Porting Disaster / Consoles

The porting process to and between consoles is not often smooth, but the worst ports can be extremely disastrous, especially if the programmers run into problems or limits with the hardware or because of sloppy coding altogether, a problem exacerbated by the major differences between console hardware in older generations.

A No Recent Examples rule applies to this trope. Examples shouldn't be added until six months after the ported program is released, to avoid any knee-jerk reactions. However, examples may still be added even if the port was fixed during the six-month period, so long as the port had clear issues on its initial release.

Atari 2600

• Defender had horrible flicker, blocky cityscape graphics, and a game-breaking invisibility glitch when you fire. The player has to go off-screen to use hyperspace or the Smart Bomb. The later superior port of Stargate (Defender II), which used both joysticks for the controls, showed that this was inexcusable. Not that using two joysticks at once, especially the 2600's joysticks, isn't without its own issues.
• According to the programmer of Donkey Kong's VCS port, Coleco forced them to use the 4 kilobyte cart instead of the 8 kilobyte cart, resulting in simplified graphics, lack of music and the removal of the 50m and 75m stages. Some people speculate that this was to make the Colecovision version of Donkey Kong look even better by comparison.
• Double Dragon was released at a time when Atari relaunched the 2600 as a cheaper alternative to the NES and Master System. It never stood a chance with its stick figure graphics and simplistic mechanics as a result of the system having only a single-button joystick. Unlike the NES though, the 2600 does manage to retain 2P co-op play but does so by employing a lane-based system where each player fights an individual opponent and are restricted to their own lane, so it's not much of a "co-op" experience.
• Miner 2049er was back-ported by Tigervision from Atari 8-Bit Computers to the Atari 2600, so the downgraded graphics and reduced number of stages (two releases with three each) were to be expected. The walking being slow and jumps barely clearing enemies had no such excuse.
• Pac-Man, the reigning king of infamously bad porting jobs and, alongside the similarly-infamous rush job of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, sometimes claimed to be one of the primary causes of The Great Video Game Crash of 1983. It was heavily criticized for its flickering ghosts (since the 2600 couldn't draw all four on-screen at the same time), lack of fidelity to the arcade version and ugly color scheme^note Atari had a policy of forcing all games that weren't set in space to not use black backgrounds, as they wanted to showcase the color capabilities of the 2600. Its infamy spawned a myth that Atari released an unfinished version of the game to get the game on the market as soon as possible. At any rate, Atari manufactured 12 million copies, 2 million more than the userbase at the time, believing that the game would boost hardware sales too. The result was a complete disaster for Atari, and yet it was still the best-selling game on the 2600, ever (7 million copies).
  The later ports of Ms. Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man were handled far better: Jr. Pac-Man in particular has vertically scrolling mazes and (still-primitive graphics aside) matches nearly every feature of the arcade original, minus the between-stage intermissions and the original's two-player mode. In fact, Ms. Pac-Man was so much better that it got a Game Mod that turned it into Pac-Man Arcade, showing that it was indeed possible to make a good version of Pac-Man for the Atari 2600. There's also a homebrew called Pac-Man 4K by Dennis Debro that's even closer to the arcade original, using only four kilobytes of memory, the same as the official port; this version would later be included on the second version of the Atari Flashback Portable instead of the official one.

Intellivision

• All of Coleco's games for the Intellivision qualify. All suffered graphics that look like the 2600 and nothing like the Arcade (Turbo's buildings look very blocky even by system standards) and missing stages (50m and 75m in Donkey Kong for example). When they were released, Mattel claimed that these ports were deliberate sabotage on the part of Coleco. Carl Mueller Jr. later proved that a better version of Donkey Kong could be programmed for the Intellivision by developing the homebrew Donkey Kong Arcade.
• Zaxxon: Coleco's Intellivision port replaced the Isometric Projection with a top-down view, removing what made the original unique in the first place. A homebrew clone called Space Raid proved that a much closer port was possible.

Atari 5200

• Gorf had some of the worst controls on the Atari 5200, a system with an analog stick that was notoriously problematic to begin with.

NES/Famicom

• The majority of the NES arcade ports developed by Micronics, a contractual developer that used to develop games for other companies during The '80s and early '90s:
  • 1942 suffers from slowdown issues and other flaws. That's not all—the March of Midway, originally a track composed of marching and whistling, replaces the whistling with beeping.
  • Athena turned what was a passable arcade game into what is widely regarded as one of the worst NES games. The original arcade version's graphics were translated into a parade of flicker and slowdown, and the controls were made worse.
  • Their conversion of Ghosts 'n Goblins turned a hard but playable arcade original into a nigh-impossible mess, by making controls ungodly slow and unresponsive, along with plaguing the game with all of this developer's well-known problems, such as low frame rate, long loading times...on a cartridge, game-breaking bugs (sometimes the boss of stage 4 will fail to spawn), bland graphics and annoying sound effects. The Japanese version is even worse, as unlike overseas versions, this version gives players absolutely zero continues, which means, that you have only three lives for the entire game. Good luck trying to beat it twice to see the good ending. There is a code, that lets you continue infinitely in the Japanese version, but why they decided to make the ability to continue hidden is anybody's guess. Despite (or because of) all these flaws, the NES port became the most popular version of the game, even surpassing the original arcade version.
  • Ikari Warriors used a rotary joystick system in arcades, allowing players to control their character's movement and aim separately. This control system wouldn't have worked out on the NES controller, which only had a cross-shaped D-pad, so Micronics took it out so that the player aims in the same direction their character is moving. Unfortunately, they did this the worst way possible. Instead of instantly turning around, the player does a full rotation while moving at the same time, causing them to walk in a circle just to turn around, making you vulnerable to enemy fire. It doesn't help matters that the rest of the game isn't hot either, with bland graphics and lots of flickering.
  • Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road, in addition to having the same issues that plagued the first Ikari game on the NES, has loading times when the player switches to the status screen after pausing the game. Additionally, there's an unskippable cutscene when the game is left on the title screen for too long, which is made worse by how slowly typed-out the text is.
• 720° had horrible graphics, ear-bleeding music, and broken controls (spinning and other moves are frustrating to pull off, and the ramp event is nearly unplayable). To add insult to injury, they took out the expert mode. Inexcusable — the NES can do considerably better than this. This port was developed by Beam Software, the creators of the similarly awful Back to the Future (1989) and the American Commodore 64 port of 720° (which is even worse than the European computer ports by Tiertex).
• Aladdin fares rather badly. While the bootleg port by Super Game still had graphical and control problems, the official port by NMS Software suffered from these flaws to a greater extent. It was shown up even harder by another pirate original version, Aladdin II, which somehow plays and runs far better than an officially-licensed port.
• Conan: The Mysteries of Time, a licensed port of a classic C64 game by System 3 titled Myth: History in the Making, suffered from poor play mechanics, graphics and music compared to the original C64 release. Conan has been derided by many NES players, not all of whom are familiar with the C64 original.
• Ghostbusters, a port of Activision's Commodore 64 game, is infamous for the screwed-up driving sequences, the nearly-impossible stairway sequence, and the ending screen's memetic "Blind Idiot" Translation which manages to misspell "Congratulations" as "Conglaturation", as well as announcing itself as "a great game".
• Hydlide took a severe beating when it was ported to the NES, replacing its music with the same, constantly-looping tune (a digitization of the opening theme from its PC-8801 sequel), muddying the graphics, and in general losing most of what made it so popular in its original version. Unfortunately, this was the only version that got brought over to America, and a major reason why the series never caught on in the West.
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (the Ubisoft release, not the earlier version released by Taito) was a port of a PC action game, which NMS Software saddled with horrendously grainy graphics seemingly produced by taking the graphics from the Sega Master System version and compressing the palette.
• Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was based on the Atari arcade game, but like some other arcade-to-NES conversions, it became a Reformulated Game rather than a straight port. Indy could now jump and use alternate weapons, but the controls for these were clumsy. Whereas the arcade game told players right on the screen what needs to be done, stage goals in the NES version were bewilderingly unintuitive. The graphics are also very poor for the NES, with the backgrounds consisting of hideous washes of blue or green.
• King's Quest V: Novotrade tried their hardest to cram 256-color visuals into an 8-bit cart and quick mouse actions onto a controller, but it just couldn't be done well. Have a look.
• The Last Ninja, an unnumbered port of the C64 game by System 3 titled Last Ninja 2,. While it was admirable that they were able to get anything even remotely resembling one of the C64's most technically impressive titles working at all on the NES, the end result simply isn't worth it thanks to the abysmal controls, horribly broken collision detection, unimpressive graphics, bland music,^note (Porting the C64 version's soundtrack wasn't viable considering that System 3 had since discovered that composer Matt Gray had done Suspiciously Similar Song versions of pop music tracks that were just a little too similar to the originals, but System 3 had at least gone with a remix of the music for the first The Last Ninja when they gave 2 an Updated Re-release, instead of the forgettable original music the NES version goes with) and the timing of the puzzles in the opening level being completely messed up to the point of making the level nearly impassable. Add all that to the port doing nothing to correct the gameplay flaws that the C64 version did suffer from, and the end result is what The Angry Video Game Nerd deemed to be the single worst NES game that he had ever played.^note (forcing him to clarify that for once, he wasn't being the least bit hyperbolic when he said it was worse than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (NES))
• Maniac Mansion, in Japan, received a horrible port by Jaleco. Not only were the graphics hugely simplified, saving your progress requires writing passwords over a hundred characters long. A completely new port, far more faithful to the PC original, was developed by Lucasfilm Games and Realtime Associates for the American release.
• Pac-Land was graphically neutered when it made the jump to Famicom, with smaller sprites, blocky backgrounds, and dull colors. 2-Player mode was also removed as were half of the levels, and Namco neglected to update the game's control scheme for the Famicom's controller (you use A and B to move left and right instead of the D-Pad), or at least it seems this way until you realize they put the more modern "D-Pad to move" control scheme on the second controller, but most people won't know that. It also removes the cutscene of Pac-Man getting Wing Boots towards the end of a trip, leaving first-time players unaware of the multi-jump ability.
• The arcade version of Road Runner, while benefitting from a good presentation that captured the aesthetic of the cartoons well, was already a game that wasn't particularly fun to play due to its slippery controls and finicky level design. The NES port by Beam Software takes away what redeeming qualities the arcade original had, with poor graphics that make Wile E. Coyote look more like the Nesquik Bunny, an utterly butchered version of the game's Public Domain Soundtrack with screechingly-high notes and the tempo sped up to the point where some of the tracks become unrecognizable, and the faults in the controls and level design being further magnified.
• Sky Shark, ported by Software Creations, features an unusually large and inconsistent hitbox for the player's ship, causing them to die to bullets that should've missed them. Sometimes the bullets flicker too causing the player to be gibbed by bullets they couldn't even see. Its only saving graces are that it does not have horizontal scrolling unlike the arcade version (thus preventing the player from being sniped by a tank they happened to scroll into view), firing a bomb erases all on-screen enemy bullets also unlike in the arcade, and the excellent alternative soundtrack by Tim Follin, but general consensus is that those touches aren't enough to salvage this port when you can end up losing lives to bullets that are obviously a dozen meters away from your plane.
• Spy vs. Spy's NES port had its levels noticeably cut down compared to the Sega Master System and home computer versions and is missing the tripwire gun trap and adjustable AI level. The computer opponent also suffers from Artificial Stupidity worse than the lowest difficulty levels of other versions.
• Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe's Brother has choppy framerates, horrible graphics and music, and watered-down play mechanics. It plays like one of those unlicensed pirate games. Another reformulation rather than a direct port, and a bad one at that.
• Winter Games forced the player to watch a subpar animation sequence that couldn't be skipped, and had a selection of games that were far inferior to the Atari 2600 version. (Yeah, that's right — the NES version of the game is worse than the Atari 2600 version. Let that sink in.) The badly animated, detail-lacking graphics and unresponsive control scheme are quite bad for the NES.
• Captain Comic. Known as a landmark groundbreaking game on the PC, as it's one of the first smooth-scrolling EGA graphics platform games; and frequently makes the top 10 of "worst games ever" on the NES.
• Heroes of the Lance is considered decent-to-good on most of its platforms...with the glaring exception of the NES version, which is borderline unplayable thanks to a combination of glitches, unclear direction, and arbitrary changes that make things even harder. It's downright ugly to boot, with its grey/green/brown palette. The only thing it really has going for it is the okay music.

Master System/Mark III, Game Gear

• Altered Beast (1988) manages to retain an impressive level of graphical detail compared to the arcade and Genesis versions, but it comes at the expense of unresponsive controls, the loss of most of the soundtrack, and an abysmal frame rate.
• Dynamite Headdy on the Game Gear (and by extension the Master System backport for the Brazilian market, which is the same game running at a higher resolution). Several levels are cut down or removed entirely, the developers having effectively given up on porting anything but the bosses by the halfway point, and then for good measure several of the bosses that cut are changed in ways that clearly didn't take into account that you're supposed to actually defeat them — Spinderella, in particular, is nearly impossible to hit without taking a hit in return, on top of there being no indication how you're supposed to hurt her (since it involves getting her stuck on the pillars at the sides of the stage when the game at no point before then ever indicated those pillars are part of the stage rather than just a fancy border). The final boss is artificially made more difficult — in the original Mega Drive/Genesis version, you get a hint as to which attack he will use, and then you get to pick a head to help deal with it. Here, for no reason at all, you are expected to pick a head before you know what attack you need it for (and for good measure, if you pick up Pig Head you're stuck with it until it fades out normally, since there's no third face button for the "remove current head" feature of the original, and this version of Pig Head will actually destroy other powerups before you can pick them up)
• Shadow Dancer on the Master System, unlike the original Shinobi (which was a Reformulated Game with similar stages but different play mechanics), attempted to be a straight port of the original arcade game, even though the arcade version ran on the more advanced System 18 hardware. The SMS version kept the one-hit-per-life system from the arcade version, which wouldn't be bad by itself if the game was balanced around this design. Instead, the SMS version kept the arcade's large character sprites while shrinking the actual playing field, allowing enemy projectiles to appear from out of nowhere and take the player by surprise, while at the same time making boss battles hard to maneuver around, leading to many cheap deaths. Moreover, only eight of the arcade version's 15 stages (counting the boss battles) were kept, and the ones that were kept were made much shorter. To top it off, the first-person shuriken-throwing bonus rounds are unbeatable due to a glitch that makes the final enemy ninja invulnerable.
• The Simpsons: Bart vs. the World had Master System and Game Gear ports made by Arc Developments, the same developer who had previously produced Sega ports for The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants that were superior to the NES original in every way. This time around, however, the ports they created were worse than the NES version. While the graphics were somewhat better, the controls were even worse than the already skittish NES controls, the soundtrack was reduced to just two short and uninspired tunes, and all the storyline sequences were chopped out, along with the extra level you got for 100% Completion. It's almost like Arc didn't feel the Sega ports were worth the effort and instead focused on the Amiga version, which actually is a Polished Port.
• Smash TV changes the blood to generic explosions, most of the characters have red skin, and the graphics are messy and unprofessional even for an 8-bit Sega console. The Game Gear version has choppy framerate and clunky controls, while the enemies move way too quickly in the Master System version. The enemies spawn a few spaces in front of a door instead of coming out of it, and in the Game Gear version, the first boss is almost impossible to beat due to the choppy way he moves around.
• Sonic Spinball features levels which are remarkably similar compared to other Sonic the Hedgehog ports (not necessarily on its own merits), but whatever physics existed in the Genesis version were thrown completely out the window. Worse is the platforming engine, in which Sonic has an innate tendency to get himself stuck.
• Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (8-bit) suffers from an issue that plagued many Master System to Game Gear ports—the aspect ratio. When the screens were lined up, the width was focused on, rather than the height, resolved by making the player unable to see what would normally be the very top of the screen. This isn't normally a problem until the screen locks; an example is the Antlion boss of the Underground Zone where it gets very difficult to judge where the balls will bounce when you can't see when they peak.
• Streets of Rage 2 has small sprites, off-key music, enemies that can combo you to death without giving you a chance to fight back, and excessively high difficulty in comparison to the original. Just to highlight how sloppy this port is, the MS port of the first game features much bigger sprites (and more appealing graphics in general), is at a reasonable difficulty and is generally more competently programmed. As well as this, the music and the Cycle of Hurting were fixed in the Game Gear port of the second game.
• Strider (Arcade) is yet another example of attempting to port a game to a platform that wasn't meant to handle it. The conversion was handled by Tiertex, the same team that developed the equally horrible PC ports of Strider and the infamous sequel Strider Returns.
• Vigilante inexplicably changed the jump command from simply pushing the joystick up to pressing both attack buttons at the same time. The game also suffers from ridiculously precise hit detection; if the player punches or kicks an enemy too closely, the attack won't register, giving the enemy a free hit. To make matters worse, the inputs for jump kicks (down+1+2 while jumping) and jumping punches (up while jumping) were made needlessly counter-intuitive as opposed to the simpler commands used from the arcade version.

Amiga/Amiga CD32

• Battletoads was released in 1994, two years after an Amiga version was announced. It cut out half of the stages and butchered the control scheme to fit on a single-button joystick and had barely-altered graphics which, in some ways, actually look worse than the vibrant NES original. The CD32 version is a straight copy of the Amiga version and shares all of its faults (including playing either the music only or sound effects without music, a common quirk of desktop Amiga games), not even using two buttons on the CD32's six-button controller.
• Total Carnage is a sluggish, under-animated bastardization of what was an enjoyably fast-paced Arcade Game. It features loads of faulty collision detection and Fake Difficulty but lacks music as well as the Password Save feature the arcade version had.
• X-COM: UFO Defense, partially because of using a joypad to control it.^note It's possible to plug a mouse into the console, though. The main problem, however, is the fact that the CD32 only has 1 KB of memory available for save data. Not only is the player limited to building a single base, but the save data takes up the entire space, preventing the player from saving data from another game without deleting it.

TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine

• Genocide makes the "bumper car" collision even worse (and many of the enemies love to ram you to death), the difficulty has spiked to unfair levels (especially the mid-to-late stages of the game) with cheap enemy placement, the controls are less responsive, the sound is mediocre, and the graphics are much worse than the original with the backgrounds and animations that are either extremely simplified or non-existent. The FM Towns port makes this version look like a joke by comparison.
• Golden Axe is shamefully bad. Although the PC Engine was one of Telenet Japan's primary platforms and their Renovation division produced some good games for it, their port of Sega's arcade classic was saddled with horrible sound effects, poor controls and graphics actually worse than the 8-bit Sega Master System version. Its only novelty was the inclusion of voice-acted cutscenes for each character which fleshed out the original game's story.

Genesis/Mega Drive, Sega CD/Mega CD, 32X

• The Adventures of Willy Beamish received a Sega CD port that's prone to locking up, especially in the final areas, but just the loading in general kills the experience for all but the most patient.
• Aladdin II, an unlicensed conversion of the SNES version of Aladdin made by an unknown Taiwanese company. This port is notable for being significantly worse than not only the original, but the Famicom conversion done by fellow Taiwanese developer Hummer Team, despite being converted to a more powerful system. The controls and play mechanics are completely broken. Unlike the original and the Famicom versions, this version lacks a password feature, Genie's bonus games, a bonus round where Aladdin and Jasmine ride on the magic carpet, and finally, the developers of this version didn't even try to port the soundtrack from the original game and just reused a few themes from some of their other games, which are scattered and repeated throughout the entire game (for example, one theme is reused four times). The only redeeming aspect of this version is that it has most of the cutscenes and the second phase of Jafar's final boss fight from the SNES original (where he transforms into a snake), which were absent in the Famicom conversion. But that's it.
• ClayFighter was ported to the Genesis by Ringler Studios, which resulted in downgraded graphics and audio, as well as worse hit detection. Sadly, this was also the version that was uploaded to the Wii's Virtual Console.
• Double Dragon II: The Revenge, released only in Japan by Pal Soft, is notable for being the only console port of the arcade game rather than a Reformulated Game like the NES version (the later PC Engine version was a remake of the NES version). Unfortunately, it's not a very good one, with smaller character sprites and muddier colors, as well as numerous bugs (including a three-second pause every time a mook dies) and cheaper enemy and trap placement compared to the arcade game (especially notable with the weed trimming tractor in Mission 3, which moves in a ridiculously faster pace than in the arcade version). The game is virtually unplayable with the six-button controller as well, since it causes the player to move even more slowly than with the standard three-button controller. To top it off, this port actually came out a few months before Accolade's Genesis port of the first game in America, which was pretty decent by comparison. The only saving grace Double Dragon II has is that the arcade soundtrack made its way mostly intact.
• Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone was an already mediocre arcade sequel, but the Genesis version suffers from missing animation frames (with many of the moves missing), bad hit detection (enemies don't react to the player's attacks until their health runs out), different button inputs for the special moves (even though the Genesis controller had three action buttons matching the numbers of buttons in the arcade version), butchered renditions of the arcade game's music (one of the few redeeming aspects of the original) and poor character balance (especially in the final two stages, where a close-range attack from an enemy does more harm than projectiles such as arrows and fireballs). To make matters worse, they based the port on the U.S. version of the arcade game, which had the credit-feeding item shops, instead of the Japanese version, which featured selectable characters and all the special moves usable from the get-go.
• Duke Nukem 3D, a Brazil-exclusive port of contested legality.^note Tec Toy claims to have obtained the license from now-defunct publisher GT Interactive, but 3D Realms calls it a bootleg. The game uses a Wolfenstein 3D-style 2D raycasting engine, which means that all the levels, instead of the city areas that are so abundant in the PC game, are now glorified corridors. Only the second episode, Lunar Apocalypse, was ported, removing 3/4 of the original game, and Duke's voice clips are almost indecipherable due to the high rate of compression used on them. What's especially interesting about this port is that, for the Genesis, what made the cut is actually surprisingly very high-quality. It only qualifies for this trope because the Genesis simply can't handle Duke 3D.
• Hard Drivin'. While the arcade game was a popular, well-received driving simulator, the Sega Genesis port was nothing short of a trainwreck. While the real-time 3-D graphics are impressive for an early Genesis game (especially since it uses no add-on chips), it's clear that the Genesis was incapable of handling such a game on its own, judging by the single-digit framerate, laggy controls, lousy physics (just try to clear the loop de loop ramp) and slippery handling, all combined with a car with the durability of a Pinto, and a very strict time limit with too few checkpoints, and the game is almost unplayable.
• While Tengen's Japan-only port of Marble Madness is regarded as a near arcade-perfect port of the original, EA's own port of the game for American markets is infamous for its ear-grating music.
• Might & Magic 2 had decent graphics, especially compared to some older versions of the game. The control scheme took getting used to, but that wasn't too bad for a turn-based RPG. Unfortunately, someone messed up the computer AI, because enemies always had a predictable pattern — they would attack the party members in order, one after the other. Doesn't sound that bad? That includes party members out of melee (who are typically there for very good reason), turning the thing from mildly annoying to unbelievably frustrating. The Europe-exclusive SNES version fixes all of these issues.
• OutRunners' Genesis conversion suffers from poor graphics and sound, missing visual effects, and stiff controls, along with a forced split-screen view, even in the game's single-player mode.
• Samurai Shodown, despite the missing Earthquake, had a relatively good Genesis port. One would expect the Sega CD port to be better, but aside from still not having Earthquake (on a CD, no less), Kuroko is missing from the backgrounds and there is a horrible Game-Breaking Bug in which the game crashes right before the final battle against Amakusa, making the game Unintentionally Unwinnable. When word of this spread out, porting company JVC issued a recall where broken copies could be traded for the decent Sega CD port of Fatal Fury Special. No fixed Sega CD version of Samurai Shodown was ever released.
• Star Control, programmed by Accolade and touted as the console's first 12-Megabit cartridge, managed to pack in some graphics and sound effects from later revisions of the game, but at a price: It absolutely slows the game to a crawl, even in the relatively simplistic full game map screen. Game Genie codebooks even published a code to turn off asteroids in combat to try making it a wee bit faster. The sad thing is, some of the original SC developers were responsible for the Genesis port. They regretted having botched it in many interviews to come, especially since the Genesis hardware is similar to the Amiga.
• Starflight was a port of a PC game. The star map is shrunken and simplified, the vast exploration of planetary maps (which didn't use much data on computers due to some processing tricks) have been replaced by a more arcadey minigame. The plot and alien interaction are also stripped down. While the Genesis port is actually larger than the PC version, incorporating a number of the improvements from Starflight 2, such as more meaningful ship upgrades and artifacts that actually do things, it did introduce an irritating bug that rendered a quest to disable the Uhlek impossible to complete.
• Sword of Sodan was already a game of dubious quality on its home Amiga, but the EA-published Genesis port somehow made it even worse, with awkward controls coupled with poor hit detection on your weakened weapon strikes, and in a case of creating a problem only to not fix it, it added in enemies able to come at you from the left, forcing you to sluggishly turn your character to face them and then back to advance. It also cut a couple of stages, but that might be considered a positive depending on your perspective.
• Time Killers was a port of an already horrible arcade game that was released four years after the original. The result wasn't pretty, with even more crippled controls and overall horrible presentation.
• Todd's Adventures in Slime World is a port of the Atari Lynx game which has audio that can be accurately described as Sensory Abuse. It also lacks sprite scaling, a feature of the Lynx predating the Super NES's Mode 7 that the game was designed to show off at every opportunity, with nothing done to compensate. It overall manages to look worse than the original, an achievement for a port to a console allowing up to 64 colors on the screen from a handheld that could only manage 16.
• Turbo OutRun: With Hertz doing a respectable job at porting the original OutRun to the Genesis, it would seem natural for Sega to contract them again for the sequel. Unfortunately, Sega handed the porting duties for Turbo OutRun to Tiertex instead, a company with a spotty track record of butchering home conversions of popular arcade games, which resulted in the Genesis version having worse graphics and sound quality, with many of the more elaborate background effects missing, as well as jerkier controls.
• Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair had hideous graphics, even worse music than the arcade version, and only 9 stages as opposed to the arcade's 14. By contrast, the TurboGrafx-CD version had near arcade-perfect graphics, retained all of the arcade game's stages and added a rockin' Red Book audio soundtrack. Worse, all of the modern rereleases of the game are based on this version; don't fix these issues and except for the Japan-only PS2 Sega Ages version, don't include the arcade version. The Virtual Console has both the Genesis and TurboGrafx-CD versions.
• World Heroes is an absolute train wreck on the Sega Genesis. Broken controls and physics, mediocre graphics and sounds, most of the soundtrack being cut (made even worse with a few of the music tracks left being played on the wrong stages), and a generic A Winner Is You ending instead of the character-specific ones from the original arcade version. A later developer interview revealed that it was a bonafide Troubled Production: it was mainly programmed by one person, a novice programmer handed the job after his predecessor turned out to be a Con Man, who was forced to write the whole thing from scratch with little time to work on it and only a post-compilation assembly dump of the source code to work with!

