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When PC Ports of Console Games Go Wrong
A post up at Gamasutra complains about the lack of effort put into the PC ports of some console games. The author picks on the unimpressively-reviewed Ninja Blade in particular: "Just as a quick guide to what we're dealing with here: when you create a new save file at the start of Ninja Blade on the PC, it warns you not to 'turn off your console.' Yes, Ninja Blade is one of those conversions: not so much converted as made to perfunctorily run on a different machine. In-game, you're asked to press A, B, X and Y in various sequences as part of Ninja Blade's extraordinary abundance of quick-time events. Whether you have an Xbox 360 pad plugged in or not, the game captions these button icons with text describing the PC equivalent controls. Only it doesn't always do that. Sometimes, you're left staring at a giant, pulsating, green letter A, and no idea what to do with it." What awful ports have you had the misfortune to experience?
I'll never forget the just plain awful translations in Final Fantasy Tactics -- an otherwise excellent game. When the same spell name gets translated in different ways depending on which screen you're on ("Summon Lich" vs. "Summon Rich" -- yeah, awesome Engrish there ;) ), you've got QA problems.
Did you really name your son "Robert');DROP TABLE Students;--"?
The new Prince of Persia reboot ensured that I won't buy a PC game from Ubisoft ever again. It suffered from the same "Let's fill the UI with references to console-controller buttons" issue.
Please die.
Please show me a single port of console game to pc, which didn't show these problems.... in over 20 years i believe its less than half a dozen
Even quite successful series like gta suffer from these mistakes
Thankfully user tweak guides fixed most of it, and then a later patch cleaned up a bit. Still pretty ordinary effort though for supposedly "release quality".
Mostly UI issues as people suggested, and bad mouse smoothing.
... on PC requires a "crysis ready" machine.
Will not run properly on a P4 2.8 + Radeon X1950 pro, runs ok on a C2D + radeon 47something.
No way to turn off the background animations, menu navigation is extremely slow, the game seems to be a console version running in a console emulator...
No surprise people are turning to Fofix.
Hmm, let's see. USB is a bit of a turd sometimes...
*ducks*
Proud member of the Ferengi Socialist Party.
The PC port of Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance was not bad, it was horrible!
You had to map the keyboard/mouse/joystick to the Playstation 2 buttons via a config tool. I also never got the graphics to display correctly.
When Gears of War's PC port was first released, it was:
1) buggy
2) crashy
3) released A YEAR LATER than the xbox version
The crashy part was fixed, iirc about 2 months after release by a patch.
As you can imagine, the sales for this port were a little slow. Video game companies being video game companies chalked this up to piracy. To them the fact that the game was a shitty port released a full year after the original with dated graphics and all couldn't have POSSIBLY been a reason.
When time comes around to release Gears of War 2 - cliffyB says there's no plans for a port because the first one was just pirated too much...
*.sig
The fact that it would crash at the required Golden Saucer chocobo race in windows newer than 98. Also the fact that Eidos didnt give a rats ass to provide a patch for it.
Im a troll because I disagree with you.
Seriously, just about any damned game in the past 2 years has been pure nigh-on crap. GTA4 would have been great, if you could have played offline without having to worry about crashing all the time, and then not having to sign into 3, yes 3 different services. Bully didn't even run on PC (at least for most people it just crashed, usually after the first cutscene (great QC there...!), Shawn White snowboarding had the similar press x a b y issues as the OP and Modern Warfare 2, oh good christ, no console, no way to type to other people while sitting in lobby, no dedicated servers, absolute fail. Its a wonder anyone makes a decent PC game anymore, the companies involved are more worried about someone pirating the damned things than making them good enough to pirate....
So, you are driwing down the highway and want to change lanes. Press left, make a perfect 90 degree turn and go head first into the concrete. Every. Single. Time.
Nobody can do everything, but everybody can do nothing.
Quick! Press X to not die! D:
You win.
I think the worst example has to be Ghostbusters. The console versions are fairly good and somewhat quirky, if ultimately flawed, third person shooters. The PC version is actually broken. As in, it can't even reasonably be described as "working". If you want to install to a drive other than c:\ you're out of luck. If you have anything other than "generic Windows sound card" drivers installed, you won't be hearing any voices in-game. And some of the early fights are essentially unbeatable without cheating, due to collision detection and clipping issues. Oh, and it does the whole "console controller analogues" thing.
There are plenty of other awful examples. The Prince of Persia reboots have been mentioned (justly so) and I think the more recent installments in the Tomb Raider franchise also deserve a mention. Last Remnant is another good example; Square-Enix titles have never been particularly kindly treated on the PC anyway. Fire one of these up on even a top end PC with an Xbox controller plugged in and it's still very much apparent that you're playing the "second best" version of the game.
That said, there are plenty of decent ports out there. While I know others disagreed, Fallout 3 felt pretty good to me on the PC. Mass Effect 2 likewise feels as though they've spent a lot of time optimising the PC version so that it feels at home on the platform. In fact, there are even a few cases where it is the console version that feels like a nasty port. Pretty much any RTS that makes it onto the consoles can be chalked up in that category. The recent AvP game looks and feels far better on the PC than on the consoles; the Predator is an over-complicated nightmare to control on any platform, but the PC version does work out somewhat less toxic.
