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 with will likely suffer.
To qualify the program as a
Porting Disaster one or more of the following major points has to be present.
- Game Breaking Bugs only present in the port in question.
- Substantial amounts of missing content, such as whole levels, playable characters/vehicles, weapons, and the like.
- Particularly with ports to Nintendo systems, certain things might get changed around with no overall impact on quality (such as removing crosses or direct mentions of God and Death), but when the change is notable to the casual observer ("wait, wasn't there that cool hovercraft minigame between these two areas?"), then it becomes significant.
- Poor quality visuals, audio or controls which can't be excused by the host system's technical limitations.
- Clumsy controls, even if you try to forget the old control layout. For example, imitating pad control badly on a keyboard, not supporting mice or customised control setups in a console-to-PC port, trying to cram too many hotkey functions onto controller buttons in a PC-to-console port, or forgetting entirely that a console-to-PC port even has a keyboard at its disposal.
- Poor performance compared to games of similar or greater complexity on the host platform. This point can be subdivided into two areas which may or may not both be present:
See also
Porting Distillation, where a game is greatly improved during the development of a ported version.
Disastrous ports to games consoles:
Disastrous ports to hand-held consoles:
Disastrous ports to PC operating systems:
Disastrous versions of multi-platform releases:
