Top 10 Terrible Ports You Need To Avoid

While today PC games and console games are generally on equal-footing, in 2002, it was a completely different story. With the main consoles on the market the Xbox, PS2, and GameCube, transferring an established PC franchise like “The Elder Scrolls” onto home consoles was a doomed enterprise. Bethesda’s attempt to bring “Morrowind” to consoles may not be their most disastrous move, not compared to “Fallout: 76”, but it was a down-graded, buggy nightmare nobody actually asked for. It had a hat trick of low graphics, low frame rate, and low draw distance, on top of a convoluted and un-optimized UI.

When it first released, “Bayonetta” was a brand new and exciting IP in the vein of other hack’n’slash giants like “Devil May Cry”, but if you played it on PS3 that might not have been the experience you got. Studio Platinum Games made the mistake of handing over development of “Bayonetta’s” port to the PlayStation to a team from Sega, their publishers. What came out of this was a watered-down version of the 360’s hit title. It had bad graphics, bad textures, washed-out colors and atrocious loading times. But by far the main offender was its clunky frame rate and terrible controls, bad enough to render it unplayable.

Konami have made their fair share of blunders, but losing the source code for “Silent Hill 2” and “3” is definitely one of the worst. Forced to rewrite huge portions of the games from scratch for the looming release of the “HD Collection”, Hyjinx were faced with more bugs than they knew what to do with. Many textures had to be removed and “Silent Hill 3” even lost all of its original voice acting, but by far the problem gamers took most issue with was that the trademark heavy fog was non-existent. Despite being an integral part to the atmosphere of all the games, the fog was removed, and many players wrote off the “HD Collection” completely.

On paper, Mega Man seems like a shoo-in to be exported onto mobile devices. The series has long retained pretty simple graphics and side-scrolling mechanics, but even with all this it still couldn’t be properly transferred to the App Store. While it’s not as broken as other ports on this list – with its biggest technical issue being that it loads stages in segments instead of all at once – Capcom made more than a few controversial decisions about this iteration of the blue bomber. Namely, adding microtransactions that allow players to pay to buy power-ups you’re supposed to earn in-game.

This series has really been through the ringer in the many years since its first outing on the Xbox 360, and while “Dead Rising 4” took the series in a completely new direction, it certainly fared better than this Wii port of the original. In this version, Frank West has hung up his trusty camera in favor of some incredibly generic third-person-shooter gameplay, and the time limit that made the original game so intense has been removed. It takes away everything except the shopping mall setting, including the actual story and most of the zombies, and replaces it with, well, nothing.

The “Souls” games have been celebrated ever since “Demon’s Souls” in 2009, hailed for their gruelling difficulty and beginner’s traps just as much for their unique storytelling and immersive worlds. But FromSoftware have almost exclusively been a console studio for years, so when they finally ported “Dark Souls” to the PC, gamers were left feeling short-changed. Permanently locked at a lower frame-rate, this version of “Dark Souls” was chronically slow and broken until modders provided free work-arounds. It left a bitter taste in the mouths of everybody who couldn’t wait to play this esteemed classic.

While any title by Bethesda is bound to be full of game-breaking glitches, they went the extra mile on the PS3. Without the modding community of the PC to sweep in and fix the myriad of problems games like “Fallout 3,” “New Vegas” and “Skyrim” possess, they’re all left in a borderline unplayable state. While all three feature constant crashes, causing players to lose hours of progress, “Skyrim” had a horrific save file bug which could put the entire console out of action; the further players got in the game, the larger their save file would grow, until it took up all the free space left on the hard drive. You need to have the patience of a saint to beat one of these.

Mobile games may be capable of reaching the widest audience, but they still can’t measure up to consoles or PC. This is something 2K should have kept in mind when they decided to port “BioShock” onto mobile. While “BioShock” is a game which prides itself on its story, this is all but lost in awful iPhone graphics and a control scheme so bad it can only belong to a touch screen. While some critics have claimed that the port is at least playable if you have a tablet and a compatible controller, it’s certainly not worth the $15 it cost when it was released. You could buy the game on console five times over for that price now, and it’ll actually work.

Not to be confused with the infamously bad “Sonic 06”, the other big Sonic game to come out of that year was a port of the original Genesis classic “Sonic the Hedgehog” for the Game Boy Advanced, released to mark its 15th anniversary. But the port was unrecognizable; it had eye-wateringly low framerate, terrible lag and a broken physics engine – which will ruin any Sonic game. As well as that, to work on the Game Boy’s much smaller screen, the resolution had to be significantly reduced. They couldn’t even get the music right, with the soundtrack missing huge chunks and also playing the wrong themes at the wrong times, ruining the mood.

Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few Dishonorable Mentions:

“Deus Ex: The Conspiracy” (2002)
PlayStation 2

“Far Cry Vengeance” (2006)
Wii

“Batman: Arkham Knight” (2015)
PC

“Mafia II” (2011)
Mac OS X

Ports to the Switch always seem to be very hit or miss – with such hits as its own version of “Doom” 2016. But “Ark Survival Evolved” is a miss in every sense of the word, a stripped-down skeleton of what the game is on consoles and computer – where it had a plethora of issues already. When a game is still stuttering on the Xbox One X, porting it to the Switch is a ridiculous move. Players were treated to a barren world with poorly-rendered assets and textures, most of the flora either removed or downscaled to the point of being eyesores. Even its all-important dinosaurs look like cartoons.