Most games I can think of that got ported from console to PC, suffers from a lot of issues.
They all have one or more in common:
- Lack of configuration
- Extremely high hardware requirements
- Bad mouse control (acceleration, non-configurable sensitivity etc) Example: Mass Effect 2 got THREE settings for mouse. And it's STILL very high on Low.
- Low FOV
- Difficulty setting too low for PC (it's easier when you actually have a mouse to aim with in FPS)
But these issues are usually something that can get patched eventually.
The most annoying thing about ports is this:
They usually make a direct port of the game. What works on console, DOES NOT ALWAYS WORK ON PC!
On PC, I got an entire keyboard of keys. Allow me to freaking bind actions to em, don't give me 3 "command wheels" or whatever.
Don't make me "tap" a button to perform a action. Who thought of that?
I can go on with numerous game design issues, but I think everyone gets my points here.
When porting a game to PC, there are certain elements you just have to redesign.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
I've played many a shitty console-to-PC port, but every once in a while there is a great PC game that gets ruined when it comes to the console version.
Worms was always one of my favorite games and I still play it regularly. I was really looking forward to playing the Wii version when I heard about it, but I was severely disappointed.
Roller Coaster Tycoon is another example of this.
Prototype is a fun game -- it's got a story line, but you can free-roam and do missions like the Grand Theft Auto series (but with superpowers instead of cars).
But... It's obviously a console port.
Most of your actions are based on combos that would be fine with a gamepad, but it kind of breaks down with a keyboard and mouse. I always find myself doing the wrong action because it's hard to chord the correct command for what you want.
The mouse is a really effective way to control things -- except with this game. You can move around and target something the mouse, but it's pretty ineffective. It works much better if you do the console method. You hit the "target" button to select an enemy to target, then all your attacks go there without you having to aim.
You know, it really is a fun game, but you can't forget it was designed for a console first, and a lot of the PC power is lost.
Hey, at least the game that you SHOULD play on a PC is dramatically better. And you still get Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 coming out primarily for PC. Before you discount these they are all major titles from two different publishers. Since I've been playing a lot of Borderlands I'm going to say its a good if not 100% ideal port as well. PC is definitely the way to play that game.
The OP seems unnecessary... you're really mostly dealing with shitty Tom Clancy ports and those have all been shitty games for a while.
I remember playing Megaman X for PC and I was pretty impressed with how well adapted it was to the keyboard. It did away with the whole 16-digit code system of "saving," and in lieu there were actual saved games. Controls were pretty easily changeable (though I used the same setup I do for SNES emus that I normally use. That being said, I've played a couple of the latter PC ports of MMX series and they were ok, though not much different from the original. So I guess I would say that Capcom had the dualism down pat.
Okay, check out the SupCom2 (Supreme Commander 2) game. The SupCom itself was great and its addon (standalone) added lots of new features.
But on SupCom2 developers were just thrilled how easy they made the game to play. How they added new tactics and new units.And same time they announced the SupCom2 will come for 3rd generation game consoles as well...
You say what? a RTS game to consoles? Not everyone own a keyboard+mouse but everyone owns a gamepad.
Just check out the just released SupCom2 demo and you can notice only one thing, the game sucks. Smaller, Faster, SImpler and lots of simpler strategies. Now it is more like point and click game than a stratetic game.
When you do games, DO NOT MAKE THEM FROM SIMPLER DEVICES FIRST! (= consoles). Make the game first for the PC platform (and make it available for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX) with all the glory and playability. THEN AFTER THAT, make the slim version of the game to game consoles, with dimmed down controls and blocked areas. You could even rip off all the functionality from the game and you could even then pleasure for both gamers groups, advanced, skilled and smart players. And then those who just want to sit down on coach 2 meters (6 feet) away from screen pushing those 10 buttons just for relaxing.
... had awful console-type controls. Game was probably good, but I quit and deleted it after about ten minutes because the controls were completely illogical to a PC-gamer.
They were essentially gamepad-controls that had been reassigned to keyboard keys. They made no sense to a pc-gamer used to a certain de-facto standard of controls.
It also had (as I recall) the typical you-can-only-save-when-we-say-so console conversion issues, as well as the wonderful "please don't turn off your console" while saving.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Interface. Nuff said.
Starting out with more bugs than a jungle, and the only patches available being on gamecopyworld.com
And then having up to 3 seconds of input lag (time between pressing a key, and the car reacting).
But only when you saw how crappy the graphics were, and how the game was slow like a dog, did you know that it was a console port.
The graphics card was irrelevant. The only thing that counter, was if you had more than 2 cores.
Because apparently, they implemented the PS3 vector processors in the CPU, instead of the vastly more powerful graphics cards.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
In the PC port of Resident Evil 3, you actually have to use the arrow keys to aim in this third-person shooter. I'm fairly sure you can't change the resolution or any of the rendering settings, either. I made sure to throw it away separately from my other trash and filth for fear of corrupting my normal household refuse.
Its a great console port, once you get past: a) They'll pick the server you play on, too bad if the server is 200ms away from you b) If the server decides they've had enough then you'll sit there whilst it "migrates" you to a new host. Fingers crossed the migration doesn't "fail" c) In game console? Don't need that, most gaming consoles don't have keyboards. d) Dedicated servers? Pfft e) Community generated content? Only if they can turn it into paid DLC.
It was on sale, and I thought it would be a cute little gardening sim for the spousal unit who loves her Sims.
Now I realize I had a POS graphics board, but it ran Civ III acceptably well, though Civ IV was slightly laggish, but hey...gardening sim. How many textures does it need to map, anyway? And besides, this a genre whose target audience is even happy with ASCII text ( http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ ).
It ran like it was being run in a 360 emulator running on a C64.
A gamepad works great for fighting games, and the standard fixed perspective jump 'n run platform games. But it is really terrible for games where you actually have to aim. It annoys the hell out of me that I can't get the camera where I want with games like Uncharted and Brutal Legend (don't own that many console games). Gamedevs often try to be clear and compensate for this horrible input method. These clever tricks of course should be removed ASAP for the PC version, because there you have a good device for moving the camera and aiming, i.e. the mouse.
Camera control is still a major problem on consoles, the often doesn't behave as you want it to. That with multiplaform release there are also bringing this problem to the PC. For example, quite often in Mass Effect 2 (which has good controls on the PC, but an annoying UI) the main character doesn't pop up after taking cover. Suddenly the camera is on the right of the character, being blocked by the a bit of scenery (which you used for cover). As a result, you can no longer see the enemy.
As a games developer, its really pisses me off too.
Thing is the word "port" is a misnomer. Since in development dev kits are rare and expensive so only the more senior guys get them or you have to share.
This means there is (and must) always a working PC build on the go. Yep, all console games start life as PC games, you don't code directly on the console, your in Visual studio. Also a lot of the testing is done on PC as its a hell of a lot easier to debug and for large periods of devlopment your console builds might not even be working. For instance on our AAA title the Playstation 3 build spends half of its time utterly dead. (Fyi the Playstation 3 is a terrible console and is actually less powerful than a 360, the graphics power is especially poor)
So there's no excuse for putting out a bad PC release, its just lazyness. or more likely bad producers and their corporate overlords dailing to listen to the concerns of the designers and pushing out a shoddy product.
One fo the problems also is when the art is created for the console. Art in a decent environment should be compiled together choosing correct sizes, resolutions, compressions for the platform. This often isnt done. This means that a texture that looks nice and crisp on the console will look utter pants on the pc at 1920*1080 as it will be having to upscale the mips.
What should be done is that each platform should have people responsable for it at each step of its production. That would ensure you don't end up with terrabad "ports". Try pitching that to management tho. :(
-Anon because I don't want to be fired. :D
Despite their hard effort (or lack thereof) to make the game piss off PC owners as much as possible, the game was still awesome.
- FOV settings, the fov is related to the distance to the viewer. On a PC, people is near the screen, so the FOV sould be higuer, is just a number, but even 90 million dollars videogames forget to change it on the PC. Out of lazyness, is not modified. (note: It may need to recompile some maps, and edit some weapons a littel). .NET, Windows Games For Live, etc.
- Stupid messages "Don't shutdown the machine"
- Savepoints, but thats parts of the mechanic, and can't be fixed
- Autoaim, thats helps pad users, because you can't properly walk and aim on a pad (seems) so need autoaim. With a mouse, you don't need autoaim. Out of lazyness, is not deactivated.
- HORRIBLE server browsers or lack of server browser. Idiot-box with a single button. Lack of dedicated servers. A whole horrible bad network experience, with not community sense and not respect to the PC values of freedom and user control of the experience.
- The game greets you with a "Press ENTER". This is a arcade saloon artifact from 1982. It has not reason at all on a PC.
- Use of bloated middleware.
- Unoptimized code. Code written for the console, that runs poorly on the pc.
- Smallish maps. Since the consoles are serius ram limits (like 512 MB or less) some maps are really small, and you see lots of "load screens". On the PC proper games use streaming to have not load screens, or the maps are giganteous large.
- Quick Time Events. These things work ok with a pad, on a keyboard are something like a "learn where the A and B key are on your keyboard" minigames. Don't work at all on the PC.
- Weird resolutions. If your game don't support 1280x1024, your game is shit, cause this is a normal (low) resoultion for lots of LCD. This force people to use lower resolutions that looko blurry, and with enormo pixels.
- Lack of configuration options. The console people like FEW options, the PC people like MORE options. Add a FOV setting, and autoaim settings, a resolution setting, a bloom setting.
- Use of the UNREAL engine. This engine don't support things like AA, so you have to force AA on the driver, but it don't work on some engines. Games like Borderlands suffer of this. Unreal could be a decent engine for consoles, but is BAD for the PC, because is optimized for the consoles.
I could continue, but I am wasting my time here. since most of these problems are out of lazyness. Disabling autoaim sould take a well managed company only 1 hour of time, If people don't know you have do disable autoaim for the PC, what the hell are you doing near a "conversion to PC" proyect?
-Woof woof woof!
Gaming on consoles is horrid and have ruined the PC-gaming market ever since.
All you console faggots should get noma.
I've found that most games that play on both a console and PC/Mac suffer when your playing them on anything but a console. It's simply that when designing a game that is going to be run on the console at all your much better off playing to that lower common denominator than the other way around. Or to put it another way you will end up just having a massive kludge of a console game that was designed for the level of complexity that can be done on a real computer.
