Porting Disaster: Difference between revisions

* ''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 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.)

** To compound the issue, the Halo 2 Editing Kit was extremely gimped. The ability to modify vehicles, weapons, and tons of other functionality were removed, including creating custom tags. This means its impossible to use the official tools to make new single-player content, and greatly reduces the amount of map modification possible; one of the few reasons why you might prefer the PC version over the Xbox version.

** ''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.

** 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]]''.

* 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 port of ''[[The Lion King]]'' was cited as one of the reasons why developers during the early 90s stuck with [[MS-DOS]] and viewed Windows as a gaming platform with disdain due to how difficult it is to optimise games for the operating system (case in point ''[[SkiFree]]'' author Chris Pirih who recalled having to contend with Windows' heavy overhead on top of dealing with bandwidth issues with the video hardware of the time). ''Lion King'' used WinG, a graphics API designed to alleviate any concerns about graphics and game development in Windows; a PR disaster with Disney, Compaq and Westwood ensued when millions of Compaq Presarios which came shipped with the game had incompatible drivers, causing the game to crash so frequently that Disney's consumer products support line was inundated with calls from irate parents whose children (presumably) had tantrums over the game crashing on their affected systems.

 

=== Macintosh ===