadow buffers were later deprecated (and in the case of ATI, were never supported at all), leading to the game being nigh unplayable as lights and shadows–which are a crucial part of ''Splinter Cell''{{'}}s gameplay–are missing on ATI graphics cards and later Nvidia hardware. The first game does have a fallback mode for ATI/AMD hardware and later Nvidia cards, but ''Pandora Tomorrow'' only supported shadow buffers, which accounts for why ''Pandora'' is to this day unavailable through digital distribution. There is however a [http://www.jiri-dvorak.cz/scellpt/ fix] for both games, fortunately.
* ''[[The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim]]'' for the PC isn't technically a port, but it's obvious that it was designed for consoles first (a trend that started with [[The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion|Oblivion]], which also had some odd porting decisions.) The developers apparently never considered that players might want to actually use their mouse, so most of the menus are operated using only the keyboard. Many of the multifunction keys either partially fail or stop working completely if you attempt to remap them, and the UI does not update to reflect the fact that you've changed them!
* Despite being a simultaneous release rather than a port, ''[[Crysis (series)|Crysis]] 2'' certainly counts. True, despite being greeted with a mix of legitimate rage over gamebreaking bugs and just plain [[Fan Dumb]], it was a fairly well-made game. The multi-player, however, was horribly broken. Crytek essentially put in ''no anti-cheating measures whatsoever'', to the point that players can simply edit their game data files to give themselves infinite nanosuit energy or bullets that do 100000 damage per shot. On top of the fact that the initial demo release of the game lacked any support for fine-grain adjustment of graphics settings.
* Also being simultaneous releases rather than ports, [[Obsidian Entertainment|ObsidianEntertainment's]] [[Dungeon Siege|Dungeon Siege III]] and [[BioWare|BioWare's]] [[Dragon Age II]] are considered by many to count for some of the same reasons:
** Broken gameplay mechanics that don't bother to hide the fact that games were developed for consoles.
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** Pacing and level design fitted to meet hardware requirements of consoles as well as functionality of the controllers.
* After being delayed for well over an ''entire month'', the PC version of ''[[Batman: Arkham City]]'' has ridiculously unoptimized graphical settings, forces Direct X 11 despite its infamous bugginess, contains crippling DRM and sometimes has problems with connecting to GFWL for absolutely no reason.
* The PC release of ''[[Tangled: The Video Game]]'' was left with a half-assed co-op mode where for some strange reason, ''only the second player'' can use a controller while player one is forced to make do with a keyboard. Pity the poor little girl whose dexterity is not that refined enough to play as Rapunzel using the WASD keyboard control scheme (you can, however, adjust the default keyboard mapping, though), as what Steam reviews from disgruntled parents can attest. Apparently, the porting house responsible for the Windows conversion forgot to note that the game's target audience is ''small children'', not ''first-person shooter players.'' And to add insult to injury, the Windows release was left unpatched at 1.0, effectively abandoning it soon after release. Sure, it is a movie tie-in game for kids, but they shouldn't have released it on Steam at all if they left it at such a sorry state. Though if there is any consolation, a rudimentary online co-op mode is available on the Steam release of the game via Steam Remote Play Together, and best of all, it doesn't require the second player to own a copy of the game, either.
* ''[[Cars 2]]'' and ''[[Toy Story 3]]'' for Windows were based on the cut-down ports of their respective Wii versions, as opposed to the similar but arguably superior Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 releases. A number of levels and cutscenes were omitted, and that's even when a low-end family computer could shrug off those removed levels at low settings anyway.
* ''[[Redout: Space Assault]]'' ran fine as a mobile Apple game. When ported to PC, they neglected to scale it to match the different hardware available on PC. As a result, due to poor to non-existent FPS limiting, it can overstress even computers it's more than optimal for because it lacks a governor on how much FPS it can feasibly render, so it tries to burn your GPU alive pushing it out the ceiling. Unless you set your GPU to give it a hard limit of 60 FPS to override this, you can fry your PC this way.
* ''[[Resident Evil Village]]'', while praised for its gameplay, setting, and variety, was nevertheless criticised for its downright terrible performance on the Windows version, as the game suffers from stuttering and frame rate dips even on systems that exceed the recommended hardware requirements. This would eventually be blamed on both Denuvo—itself already reviled by critics as an excessively draconian form of DRM—and on what appears to be a botched implementation of Capcom's own anti-tamper mechanism in an attempt to further deter pirates. Adding insult to injury was that a cracked release of the game by an independent cracker who goes by the alias EMPRESS ran far better than the original version, as shown by [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXZGCwAJpbM Digital Foundry] and YouTuber [https://www.dsogaming.com/news/resident-evil-village-crack-completely-fixes-its-stuttering-issues/ Modern Vintage Gamer].
* The Windows version of ''[[Disney Princess: My Fairytale Adventure]]'' was merely a straight Wii port and fixed to run at 720p with no graphics or display mode options. Running it at anything higher than 720p results in the game being crudely upscaled with noticeable pixelation.
* ''[[Disney Princess: Enchanted Journey]]'' for Windows notably lacks controller and local co-op support, and it didn't help that the instruction manual provided for the game on Steam is for the PlayStation 2 release, with instructions specific to said console which would not obviously apply to the Windows version. It also lacks vsync support, causing higher-end computers to run the game at four-digit framerates! It is generally advisable to force vsync on the game via the graphics driver's control panel to prevent unnecessary strain on the GPU.
{{reflist}}
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