Even with the Mass Effect series which I have enjoyed I still think how much better the game would be had it been designed as a PC only title. But sadly that is not where the money is at.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
... here is a positive: Colin McRae's Dirt2: the game feels so polished on the PC that I'd think it was designed for it.
Another negative: NFS shift: there's no way to avoid watching the 10 second or so video clip at the start and re-start of every race if you don't press the 'A' button... which it seems cannot be mapped to the keyboard or to a button on a non-xbox controller... very annoying when trying and re-trying to get a race right.
Tip: With the pinnacle game profiler program and enough patience you can customize your controller to cover for the lack of attention the game developers put on the port to the PC.
The translations of the controls from console to keyboard for various Resident Evil games was awful, especially in recent releases. Many were unplayable unless you used cheats, because you couldn't control character motion well enough in combat scenes.
Onimusha 3 anybody?
Can't be forgetting that piss poor game. It was merely ok on the Xbox360 but the pc port was horribly done. Not as bad as others but more than bad enough!
Mass effect though, a great game but a bit of a crappy port. And OH! the bugs!!! And let's not forget the SDK. Hold on..what SDK?
With love
The Anonymous Coward.
Every time I see it, I curse both Ion Storm and Microsoft.
The 64Mb memory of Xbox lead to room-sized levels. I had a feeling that game designers were more concerned about advertising this console graphics (oh, look, we have shaders and are not afraid to use them), than actually making a decent game. The six-button controller crippled the interface. The teenager target group lead to oversimplified gameplay (same ammo for pistol and flamethrower, WTF?) and a stupid plot (virtual Britney Spears clone is remarkable).
And despite all that, it ran really slow on my PC, which had four times more RAM and a better videocard than this X-crap.
An post? Not the most mellifluous way to start off with a post to the /. crowd n'est ce-pas?
The new Prince of Persia reboot ensured that I won't buy a PC game from Ubisoft ever again. It suffered from the same "Let's fill the UI with references to console-controller buttons" issue.
I had the same problem if I started the game from a shortcut I created to the executable. If I used the launcher from the game disk, all the UI references to the console controls went away.
With respect to the port, I played it on both the PC and the PS3 and enjoyed the PC version since the graphics were very crisp compared to the console and I like the mouse/keyboard combo.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
What a let down.
Do you remember the "insert coin" messages in console games, back in the days?
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
For those unfamiliar, it's basically GTA but slightly more tongue-in-cheek, with a heavy emphasis on character customization, a la Def Jam: Fight for New York, or The Godfather. It's a blast to play. It's really one of my favorite games. Which makes it all the more bitter that THQ did such a crap-ass job of porting it.
I suspect that Ctrl and left-Shift are mapped as shoulder buttons, because that's how you scroll through the in-game menu, not with the arrow keys or the mouse. Despite having graphics that are really about five years behind the times, it chugs along at about 30 FPS (I run Crysis on highest settings at 1280 x 1024 at 60 FPS), dipping down to the 20s when there's a lot of drawing on screen. That's tolerable, except for the fact that a bug that only exists on the PC causes the frame rate to hover around 10 whenever you drive a car past a certain speed. No patch for this, of course.
You drive a lot during the game, like most GTA-style games, and you can't steer with the mouse. There are two radial menus, one mapped to an analog stick, and one mapped to the D-pad. The stick menu, for weapons, is also mapped to number keys. (Good port!) The D-pad menu, for health items, is bound to the arrow keys. (BAD PORT!) Consider that the time you most need to use health items is generally when one hand is holding the "run the hell away" button and the other hand is using the mouse to shoot or steer. These cannot be remapped to any other keys. Also, nothing can be mapped to mouse buttons other than the wheel or left-/right-click.
It's maddening, because all of these things tarnish what it otherwise a great game, and the control aspects at the very least could be fixed easily.
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
But just a few of the most common gripes:
Lionhead did a commendable job porting Fable, but in translating the controls to keyboard+mouse, they completely neglected joypads or any alternative input devices. The first thing we saw were customers downloading Joy2key just to adapt, which produces twitchy results and demonstrates that the devs clearly failed to test it against a real group of gamers because anybody could have pointed out that people would want to plug in a controller. (It's either this or the far scarier scenario where Lionhead apparently didn't realize you can even use peripherals on a PC.)
Sadly that's not the only game, while others have it the other way and fail to adapt decent keyboard+mouse controls. Still others like one of the Spiderman games wouldn't even accept my non Xbox controller as an input device, even though Windows and everything else registers it fine.
I see a lot of ports that fail to take advantage of the basic hardware superiority of a PC, right down to increased screen resolution, or even wide screen displays. Sadly some native PC games are even guilty of this (I think Doom 3 and/or Quake 4 were in this group)
Many more fail to appreciate the fact that while one-size-fits-all may be the creed of the console companies and their audience, PC gamers are accustomed to settings and expect the freedom to tweak for performance. We're not simpletons that need tech support to plug A/V cables into a TV, and would-be port developers need to recognize this by adding the full list of options for shadow detail, texture resolution, etc. if for no other reason than because that's what the other PC games offer and your product will look half-assed and inferior by comparison. And may your gods help you if you don't fully support keyboard configuration, and I get stuck using some WASD, RDFG, or whatever scheme with no recourse to change it.
The top complaint should be the steep system requirements, which often make the clearest indication that studios and their developers aren't even _trying_ to produce a decent port. We understand that you can't directly convert the specs of an Xbox 360 to PC as if they were sporting the same architecture and there is no overhead from the OS and other running tasks. But when a game runs fine on the limited hardware of a console, yet states ten times the system memory, GPU memory, etc as the minimal PC requirements and you still get framerate issues it makes one wonder if they bothered to optimize any of it.
Another issue is support, because I see too many games released, followed by the predictable fan response on official forums about bugs and errors, and months later no patch has ever surfaced. Some games are known for having to rely on third party unofficial patches, or even developers personally releasing their own fixes independent of the company. If you want the respect (and positive reviews and money) of the PC community, then you need to expect to stand behind your product. Which isn't to say every kid who can't understand how to update his video drivers needs to be placated, but you can expect to alienate your own fan base by outright ignoring+abandoning them once you have their money.
The last complaint I'll add involves DRM. I think it's lovely that you--whether you're a developer or publisher--believe that the Nintendo Wii or whatever is 100% secure and are fully committed to the myth that piracy only affects the PC.
The problem is when you try to introduce the same false sense of security into your spiffy PC product in the form of DRM, because too often that has arrived in the form of rootkits/Starforce/et al. PC Gamers are often fanatical about things like system maintenance, and we've learned to notice the details like inconspicuously placed services and entries to the Run keys in our registries. Frankly, it's a violation because the lone act of _us_ paying _you_ money by buying your product does not give you the right to take over our system and do what you will. And until you can come up
Despite the fact Halo is to xbox that Mario is to Nintendo, the pc port was very good. I only played the game on a pc, and although it needed a much more poweful pc than the xbox's 733mhz it never felt like a port. Controls worked well with keyboard and mouse IMHO.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
The problems in the PC version of Dead Space are well-known: delayed movement, delayed aiming, partially rebindable keys (you can't use the cursor keys to walk because they're permanently bound to the RIG menu), etc.
I can't believe nobody mentioned Final Fantasy 8. It was running on an emulator, it even had some of the same graphics bugs that EPSXE had at the time (square hit boxes were visible on the maps). To be fair all they had to go on for FF7 was gold masters, Square deleted the original code/graphics (200 gigs was a lot back then, lol). But then What's FF8's excuse? To this day the best way to play them is running in EPSXE.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
it seems devs don't want to bother with pc anymore unless the drm is horrible.
Or unless it's the dev's first title. Especially Nintendo doesn't want to deal with startups; see Bob's Game.
Obviously, the orientation of the USB cable is in a state of superposition until you make an observation, collapsing the quantum wave function to a single orientation, thus allowing it to fit....
Knowledge != Intelligence
One of the worst is Resident Evil 5. The game maps the keypad to a XBox 360 one, and don't have the option to reconfigure it. The result is that, when you play with any PC keypad, the controls are all wrong. In the end you are forced to use a XBox 360 keypad or use something to remap your PC keypad.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned DMC3, the poster boy of bad console ports. Basically unplayable due to totally fucked up controls. Even if you got a PS2-like controller and the PS2 DMC3 manual so you could make some sense of the controls, there was no support for analog axes so it still played like shit. Also the graphics looked like ass and the menu navigation was extremely confusing. Overall it felt like it was running on top of an ultra-shitty emulator.
Worst...console port...ever.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Screen resolution.
Even AAA titles like Oblivion failed hard at this.
I'm not looking at your game on a stupid 640x480 video monitor, so I don't need your text to be ginormous to be clear.
A corollary to this would be the UI in general - where every button is huge and lists only show 4 things at a time, because everything is supersized for the poor bastard navigating with a gamepad on a TV screen.
You never appreciate efficient UI design as much as you do playing a console game (badly) ported to a computer.
-Styopa
The 3DO port of Star Control II
Oh, wait? MISfortune? Sorry. Um, Halo? No, that was actually better on PC. Maybe Thief: Deadly Shadows.
Yup, It isn't out for the PC yet. (I am sure they delayed the PC launch as to maximize console profits where piracy is less of an issue.**cough cough** I was looking forward to buying this game, but now with UBI-Soft's great DRM scheme, I may wait for a "fix" to come out before I even consider buying or installing it.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
These games were so obviously made just for the console. And lacking that, absolutely no porting was done for RE4.
:(
I loved the games on the PS1/PS2/Xbox 360, etc. However when I decided to buy it for it the computer, I regretted it.
Ruined my love for the game
I'm surprised there isn't a modded up comment about MW2 on here already. MW2 was probably one of the worst console to pc ports ever done, especially considering that some of the error messages still say things like "Lost connection to Xbox LIVE."
What's even worse is that MW2 was built out of the base code for Modern Warfare. Infinity Ward even left the original network code in. That makes MW2 a PC game that was rebuilt for console, jazzed up and then ported back to PC without much thought to the quality of game play.
First Arkham Asylum. I had assumed that since it was a console game I should try using a game pad, and this usually solves the issues with console ports, but in this case it was far worse. In Asylum the usb pad I had (logitech w/two analog sticks) had the problem where pushing forward moved you back, back moved you forward. The only fix for this was messing with some cryptic config files. There was no way to set these parts of the controls within the game... Small problem but it made things very unpleasant.
:(
In Bioshock there specific keys that you couldn't map. In one case it was one I usually use for reload. It decided that was a permanent ui popup key.
These are the small things that can easily ruin really good games.
Snowbank vs. Concrete?
Nobody can do everything, but everybody can do nothing.
doesn't even have a proper menu system. Makes me want to punch myself in the head. All the character movement is done with the mouse and WASD. In the menu screen, I have to use the arrow keys, and get this, Left and Right Square Brackets to tab between menu screens. Kill me now. No mouse function in the menu.
What bugs me about games like the Mass Effects is that they support the 360 controller on the consoles but not on the PC. I mean, you already did all of the work to support different controller options -- why not let me use them on the PC?
Bioshock 1 (and I pray 2) did this beautifully. They let you use either mouse/keyboard or the 360 controller.
Which brings me to a program called Xpadder. I found it while trying to get Mass Effect to work with the 360 controller. The program maps controller inputs to keyboard/mouse inputs. You can download profiles for games like ME that are made by other users just like you, or you can make a profile yourself.
The only real port I've ever played left a very bad taste in my mouth.
In college, one guy had a Nintendo Gamecube and played Resident Evil 4 a lot. So did I, it was a fun game, only I didn't have a gamecube to play on my own. Even tried playing it on my laptop through a USB TV tuner device, but it created enough of a lag between controller and screen action (half a second at least) that the game was unplayable beyond general exploring. Eventually, I worked up the money/willpower to go and buy the PC version for my laptop. Mistake.
Graphics: good, audio: good, controls: wretched.
I swear all they did was map the buttons to the keyboard and called it a day. There was no mouse support, just the arrow keys, which made precision aiming a challenge. Yes that was how the Gamecube version worked, but the movements here were not smooth. Then there was the zoom. Apparently it's based on feedback or something, because if I pressed the zoom key, it would go to one level of zoom and stay there. To zoom in and out, I'd have to exit zoom and hit the key again, no gradual up/down motion. Also, the graphics for the quicktime cutscene events were still A button, B button rather than say, allowing one to customize the buttons and then show the new keyboad equivalents.
Management: We want our latest title ported to the PC
Project manager: I can do that Sire'.
Management: You will have to do this within the budget of the console program
Project manager: I can't do that Sire.We have already used the allocated budget, your greatness
Management: WHaaaaT! Look Jack (modern equiv to plebe). The PC segment is small but it is worth 100's of millions to Greedo Corp.and I want a good share of that segment. All you have to do is run it through one of your conversion compilator things. One of your developers can do that on his lunch while he is doing his other tasks. It's not like he needs to do much of anything, it will do it all by itself. I see no problem here.
Project manager: Uhh sire it is a little more complicated than that. These are completely different platforms, the controls are all different, there are.......(interrupted)
Management: It's not difficult! I've been here a year since I left MilkDuddy Inc. It has been done before, everybody does it. I want that PC market segment You have a week. I have already ordered the artwork and packaging. This has to be complete, released and sales figures before the next quarterly report! Make this happen! And make it happen within budget!
Project manager: Ummm yes sire. But there is no budget, it will take longer, all the control conversions, debugging....(interrupted)
Management: Are you saying you can't do your job?
Project manager: No..I... yes sire (leaves the penthouse offices and walks the long dark hallway dimly lit by the lights reflected off the oil paintings of the past CEO's of Greedo Corp).
*Next installment. Programming Engineer is called to Project Manager's cubical (There is a window and the light is blinding to the engineer).
Hey Jack (His name is really Ed) I have a new priority for you. Should only take about a wee...........
This all goes badly and some poor schmuck living in the slums of India, studies the strange English dialog with his stained and bent English for Dummies book perched on an old yogurt crate, "Oh my goodness, I pray to Ganesh for mercy. What is this 'toggle' mean?".
Mass Effect 2 has horrible PC interface issues. The main problem is the menu screens. You have to mouse-click EVERYTHING, the buttons you have to click are spread out as far as possible all over the screen, and there is no support for arrow keys and selecting stuff in the menus. The buttons on the menu screens are all placed exactly the same places and look exactly the same, so it's hard to figure out what screen you're on.
I have never seen such a beautiful interface be so damn unusable.
The only salvation is that there's far less managing of equipment in ME2 than in ME1. If you had to do as much stuff as in ME1, I think I would have not bothered switching equipment/weapons ever.
I could not understand why they had gutted the game so much until I read its being released on the 360 as well..
It explains why SCFA is so much better.....Very sad the game has gorn backwards so much after TA and SC trail blazed RTS.
The pc port was actually pretty good, few bugs that bothered me, but one gigantic, huge, blaring flaw...
It was really really really really super easy. It was the exact same gameplay as the PS2 version (which I also owned) but mouse+keyboard is so far superior to the console, that every single gun might as well have been "the golden gun" from goldeneye. I am serious, those super hard missions where you had to take out 900 guys and you had to try 1000 times on PS2 and still you just barely pass it after breaking a controller or two.. cakewalk when you can actually aim.
The hellicopter mission, where you are taking passes on the mob base, with a tinfoil hellicopter... That mission was the bane of the ps2, finishing with more than 5% of the chopper health was a feat of god... On PC, 99% health was like oops, LOL I should not have made pizza rolls while playing that mission.
It really opened my eyes to the common notion at the time that the gap was narrowing between console fps/3ps and PC, it was just not the case. Still isn't, because a controller will never (barring comprehensive design changes, and I am not sure motion control will ever quite cut it)have enough precision and reaction.
It was really weird having a pretty nice port that was totally useless, and it really turned me off of the PS2 version, made it seem like "Nintendo hard" Hard because of gimped controlls not because of good design/creativity.
I just forced myself through Bioshock 1 on the PC. I'm guessing the game is a lot better on consoles. The worst example was that plasmid slots couldn't be arranged on the PC, eg. to keep your Shock on F1.
Every time you added or replaced a plasmid it shuffled all your plasmids over 1 key binding. I ended up going through the game rebinding my keys every time I got an upgrade.
The control config doesn't even say "Plasmid Slot 1: F1", it says "F1: F1" (or by the end of the game for me, "F1: F6")
While it had immense promise, the actual port was horrible with massive lag warping and bugs. It was too bad as it had such potential for the franchise, with the ability to have user-created content. I doubt MS liked that fact however, and few patches were ever released.
I learned my lesson on that game... and when Gears of War came out, I laughed as I heard of all the extremely buggy gameplay reports from PC users. I had followed these games forever and was a very likely buyer but never ended up dropping the cash as I will not support such nonsense. Quite honestly, those debacles had quite a bit to do with me winding down most gaming. I am not paying for a console to play games with a controller and low res when I have a killer computer just sitting here waiting. And if the companies don't want to make content, and BS about the true reasons (calling out 'pirates'! yeah right) then they can keep all of their crap, and I will keep my money. Kind of like how I feel about the music industry in general.
Wow! It's like they just described Madden '95 on PC!
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Video game ports are BAD?
No! Get out! Really?
News at 11! Exactly how is this news...
In other news this REVELATION: It was JUST determined in a study that most video games based on Movies are not very good.
O.M.G.
In a further story:
Our in depth coverage continues over at EA Sports, and it appears, at least initially so that when you increment a sports game by one, either be increasing the year in which it was produced (say from 2009 to 2010), or just tacking another number on it (say 12 to 13), that it doesn't really mean there will be any improvement on the game itself, and may really only contain some of the roster changes from the year before.... If we have any new details we will break them as the become known to us...
This just in:
When you take user anonymity add a 12 year old, and a microphone and an audience, you will get a racial swearing, cursing asshat.
Also...
Fire hot, scissors sharp.
Also...
sometime cheating occurs online...
Also...
if you ever played more than 3 video games in your entire life, you are probably aware of all the above and more.
if you haven't, the likelihood of you being interested in any of these things is inversely proportional to your hat size minus the colour yellow.
Resident Evil 4 PC port.
Could not use mouse to aim (arrow keys to aim in FP view).
Could not exit game, had to ctrl+alt+del.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Ban quicktime events. Seriously, this is a basic human rights issue that could be handled in Geneva. Dare to imagine a world without without quicktime events, comrades!
Having been personally involved in coding several of several ports mentioned in these comments, to and from a wide variety of different platforms, the way it usually works is that the publisher will outsource the development to company like the one I work for. The schedules are always very aggressive and tight so unfortunately you know what the end result of that is. It's not like we're trying to make a bad product, we do the best we can given the constraints. Personally I find the job very rewarding and fun and intellectually challenging, even if the end result isn't always that great. I get to see a lot of code from a lot of different companies and it's quite interesting. The challenge is, basically, here's a big mess of code of uncertain quality, get it to work on another platform in 6 months. I *always* give the publishers realistic timelines, which they ignore and we still wind up having to do it 6 months. The only way to get a real quality product on multiple platforms is for the original dev team to develop for all those platforms themselves, or give us enough time to do the port. A lot of times we'll get the contract a year or more after the original game has shipped, we've only occasionally be able to develop the ports simultaneous the original development.
Halo mistakenly called "Combat Evolved" for PC. Crashed mine more often than not
I'm with you on aiming, but I find the right thumbstick to be perfectly fine for camera control except when the game takes that control away from you for no reason. Yes, I'm looking at you, Prince of Persia and Tomb Raider.
DICE have done a realy good job in getting this game to both PC and Consoles. However, since it's still in BETA / Demo there are still some things that need to be fixed on the PC version. For example "aim-lock" when using the aim button, that's a very irritating "feature" that i haven't been able to turn off yet. Except from that it's a great game adapted for both PC and Console with some adaptions to both of them for better user experience :)
Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden II, Street Fighter II, Castlevania, were very bad PC ports that utterly failed to capture the charm and gameplay of their console counterparts. Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Sonic CD, and Mega Man X were very well done, on the other hand. Emulated games such as those in the SEGA Smash Pack were great.
Twinstiq, game news
Metal Gear Solid, ported by Microsoft, was also horribly done. On their own platform! Glitchy, horrid graphics that were inconsistant compared to even the Bleem! + Dreamcast version. Silicon Knights did it right with Twin Snakes for the GameCube. Luckily Konami did their own work with Metal Gear Solid 2 on the PC.