Super NES/Super Famicom

• Another World has better sound than the Sega Genesis version of the game, but it suffers very frequent slowdown, especially when there's a lot of laser fire on-screen. Despite this, there's still Loads and Loads of Loading, sometimes as long as twenty seconds between screens, a rarity on an SNES cartridge.
• Brandish, Koei's SNES port of a Japanese PC-98 game, is legendary for having one of the worst control schemes in the history of gaming, one that renders the game almost unplayable for many players. The original used a mouse and keyboard control system similar to Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder that didn't translate that well to an SNES controller.
• Captain America and the Avengers. Flickering graphics, unresponsive controls, missing voiceovers, Mercy Invincibility given to the enemies instead of the heroes as the arcade original did and making the game much harder were only some of its problems. The most glaring flaw? Despite being a cartridge edition, it still took over a minute to load the first stage!
• The DOOM port does have a few points in the "Pro" column like being mostly uncensored (unlike the infamous SNES version of Wolfenstein 3-D), retaining more levels than some other ports along with all weapons and enemies from the original, having a truly excellent take on the PC version's MIDI soundtrack, and coming on a spiffy-looking red cartridge. As for the Cons, though, the graphics are very muddy and heavily pixelated, floor and ceiling textures have been removed, the number of enemy sprites have been reduced so that they "crab-walk" and always face the player, several levels are still cut, and perhaps worst of all, the control scheme will not let you turn and strafe at the same time, eliminating the best strategy for dealing with the game's heavy hitters. That DOOM was able to be ported to the SNES in the first place is impressive and it's actually not the worst console version of the game (that dishonor goes to the Sega 32X port), but it unfortunately does sit near the bottom of the list, regardless.
• Final Fight had a port that was widely considered a disappointment at the time of its release. Due to a combination of Capcom rushing the game out the door to make it a launch title for the Super Famicom, a lack of larger cartridge sizes at the time and the limitations of the SNES hardware, the port wound up being a pale imitation of the arcade original. The amount of enemies onscreen at once was reduced to three and yet despite this the game was very laggy. Additionally, both Guy and the Industrial Area were cut from the game. The worse part however was the removal of the two player mode—a staple of the genre. The port sold well at the time but would quickly be outclassed by Konami's port of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, which proved that an arcade Beat 'em Up could successfully be translated to the console.^note Those wishing to play Final Fight on a home console would be wise to pick up the Sega CD version, considered by far and away to be the most faithful port. Or the Capcom CPS Changer port, though considering how expensive CPS Changer games are (and the fact that they're all but impossible to find outside of Japan) it would probably be cheaper to just buy a Final Fight arcade cabinet
• Mickey Mania, despite being a cartridge-based game, somehow has loading times longer than the CD-based versions of the game for the Sega CD and PlayStation; the Sega Genesis version has no loading times at all. It's missing a stage present in all other versions of the game: the rotating tower area in the second level. It's anyone's guess as to why; the Sega Genesis version even had some Genius Programming to emulate the Mode-7 effects in this stage that the SNES could naturally do. There's a nearly identical stage that appears toward the end of the game that also uses Mode-7... but for some reason, that level wasn't removed in the SNES version. The sound quality on the SNES is better as a result of the developers having access to sample-based sound hardware instead of the Mega Drive/Genesis's YM2612 synth, but the controls suffer.
• The SNES port of the original Mortal Kombat (1992) was most infamous for the heavily sanitized fatalities and gray sweat, but its ugliness is more than skin-deep. Its controls were very unresponsive, and it was plagued with poor hit detection that made most combos impossible to perform and a bug where if both players threw projectiles, the first hit would make both projectiles disappear instead of having the players trade hits as in the arcade. Series creator Ed Boon actually apologized for the poor quality of the SNES port. All of this stemmed from wasting time on a half-baked idea to make Goro a playable character in the SNES version to give it a unique feature to make up for the inevitable Nintendo-required censorship, preventing Sculptured Software from properly optimizing the controls and still make the mandated street date. And it came off even worse in PAL territories because of the processor timing differences. The Genesis version, which was uglier in the graphics and sound department but more responsive and playable and much less censored (in fact, it had the now-famous ABACABB code that removed all censorship altogether) outsold the SNES version on a three-to-one basis. It proved to be bad publicity for Nintendo and they allowed Acclaim to release the port of the sequel uncensored.
• Oscar was an average platformer for Amiga and MS-DOS. The Amiga version at least has a catchy soundtrack and excellent animation to make up for the fact that the gameplay was average, while the DOS version had a slightly tarnished reputation due to its butchered soundtrack (especially when you're coming from the Amiga version) and unoptimized graphics^note the title screen background animation on was jerky and clearly dropping frames while the logo was made static compared to the Amiga, which still managed a silky smooth background animation while having a smoothly animated logo and a soundtrack leagues beyond the MS-DOS version, had random bouts of slowdowns on older PCS, and is visibly inferior if run side by side with the Amiga version. You would think that it would be improved by porting it to a more powerful system like the SNES, but instead not only are the graphics just as unoptimized as the DOS version, the play mechanics were ruined. And if you think what they did to the DOS soundtrack was bad, what they did to the SNES soundtrack is even worse^note sounding like the musician doesn't even remotely have a sense of rhythm. This is the DOS version running on an AdLib chip. And this is the SNES version. For comparison, here's the Amiga original. Both the DOS and SNES ports were published by Titus Software.
• Pit-Fighter, a port of a mediocre Atari arcade game, is an Obvious Beta. It features stiff and unresponsive controls, a repetitive soundtrack and muffled sound effects, a game that is hard for the wrong reasons, and The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard. There are also no continues and only one life, Ty being a Game-Breaker when used correctly (if you can figure that out), and beating the game only gives you a text-only ending, followed by the Game Over screen. The Genesis port turned out far better.
• Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow & the Flame, handled by Titus Software of Superman 64 infamy, featured bad controls, mistimed and glitchy play mechanics, a Game-Breaking Bug in the form of one specific mook that crashes the game when he dies, and screens that scroll only because the display tiles are too wide. Several story sequences were removed, and the game ends at Stage 13, with Jaffar appearing as an underwhelming Anticlimax Boss. It reeks of pure atrocity next to the amazing SNES version of the first game, handled by Arsys Software Inc.
• Race Drivin', the sequel to Hard Drivin', managed to be even worse than the Mega Drive port, with an extremely low framerate, short draw distances, inexcusably slippery controls, and most of the screen being taken by the HUD.^note Almost any "Worst SNES games ever" list will feature Race Drivin' and Pit Fighter in the top (or bottom) 2 spots, the order usually depending on which game the author played more recently. There's bad games, and then there's clearly unfinished and barely functional games. Race Drivin' and Pit Fighter are firmly in the latter group. A Game Mod exists that addresses the low frame rate by implementing the SNES' SA-1 chip (most notably used in Super Mario RPG). The difference is like night and day.
• Like the Dragon's Lair NES port before it, Space Ace is a port in name only, being released on a cartridge with limited ROM space on a system that couldn't hope to reproduce the Interactive Movie approach of the arcade original. It's a rather awkward action game with stages based on scenes from the original. Dexter took only one hit before he died, the jumping is a disaster, Dexter's sprite is oversized, and he moves too slow.
• Ultima VII had its plot butchered as a result of Nintendo's strict Standards and Practices at the time. The double homicide that starts the plot of the game is replaced with a double kidnapping, and it only goes downhill from there. The entire combat system and party system that defined the original game is dispensed with altogether in favor of a Zelda-style action RPG format in which the Avatar wanders around alone whacking snakes and bats with his sword. The PSP port included on EA Replay is based on this version. The Japan-only port of Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire for the Super Famicom has all of these issues as well.
• Ultima: Runes of Virtue II somehow ended up being an inferior port of a Game Boy game. Not only were all the character portraits completely redesigned for no obvious reason (the Game Boy original had them adapted from Ultima VI), but the game's overall graphical style was changed to a much more cartoonish one that seemed ill-suited to the series. On top of that, the already-spotty hit detection of the Game Boy version was made vastly worse, and the animations that indicated when you were being hit were removed, making battles a major chore.
• Urban Strike has the same graphics and sounds as the Genesis original, but the action slows down immensely the moment anything other than the player's own helicopter was on screen. In a confounding design decision, the button for jinking (strafing) was mapped to one of the face buttons, while the SNES versions of the previous two games had it conveniently mapped to the shoulder buttons which allowed it to not interfere with firing weapons. The game doesn't have many options to reconfigure the controls, either.

Philips CD-i

• Arcade Classics was a sort of precursor to Namco Museum and featured Ms. Pac-Man, Galaxian, and Galaga, all based on their NES counterparts. Ms. Pac-Man in particular, while being the only game in the collection to receive a graphical overhaul, is painfully slugish except on the highest difficulty, but even then the difficulty cranked up to the max, the ghosts' AI seems to have been dumbed down, as they'll run around the maze at random instead of actively chasing the player. Even if you are right in front of them, they will likely turn a corridor away from you. That doesn't mean you won't die anyway thanks to the game's spotty controls. To a lesser extent, the port of Galaga. For some reason the playfield is cropped into a window making the graphics blurry and your hitbox is bigger, ramping up the difficulty.
• Dark Castle has even worse controls than the Genesis version, with one button being used to jump, duck or interact with objects; perhaps to compensate, it plays very sluggishly. It has better graphics than the Genesis version, but the screen is severely cropped. The list of high scores gets cluttered up quickly because you can save after dying, can continue from that save with no score penalty, and not have your previous high score erased... assuming you actually get anywhere, what with the godawful controls, swarms of enemies everywhere, and incredibly long hit stun whenever you trip over practically anything.
• Tetris on the Philips CD-i is a uniquely bad port, as its problem is that its visuals are too good compared to the original. They decided to add nature scenes with the classic board sitting on some piece of the scenery, which ended up shrinking the playing field and making it a bit harder to see (and often annoyingly off-center).

Atari Jaguar

• Space Ace got a release for the ill-fated Jaguar CD add-on. For some reason, the visual cues appear after the game expects you to perform the commands, killing you before you can even do anything. Space Ace is an Interactive Movie where the game consists solely of pressing buttons when ordered; messing with the visual cues makes the whole thing completely unplayable.

Sega Saturn

• Akumajo Dracula X: Gekka no Yasokyoku^note "Devil Castle Dracula X: Nocturne in the Moonlight", a Saturn port of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night which never left Japan, attempted to add some additional features by making Maria playable and adding two new areas. Unfortunately, the novelty of the new features are quickly cancelled out by the actual quality of the port itself: the added areas do not match the overall graphical level of the original PS version at all, the game suffers from constant slowdown when the screen is filled with enemies, most of the graphical transparency effects are lost or replaced with dithering, and the game loads before and after entering the transition rooms between areas (you know, those rooms that were there to lessen the loading times in the first place). It also loads when entering or exiting the main menu and because the Saturn controller doesn't have as many buttons as the PS1 one, there's no dedicated button to open the map: as a result, you need to enter the main menu every time you want to check the map, meaning a process that took a second on a PS1 now takes around 30 seconds.
• Daytona USA was rushed for the Saturn's release, and it shows. The draw distance is extremely short and the framerate was reduced to 20FPS, which often dips down. The Saturn was known from the beginning to not be as powerful as the Model 2 arcade board, but games such as Sega Rally Championship and Virtua Fighter 2 ran rather well. However, the game controls well and the CD music is great.
• Gekirindan suffers from wobble scrolling (meaning that you need to fly all the way up to see what's going on at the top), micro-stuttering, graphical issues such as the rotating space colony in the first stage, sound effect quality is subpar, and loads when getting to the stage boss.
• Layer Section II, a Japan-only Saturn port of RayStorm, despite having a few novelties over the PlayStation version such a playable R-GRAY 0 without playing 13 Ship Mode and CGI cutscenes between stages, the system's notorious 3D handicap couldn't handle a shoot 'em up such as this, unlike its predecessor. The graphics were downgraded with worse visual effects but not even these changes could prevent the frequent frame rates that plague this port, which brings the gameplay to a slow crawl and introduces input lag. Many of the game's sound effects and music also sounds worse compared to other home ports of the game.
• Phantasmagoria was ported to the Saturn in Japan under the shortened title Phantasm with Japanese voice acting. While the translation and dubbing remain faithful to the original PC version, the graphics and FMV sequences were downgraded due to the console's lack of video decompression, making it harder to see what you're doing. The game was also heavily censored, limiting Carno's wives' death scenes to a few shots of Carno and Adrienne's reactions. There's also the fact that the game was released on eight discs, which is one more than the original PC release.
• The Saturn port of SimCity 2000 may be the same game as on computers, but suffers from graphics that are incredibly murky and blurry. Making things worse is a clunky interface that does not translate intuitively to use on a gamepad and slowdown that becomes increasingly worse the larger your city becomes. You also only have one save file: a major downgrade from the computer versions which allowed you to save as many games as your hard drive had room for.
• The Saturn version of Time Commando, released exclusively in Japan, suffers from bad framerates, lower quality character models that lack lighting and dithering, and a nasty Game-Breaking Bug that crashes the game upon reaching a specific point in the second Future level, rendering the game unwinnable.
• The Sega Saturn port of Waku Waku 7, despite utilizing the 1MB RAM Cartridge, suffers from crippling slowdown (especially noticeable during the Final Boss battle against Fernandez/Fernandeath), long load times, frame rate issues, and decreased details of the backgrounds, in which they look extremely pixelated.

PlayStation

• Evo's Space Adventures, the PS1 port of Space Station Silicon Valley, worse graphics and cutscenes, shoddy analogue programming that causes every character to move very slowly, whole levels cut out, and just generally poor design. The only thing that it has over the N64 is that a Game-Breaking Bug that prevented 100% Completion was fixed.^note The souvenir trophy for one level lacked collision detection on Nintendo 64. The original team had little input beyond providing the models and textures.
• Creatures, in addition to compressed graphics, removed the virtual genetics, which was one of the primary things that set Creatures apart from other artificial life and pet sims. The lack of Game Mods for the console versions is also a problem.
• Descent is a piece of absolute garbage. Though it features the awesome soundtrack from the Macintosh version, as well as remixes of the licensed songs (by Ogre of Skinny Puppy and Type O Negative) from Descent II, it is completely ruined by blocky graphics (enemies are hardly visible at distances), slideshow-level framerate (making firefights in large rooms nearly unplayable) and awkward controls (no analog support unless the player uses the rare Analog Joystick or the original Dual Analog pad, and even then it still kind of sucks). Inexcusable even by early PS standards.
• Duke Nukem: Total Meltdown has some things going for it, such as enhanced music and sounds, upgraded cinematics, a quicksave feature absent from other console ports, and a new episode exclusive to it. Unfortunately, these are significantly weighed down by the frame rate issues, grainy graphics, and limited control customization options. Most egregiously, it does not have split-screen multiplayer despite the Nintendo 64 port having it, meaning that the only way to play multiplayer is for everybody to have their own consoles and copies of the game.
• The version of Final Fantasy V on this system was the first version with an official English localization. Unfortunately, it was saddled with a number of issues:
  • A terrible localization that translates Sarisa (Faris' true identity) as Salsa, gives Faris a pirate accent that made most of her dialogue incomprehensible, and has a Translation Trainwreck of enemy names that can be hilariously awful (Sucker is translated as Soccer, Exdeath is translated as X-Death, Wyvern is translated as Y Burn, Tonberry is translated as Dinglberry). The European version is also in English only, in a region where translations to French and German are needed.
  • The encounter rate is higher than the SNES or GBA versions.
  • Butchered MIDI arrangements of Nobuo Uematsu's classic soundtrack, the black label version's corrupted save system that made the initial PS1 version incompatible with anything newer than the first PlayStation, ^note This is an extremely rare case of a PS1 game being incompatible with newer systems, and given the reliability of the backwards compatibility on the PS2 and PS3; this is really saying something.
• Hexen looks like it was made on a slightly modified version of Doom's SNES port engine, complete with enemies animated only on the face side, the poor framerate and a pretty low screen resolution (hence that, poor visibility); but what was excusable for a 16-bit console, doesn't do the job for 32 bits, however. The levels were also cut in this way or another, which lead to turning some of the ladders into elevators, torches obviously hanging in the air, green serpents being completely replaced either with the centaurs or brown serpents. And on top of all that, the savegame has occupied the entire memory card, leading to a whole minute of saving or loading the game. On the plus side, it had a lot of different control layouts, as well as Redbook-quality music and the exclusive CG movies, but that's it.
• Hidden and Dangerous removes the squad-based elements entirely (the player's teammates became, in effect, extra lives), has massively cruder graphics, is first-person only and is generally dumbed down.
• The sequel to Krush Kill n' Destroy was lucky enough to get a port of its own, which, despite the removal of most of the units' voice samples, didn't had a whole ton of obvious bugs... Moreover, it had a split-screen versus mode which is rarely met among RTS games, and that would imply that Krossfire would be great for a quick and friendly skirmish, if only it wasn't for the controls. In a nutshell, the port ditches the traditional C&C-like the interface of the original version... only to replace it with a menu-based squad selection system, which takes a while to use and an even longer while to figure out how it works. Moreover, the feature list makes it clear that the developers were intentionally messing up with your well-established reflexes:
  The control method has been custom-designed for the PlayStation, allowing you to order your units to the front line, ready for action or to their deaths.
• Independence Day suffers from poor graphics, horrible framerates, and low-quality cutscenes. Thankfully, the Sega Saturn game was better.
• The PlayStation port of LEGO Racers already suffered from muddled down visuals which weren't anything too unexpected, but it suffers from very noticeable input lag. In a game genre that requires quick reflexes. It's not minuscule either, the lag is extremely noticeable if you've played any other version of the game. The game is nearly completely unplayable due to this issue, and it's compounded by a lot of other problems the ports suffer from too, such as Loads and Loads of Loading.
• London Racer is a brutally bad port of a competent PC game. The soundtrack was completely removed, leaving you to race in silence. The translation was butchered, with various Dutch words left untouched. And that’s before reaching the gameplay itself, which has many egregious issues. The original game had three leagues, each with progressively better cars, while this port has only one, with cars equivalent to the first league of the original. The courses themselves are stripped down, with many invisible walls blocking what were originally legitimate routes. Whereas the original game had seven car races, this version has only four competitors on the track. The police system was also changed to make it much harder than necessary, where instead of them needing to force you to a stop to issue a warning like the original, here they can just barely scrape you and that’ll count as a warning, along with them choosing to Gang Up on the Human whereas they would chase the AI opponents in the original game. All this adds up to make a decent budget game on the PC into one of the worst games on the PS1.
• Mortal Kombat 3 suffered 8-second load times when Shang Tsung morphed.
• Puzznic is a port of an arcade game that for some reason doesn't have the music from the original. That is if you're playing the US version; the Japanese and European releases have music. The kicker: The music works on PS1 emulators.
• Rayman 2: The Great Escape had a PS1 port released a year after its original release, and was handled by Ubisoft Shanghai rather than the Montpellier studio. While the graphical downgrade was to be expected, the number of changes made to this version are noticeable, such as the removal of several levels (Rayman now has to collect 800 yellow lums as opposed to the original's 1000).
• Shadow Man was abysmal on PS, in part because the system was far too underpowered to handle such a massive game. Originally made for PC, the game saw minor cuts to content for the N64 and Dreamcast ports, but were still generally intact, had most of the original content (amazingly, the N64 cartridge was able to hold nearly all the maps with only a few minor rooms cut, plus nearly all the audio and cutscenes intact), and were playable. PS port, however... the textures were very low resolution and grainy, controls were awful, and not only are the load times quite long, but the noises the system makes while accessing the data sounds as if your system is about to tear itself apart. While most versions of this game got good critical praise, the PS version was panned.
• South Park, a port of the N64 game by Iguana, was an unfinished bug-ridden disaster with inconsistent framerate, bad draw distance, poor audio quality, and even using footage of the N64 version as FMV. The multiplayer maps aren't named like they are on the PC and N64 versions, instead, they are all just named "DM(Number)" which makes the game feel like an Obvious Beta. In a bizarre inversion of how it usually is, the game even cuts out content from the N64 version which was on a cartridge.
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and 4 are effectively downgraded ports of the PS2 versions made only for a quick cash-in aimed at players who hadn't bought a more powerful console yet. It should be said that 3 manages to be a good game by running smoothly and having unique features to it, but 4 is a total disaster. Instead of being made by Shaba Games like THPS3's port was, 4's port was headed by Vicarious Visions. They were known for the amazing ports of Tony Hawk to the GBA, so who knows what happened here. The levels barely resembled their 6th-gen counterparts, the physics were wonky, the level design was terrible, the graphics looked unfinished, it was nigh impossible to do a lip trick, the songs were censored to the point of absurdity, and it was filled with glitches.
• Total Eclipse Turbo runs at a faster framerate than the original on 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, which isn't a good thing in this case since the game's speed is tied to the framerate, making the game unplayably fast and twitchy on PlayStation.
• X-Men vs. Street Fighter for the PlayStation, unlike the Japan-only Saturn port, had no support for RAM expansion due to lack of any cartridge port on the console. As a result, the PS version has choppy animation due to many frames removed, eternal loading times and most importantly of all, lacks the tag-team mechanics of the arcade original; instead, the player's second character acts as a glorified assist character (unless the pairs are matched against an identical pair). The PS versions of Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter and Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes were significantly improved, but they still lacked the tag-team feature.
• The two Humongous Entertainment game ports by Runecraft weren't trainwrecks by any means, but they were still badly screwed up. Their port of Pajama Sam 3: You Are What You Eat From Your Head to Your Feet suffered from Loads and Loads of Loading, an awkwardly upped frame rate (it's like everyone is on steroids), some cutscenes, animations, and music being completely removed for no reason at all, and bad controls in a game where all you do is point and click (according to one of the programmers who had worked on the port, they had to rebuild the entire game completely from scratch, which explains why this version turned out to be so sloppy). Their port of Backyard Soccer (which was actually based on the MLS Edition, without the pros, even though it has the same intro) wasn't much better, which had awkward controls and an incredibly simplistic physics engine rather than the more realistic one found on the PC version. Just for the record, the Game Boy Advance versions were closer to their PC counterparts in terms of physics than this.
• San Francisco Rush received a terrible PS1 port. The game contained only four tracks (compared with the N64 version's six), the graphics were sloppily drawn, the soundtrack was even worse than the original's, and the stunts were horribly downgraded. The game did, however, contain one thing the Arcade and N64 versions lacked: Weather conditions.
• Dancing Stage Fever (2003) and Dancing Stage Fusion (2004) were released in Europe for the PlayStation and the PlayStation 2. In other regions, Konami had shifted DanceDanceRevolution home console releases exclusively to PS2 beginning with the Japanese and North American home console releases of DDRMAX (both released in 2002). The PlayStation versions of "Fever" and "Fusion" are both reskins of the 4th Mix/Konamix engine (with the latter also pasting in graphics from DDR Extreme as well), and thus include fewer songs and modify those that remain to conform with its limitations, such as removing Freeze Arrows (see "Kakumei" for example).

Nintendo 64

• Cruis'n USA has muddier graphics compared to the 1994 arcade original, with a low draw distance, wonky framerate, and worst of all, the music picked a fight with a MIDI composer and lost. It also suffered from Nintendo's Censorship Bureau. But what makes this example especially egregious is that Nintendo and Midway touted the arcade version as a Tech-Demo Game for the then-upcoming Nintendo 64 (then called Nintendo Ultra 64) while claiming that the game ran on actual Ultra 64 hardware and that an "arcade-perfect" port would be on the console proper. Not only was the final Nintendo 64 version far from arcade-perfect, but the arcade version actually ran on a proprietary Midway arcade board that was nothing like what was used in the N64. Despite this, the fact that Midway had two full years to get it right makes the result inexcusable.
• The port of Off-Road Challenge suffers from jittery framerates (even the menus slow down!), annoying music, a sparse selection of tracks, and a lame two-player mode.
• Daikatana, as if it wasn't lousy to start with on the PC, somehow got even worse after festering in development for another three months before finally being ported to the Nintendo 64... with significantly worse visuals, distance fog everywhere, and a blurry resolution that makes the game almost impossible to play in multiplayer split-screen. You also can't even use the Daikatana. The sole improvement the Nintendo 64 version makes over the original is the omission of the much-maligned partner system.
• StarCraft features excessively clunky UI and unit handling as well as considerably worse graphics and audio. Just the thought of trying to play an RTS with the N64 controller should tell how terrible the port was. Somewhat justifiable, not all the game's content is available without the usage of the Expansion Pak (extra 4MB of memory). This port did however give us the extra mission Resurrection IV where Alexei Stukov is resurrected. Its storyline is considered canon.
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1-3 were ports that had, unfortunately, fallen victim to the N64's shortcomings. The draw distance was lower. The trick controls had to be mapped to the C buttons because of the controller's design. Every single FMV had to be cut out, which means that the intro was replaced with in-game footage, and you got no reward for beating the game (whereas in the PS and Dreamcast versions, you get skater-specific video clips and bail compilations) due to the game having to be cut down to fit in a 16MB cartridge, which was 40 times smaller than the PS game. And also due to that filesize, there were only 6 songs in Pro Skater 1 and 2 (as opposed to 11 in the PS version of Pro Skater 1, 13 in the European release of Pro Skater 1, and 15 in Pro Skater 2) and they all had to be cut down to less than a minute^note Some of the songs in the PS version were also clipped short, but not to this extent. Some of the songs in Pro Skater 1 were cut down to an instrumental. Most of them cut out after the first chorus, or sometimes even halfway through the second verse. The songs looped frequently, which means that you had to turn the soundtrack off to actually enjoy the game. This is Tony Hawk we're talking about. The N64 port for the third game was the last (official) game to ever come out for the N64. Talk about a bad way to end your console's lifespan.
• Carmageddon 64. The game suffered from blurry and outdated graphics, horrible framerates, clunky play control, and worst of all, the humans you could run over in the PC original were replaced with green-blooded zombies, completely ruining the game's whole selling point.
• The first Mega Man Legends game, renamed Mega Man 64, had several issues compared to the original PlayStation version; the draw distance was shorter in most areas, the voices were downsampled to fit on the smaller cartridge, and the CD Samples in the Apple Market CD store were taken out completely. The game suffers slowdowns whenever too many objects are onscreen at once, and there is also a glitch in which standing on moving objects can cause Mega Man Volnutt to slowly slide either to the left or right and fall off. Finally, the music that played over the credits was removed, and one of the generic town themes plays over it instead.

Dreamcast

• Sega Smash Pack Volume 1 was a compilation of older games known for its poorly done emulation of Genesis games. Sonic the Hedgehog had horribly mangled audio, tended to lag, and suffer from glitches absent from the original Genesis games. So did Vectorman. Every Genesis game features awful sound effects and music (Golden Axe being the worst offender), which had reviewers claiming they reached dreaded Atari 2600 levels at times. Especially sad given how many times more powerful the Dreamcast was than the Genesis. The only exceptions to the aforementioned mess were Virtua Cop 2, which ported the passable but unspectacular PC version, and Sega Swirl, a puzzle game that the earliest Dreamcast owners already had anyway.
• Sega Rally 2 suffered from poor framerates, despite being as powerful as the Model 3 arcade machine, which ran the game at 60FPS. There was even a code to enable a 60FPS mode, but even then the game still suffered frequent framerate drops. The game was ported using Windows CE, which meant it emulated the PC version of the game. Because of this, the Dreamcast's full potential was not being used. The European/Australian version ran even worse, with ugly-looking black borders at the top of the screen and a worse framerate.
• Worms: World Party was a decent port from the PC version, except for the atrocious network code. The most notable of the many Game Breaking Bugs was the lobby system bug — if anyone disconnected from a lobby at any time (including leaving to another lobby before a match starts, disconnecting during a match, or skipping the post-match wrap-up stats) everyone in that lobby would have to power down (not reset) their Dreamcast, or else everyone's game would be stuck forever on the lobby screen the next time it showed up.
• Mortal Kombat Gold, a port of Mortal Kombat 4, got additional characters but at the expense of being buggier than any other version of the game. And despite the Dreamcast specs being more powerful than the original Midway Zeus machine the arcade version ran on, the graphics were still inferior, with numerous visual effects missing. This was the result of the game being ported from the PC version, which in turn was based on the PlayStation version. About a month after this botched port's release, Midway released an updated version that fixes most of its issues.^note It can be distinguished by the red/white disc art (unlike the original's yellow/black disc art) and a "Hot! New!" logo on the cover.
• The Dreamcast port of Slave Zero was an unfinished mess shovelled out to cash in the successful launch of the system. The entire soundtrack besides the intro and ending credits themes was excised. The framerate was low and unstable and severely dipped during the cutscenes, making them nearly incomprehensible. Many enemies and non-hostile NPCs were removed from the levels, with one enemy type (the giant green mecha-spiders in the sewer levels) being removed entirely. The main menu was glitched when the console was set to languages other than English, and the port introduced many ridiculous bugs such as falling infinitely from a bottomless pit or getting killed by a cutscene in the first level and becoming invincible as a result.
• The Dreamcast port of Soldier of Fortune suffers from frequent and insanely slow loading that make Sonic 06 look speedy in comparison.