Twinstiq, game news
I knew SR2 would be a bad port, but I still bought it because it was only three euros. Bad idea.
The game runs so badly that as a programmer I find myself taken in wonder; how is this performance physically possible on my hardware?
The most heinous problem is the constant stuttering. When the game is loading world data - ALL THE TIME, this is an open-world sandbox game - it hangs for at least half a second. In fact at least 10 minutes out of every hour will be spent involuntarily watching a still picture.
Bear in mind that this game was ported from the Xbox 360, where it streams from a 12x DVD-ROM drive with an 18MB/sec best-case transfer rate. And it doesn't stutter. The PC port reads directly from the HDD, a device with five times the transfer rate and half the seek time. With this five-fold improvement, they manage to leverage a performance gain of negative infinity. Great job!
Then there's the graphics. The game's rendering speed is appalling, and it's not for the sake of fidelity. The graphics are on par with a PS2 game. I can live with ugliness or slowness, but not both.
To put it in perspective, I have hardware that can comfortably run Crysis at settings beyond what you can choose in the GUI. I can play other shitty ports and have an enjoyable experience with a modicum of visual appeal. But this game? It's just too much.
You can turn down the settings of course. For the record, at any setting below maximum it looks considerably worse than the 360 version. The settings go lower than most games; lighting is optional for example.
Oh yes. Allow me to elaborate: unlike any other modern game, this runs so badly that there's actually an option to turn lighting off entirely. Not just a reduction in quality, but literally nothing, not even uninterpolated flat shading. No shaders, no lights, no shadows, no bump-maps, nothing - and it still runs like fucking dogshit.
That's pretty impressive when you think about it. They made rendering unshaded polygons with a single low resolution texture more computationally demanding than protein folding.
Mysteriously the game runs just fine on the 360, despite having something in the region of one-sixth the GPU horsepower my computer has. I guess in that version they forgot to include sleep(100) in every inner loop the renderer has.
The worst thing of all is knowing that there's a good game underneath the mound of technical failure. The game supports mouse and keyboard and controller simultaneously and properly. Online play is fun and works well; you can join anyone's game any time because the entire game is cooperatively multiplayer. The game is hilarious and fairly well designed.
What a goddamn shame.
Why not try something newer, having played BattleField2 since 2005ish I had been waiting for the new release "BF3" - it was postponed, and again and finally something strange happened. Bad Company came out, but wow this was for XBOX/PS3 only!
Meanwhile Call of Duty : Modern Waffle was ported so well onto PC from the console that they decided cheating would be a problem - so best way round this was to just not make it possible to have dedicated servers thus removing any admin burden.
Thankfully EA, master of writing sucessively dosh GUI interfaces do half-decent game engines, got out Bad Company 2 - a lovely console port that involves high paced first person shooting without the ability to duck behind objects.
Fear no though, as you are getting upset over the Beta you paid 50$ for, they cut you off hike the price to $70 (online purchase, still $50 for the CD).
So to recap, in the future we will all buy online for twice the value with no rights to transfer or sell the product as we are only licensing it for a lifetime. Futher the product will be shipped in Beta form, and by the time you forgot it was in Beta they will be on to the next game.
PS. notice hollywood will soon follow suit. Movies titled to be in 3D, but for the most part only in 2D. Oh no wait, there was just a movie out like that...
Is this common info that can be easily found? I guess the company producing the game wouldn't want everyone to know it's a port. I'm playing Mirror's Edge on PC right now and there's a lot of bugs, then I find out it's a port... seems like something that should just be avoided when buying a game. Is it just a matter of doing a bit of research?
Splinter Cell: Double Agent (originally for PC and by Ubisoft Montreal, it was then sent to Shanghai and redone from scratch for the Xbox 360 with an "attempted" PC port) was completely ruined by Ubisoft Shanghai. The original version that Montreal would have released was in the same style as the previous versions (which was just fine by me) and most likely actually would have WORKED. The released PC port was so buggy that it was an absolute and immediate flop.
I hate business people with a passion.
how is babby formed?
I found The newest Prince of Persia to be a particularly poorly thought out port from the xbox 360 version. The default keyboard controls were configured by a blind folded monkey.
Yes there are some shit games, do your homework dumb ass. However Aliens vs Predator is a recent port and it FUCKING ROCKS !
I find it funny how the problem used to be with console games being ports of computer games, and now we have the opposite problem. The only think i can say is what PC owners have said for years but slightly different. "Just buy a console."
Its pretty easy to determine whether a port or a game in general is going to be bad, and if you are still going out and dropping 60$ for $20 worth of software, then you probably shouldn't be gaming. I've been gaming on PCs since the time of Quake, and i find it quite simple to play games on PC, a little bit of technical knowlege is very beneficial considering that PC games are almost always more in depth, come with more features, and offer plenty more options to the end user.
Game discussion on slashdot seems to include alot of whining and fanboyism, like adolescent children fighting about which console is the best, where genuine statements about what gaming is actually about are nonexistent.
You ever try to oval race a supercar with a keyboard? Damn nigh impossible. Analog input is for pussies!
Winkey shortcut mapping for 64bit windows. WinKeyPlus