PlayStation 2

• Arcana Heart 2 suffered extreme lag in sound, game speed and graphics (of particular note being horribly pixelated sprites). Some players may be able to adapt to such shortcomings, but it is still a disappointment compared to the original arcade version.
• Arctic Thunder, a port of an arcade snowmobile racer, suffers from screen pixellation and a really bad framerate. Since the graphics do not nearly touch the potential of the PS2 (even for a game made in 2001), it's clear that Inland Productions was pretty lazy in porting this game over. It also supports only two players, compared to four from the Xbox version (which, by the way, is a Polished Port).
• Grandia II has incredible slowdown on the PS2 compared to the Dreamcast original; the Dreamcast had massive amounts of Video RAM, which Grandia II was designed to take full advantage of by making most spell animations into elaborate prerendered videos. Also included were a rather distinct drop in resolution, the occasional unannounced complete game lock-up, and a lot of the characters' announcements of their moves are either muted or, worse yet, not actually synced with their moves. There was also how characters in combat would sometimes turn completely white for the duration of the battle, and AI glitches could result in some battles never-ending.
• Every Guitar Hero game for PS2 after II suffers from this.
  • Guitar Hero III couldn't cope with some of the busier songs and suffers from clear lagging and skipping issues — a game breaker for a Rhythm Game. (See "Knights of Cydonia" and "One" for examples.) It's pretty clear that the game was primarily developed for PS3 and Xbox 360 hardware, and every other platform was hacked up from that (the PC version is, save for some controller modifications, a direct port of the 360 version). Oddly enough, the PS2 port was rated higher on Metacritic than the 360 version.
  • World Tour had very downgraded graphics and Loads and Loads of Loading. When creating a character, it can take up to 10 seconds for each piece of hair and clothing to load.
  • Guitar Hero 5 and Band Hero on PS2 are just the game's content bolted onto the World Tour engine (not unlike the Dancing Stage examples for the original PlayStation). As a result, they suffer from the same problems as World Tour, if not more, and they do not have any of the major improvements the PS3/360/Wii counterparts received, such as the upgraded engine, multiplayer improvements, Career challenges, and so-on.
• Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life was a GameCube title originally, so it makes sense for the PS2 port to cut some corners to accommodate the weaker hardware, but it's still considerably duller looking and almost unbearably laggy and slow, so the added features (one new bachelorette, as well as the option to have a daughter, and gameplay upgrades introduced in Distaff Counterpart) generally do not make up for it.
• killer7, originally designed for the GCN, received a PS2 port that was generally derided for its slightly inferior graphics, less responsive controls, occasional framerate problems, and most of all, significantly longer load times.
• Max Payne 1 and 2 on PS2 are inferior in every way to the Xbox and PC versions. Max Payne 1 in particular suffered from lousy controls, long loading times, poor framerate and no ability to save whenever you want, unlike the other versions. Max Payne 2 was not much better, though this time you could save at any time you wanted, there was no autosave feature meaning if you got really far without saving the game via the pause menu, you would lose lots of progress and have to start again. It also suffered from lots of blurry, pixelated textures, still lousy controls, really long loading times (sometimes even during the levels), parts of levels being cut out and missing sound effects. While there was still fun to be had with the games on the PS2, they were only good for players who didn't own an Xbox or a capable PC.
• Mega Man Anniversary Collection suffers from input lag, a game-breaking flaw for a game that requires such quick reflexes.
• Mushihime Sama doesn't properly emulate the slowdown of the arcade original, causing the PS2 port to be more difficult than intended and moments where the game suddenly slows down or speeds back up. It doesn't run at its native resolution, either — playing the game in vertical mode reveals that the game's resolution has been scaled down.
• Psychonauts (Which was done by a different developer and not Double Fine themselves unlike the Xbox and PC versions) apparently had its controls dipped in molasses during the porting process, and it also suffers from framerate issues, long loading times, and occasional crashes. And woe betides you if you had to play the European/Australian version. Sound effects playing a random length of time after the trigger, the music loops go out of sync, the cutscene camera being in the wrong place, event triggers occurring out of order, Raz randomly getting stuck on thin air...
• Rainbow Six 3 was a port of the Xbox version which 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".
• Ribbit King was developed with the GameCube in mind, and it shows. The shading is noticeably inferior (particularly in the F.U.V., where everything is inexplicably garishly bright), it suffers from frequent and oftentimes catastrophic frame rate drops (sometimes reaching the single digits), the textures and graphics sometimes glitch out, and it often freezes for a few seconds just to load the AI opponent's shot.
• Rock Band played correctly, but most of the cool features were cut out. To work around the console's graphical limitations, each song used a pre-rendered video with a preset band, with the gameplay UI overlaid on top, which meant that character customization had to go. The Band World Tour mode was also stripped down into a more Guitar Hero-like career setup, and for obvious reasons, there was no Downloadable Content.
• Secret Agent Clank suffers from loading times of over a minute in length, as well as very noticable graphical glitches
• Sega's GameCube to PS2 ports are notorious for being some of the worst ports on the platform, not that it stopped most of these from obtaining the "Greatest Hits" label due to strong sales figures:
  • Sonic Heroes has a much lower framerate than the Xbox, GCN, and PC versions, only running at 30 FPS (as opposed to 60 FPS on the others) as well as having lower resolution textures and lower poly character models in comparison to the other three versions. This would be an understandable compromise if not for the frequent slowdown. It also suffered longer loading times than Sonic 06. It's no wonder GameSpot and IGN gave the PS2 version the lowest score out of all three releases.^note  Rumor has it Executive Meddling played a role here as Sony apparently told Sega that unless this game was released on the PlayStation 2, they would forfeit the right to publish anything else on the platform. So Sega had to take an in-house engine they were working with and discard it in favor of Criterion Games' RenderWare multi-platform game architecture, with the redevelopment required harming the stability of the end product.
  • Shadow the Hedgehog is even worse, consistently running below 30 FPS (with Lethal Highway routinely falling into the early teens). The framerate is so bad that Shadow often passes through rings instead of grabbing them due to the collision not being able to keep up. The port also has absurdly low draw distance and bad controls.
  • Sonic Riders has absurdly long loading times which last longer than the actual cutscenes and stages, and features even more lag than Shadow which even hits the tutorial's menu option (the pre-rendered video displayed when hovering over the option lags) and the announcer's voice clips (which are full of random pauses of up to several seconds in length).
  • While it fares better than the Sonic games, Super Monkey Ball Deluxe still suffers from lag, a lower FPS cap, missing effects (like reflections) and absurdly long loads. There’s a reason speedrunners of the game overwhelmingly use the Xbox version. ^note For point of comparison, Beginner speedruns take about 5 minutes longer on the PlayStation 2
• Turok: Evolution wasn't a great game to begin with, but the PS2 port was just a trainwreck, with a poor framerate, noticeable texture and model pop-in, faulty hit detection, and a severely nerfed version of the already-shaky AI from the GameCube and Xbox versions. Apparently, the same thing happened here as with the aforementioned Sonic Heroes; Sony threatened Acclaim with dire consequences should the PS2 not get a port, and Acclaim, who were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy as it was (and fell over the precipice not long after), were in no position to refuse, forcing them to hack and slash away at the GameCube version until they had something that would run on the PS2's inferior hardware.
• Vantage Master Japan had a major bug in its PS2 version. Every time the player moves the cursor, the screen pixelates heavily◊. It also doesn't possess any of the extra content that was released for the PC version.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: The Beginning of Destiny, a PS2 port of the first Tag Force game for the PSP, grossly suffers from music that skips around like a broken record, the game lags and locks up when certain cards are played, and worst of all, the one key feature in it that would've been a boon to the game — multiplayer — is taken out. Even the purported extras you can get by linking it up with the second Tag Force game were horribly lacking.

Nintendo GameCube

• The version of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask included on The Legend of Zelda Collector's Edition^note Which was given away to people who had registered a GameCube and two games and later sold with the system itself suffers from several glitches not present in the original N64 version, including music skipping, a myriad of graphical issues, and a few Game-Breaking Bugs that can crash the game, making freezes disturbingly usual. In a game with such strict Save-Game Limits, this can be a huge problem.
• The SpongeBob Movie Game, while not as terrible as some ports, has some downgrades from the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions. These included inconsistent framerates that can go from 60 fps on one stage to 30 fps on another, many missing visual effects and background details, and far more bugs than the other versions (including a Game-Breaking Bug where the game will hang on a loading screen indefinitely, usually if it's been running for a while). This can be at least partly credited to the game's rushed development, as the previous game was developed under less constrained conditions and consequently didn't have these issues.
• The GameCube port of Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex—which was handled by Eurocom rather than Traveller's Tales—suffers from extremely downgraded graphics and abysmal frame rate issues that cause the game to run below 30 frames per second in most levels (you heard right, below 30 frames per second) despite running on more powerful hardware. Additionally, the music that plays in the level Medieval Madness is recycled from a previous level, The Gauntlet, as opposed to the unique theme the level has in the other versions. Eurocom used the Xbox version as a basis for the GameCube port (the Traveller's Tales development team lists three "Xbox Programmers" in the credits), which explains some things.
• The Mega Man Anniversary Collection was downright abysmal on the GameCube. In addition to the input lag found in this version, this one had the developers inexplicably swap the A and B buttons making the games near unplayable for veterans of the series, Dummy Out the controller remap option that could have fixed that, and Mega Man 8 suffered from frame drops, non-looping weird cuts of the music, and improperly pitched sound clips that made the robot masters sound like they'd huffed helium. Yes, it's a Mega Man game with broken music and controls, the two things the series is known best for doing well.
• The GameCube port of Finding Nemo is extremely poorly optimized compared to the PS2 and Xbox versions, with load times often lasting a whole minute, blurrier textures and an inconsistent 30fps framerate compared to the other versions' more consistent 60fps.
• Def Jam: Fight for NY is a rather butchered port that suffers from blocky looking visuals, only having one voice for the main character (as opposed to the choice of four in the other versions) missing several licensed tracks, long load times and a poor framerate.
• While True Crime: New York City wasn't exactly a technical darling on any platform, the GameCube version was by far the worst of the lot. Severely downgraded textures and lighting, a framerate that often drops below 20FPS, and a smorgasbord of additional bugs in a game that was already an Obvious Beta to begin with (including a Game-Breaking Bug that could potentially corrupt your entire memory card). It's such a technical mess that Dolphin, a GameCube and Wii emulator, has a wiki page for the game listing issues not to report as emulation bugs, because the port is just that broken.

Xbox

• Half-Life 2 had some effort put into it on Valve's part, but it's clear that the original Xbox simply did not have the horsepower to make the Source engine shine. Fuzzy textures and some very noticeable framerate problems plague this port.
• 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.
• Unreal II: The Awakening has terribly downgraded graphics, a jerky framerate, and long loading times.
• Metal Slug 3 is a difficult arcade game that expects you to burn up many, many continues to get through each stage. The western Xbox port, however, gives you a limited set of continues which puts you back at the beginning of the current stage. The problem? The fifth and final stage is a Marathon Level that practically takes up half of the game, with several bosses spread throughout. Have fun going through all that with no continues at all.
• The Serious Sam 2 port, though a valiant effort, suffered from a jerky framerate, muddy low-resolution graphics, some missing secrets, and removed the entire final boss battle without offering anything in replacement.
• While nothing that would make the game unplayable, the Xbox port of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty had plenty of performance issues and occasionally severe framerate drops, especially in the intro cinematic and the Harrier boss fight. This was a bit disappointing since the Xbox had a beefier hardware than that PS2, and it was expected that the game would run at least as well as the original.

Xbox 360

• The 360 port of Blood Bowl's original PC version covered everything except for one small omission—online leagues. Removing the online multiplayer leagues from Blood Bowl is the equivalent to removing multiplayer from a fighting game, gutting the main draw of the entire game. The result was best summarized in Angry Joe's review of the game where he was mostly complimentary towards the game in general for most of the review until he got around to mentioning the omission of multiplayer leagues, where his attitude suddenly turned violently nasty. He ended up giving the 360 version a score of 2/10 almost solely for this reason—yeah, it was that big of an omission.
• Bully: Scholarship Edition is an odd duck. Some players reported playing through the entire game with no problems, while others complained of crashes, glitches, unresponsive controls, and errands that refuse to appear. Rockstar released a patch that fixed the problems for some affected players... and reportedly made things worse for others. There does not seem to be any rhyme or reason to who is and is not affected by these problems.
• Dark Messiah was not too bad on PC. The 360 release is... something else entirely. The graphics are terrible, and despite trying to be an RPG, the game flagrantly removes almost every game mechanic associated with the RPG genre to make a linear first-person game. It was an attempt to completely remake the game as something more console-friendly, as Ubisoft had previously done with Far Cry... but while Far Cry Instincts was lauded for its unique direction and all-around quality, Dark Messiah of Might & Magic: Elements didn't turn out quite as well.
• DoDonPachi: DaiOuJou BLACK Label, in addition to the long load times (even when installed to the hard drive), is also rather buggy. One particularly egregious error is when the screen is in Tate mode, all the menus will still be displayed as if it was still in Yoko mode so you have to either tilt your monitor or your head to navigate the menus. The likely reason for all these things? Aqua Systems used the source code from the PS2 version. 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.
• Duke Nukem Forever has inconsistent framerate, constant screen-tearing, poorly implemented shadows, excruciatingly long loading times... In part, it's because the porting was rushed, but given the game's dated visuals and the fact the PS3 version has no such issues (which also makes it more enjoyable), it's not an excuse. However, the DLC The Doctor Who Cloned Me included a patch that has fixed all these issues. Now the blood decals don't flicker, the textures load fully, the framerate drops are extremely rare, etc. Now the game is much more enjoyable, especially since the DLC more or less won back the crowd for the people who played it.
• The Xbox 360 port of Forza Horizon 2 developed by SUMO Digital made a lot of sacrifices, such as removing the weather effects and certain parts of the map that were present in the Xbox One version, along with downgraded textures, which are understandable given the 360's weaker hardware. While it's far from unplayable, this version of the game suffers from pop-in issues, poor collision detection where cars can clip through the ground (and buildings in some cases) or hit invisible walls, and broken physics.
• Guwange runs in letterboxed 16:9 on the Xbox Live Arcade if you are using any resolution that doesn't have a 16:9 aspect ratio (e.g. a standard-ratio CRT screen), on top of the pillar boxing used to fit a vertical screen onto a horizontally oriented monitor. Unless you have a huge widescreen TV or are willing to turn your screen 90 degrees, prepare to play on a very small screen.
• Space Invaders Extreme had its XBLA release featuring neither a stage mode nor a "no continues" mode (rankings are instead done through Arcade Mode and accept scores achieved with continues). As well, the game stretches to fill the entire screen, which means if you're playing on anything other than a 16:9 screen the game will look stretched.
• Lego Jurassic World shipped with an unparalleled Game-Breaking Bug that made the game crash upon start-up, and it still hasn't been patched. All other versions don't have this glitch.
• Supreme Commander suffers from stuttering graphics, framerates as low as 1 FPS when a nuke goes off, and lockups whenever you receive a transmission. Chris Taylor admitted the crappiness of the port and promised that Supreme Commander 2 will be better. At the time of release, only the most powerful PCs could handle it at full detail on the largest maps, and even two years later most players couldn't get good performance on top settings. A console not being able to handle it was a foregone conclusion. The sequel has slightly simpler models and textures to make it more accessible.
• The Sakura Flamingo Archives., a very sought-after (and expensive) compilation of MileStone, Inc. shoot 'em ups released after the company's dissolution, also introduces problems to half of the games featured in this collection on top of being barebones arcade ports lacking extra features and options from prior conversions and compilations.
  • Chaos Field was hit the hardest in this collection. Despite running at higher resolutions and usually better frame-rates, it's missing certain textures and effects, while suffering from horrendous performance issues that occurs during explosions that can bring the game's frame-rate crashing down—sometimes to the point of crashing the entire game.
  • Radirgy in this collection suffers from bizarre micro-stutters whenever it tries to load in-game messages, which happens often in this game.
  • Karous has micro-stutters when loading in-game messages, and bad sound mixing that causes a grating buzzing sound that drowns out the background music whenever the player fires their shots or swings their sword. The same sound problem carries into this collection's own Mixture and Death modes.
  • illvelo and Radirgy Noa have the fewest problems in this collection as they have better performance than in previous ports; however, the standalone versions of these games on the Wii and Xbox 360 respectively offer more modes to play than what this collection has to offer, which makes one question why they should play the Sakura Flamingo Archives. version of these games when their standalone versions and previous ports can be found for a fraction of the price for what it goes for used.
• Wolfenstein: The New Order has no tutorials, meaning you can get stuck at various points because the game won't explain dash-sliding and leaning, and has a Game-Breaking Bug that can jam the system's Bluetooth communications chip, meaning your controller won't stay connected.

Wii

• Far Cry Vengeance is a remake of Far Cry Instincts: Evolution. Understandably, a Wii port of an Xbox 360 game wouldn't look as good as the original, although there are ways to lessen the drop in quality. It's not so understandable for the game to look barely better than Jurassic Park: Trespasser, when the original Far Cry games were known for Scenery Porn out the wazoo. Besides the seemingly random content cuts, the excellent AI becomes so idiotic that it doesn't notice when someone five feet away gets killed. This wouldn't pass muster on the N64; on the Wii, it feels like a slap in the face.
• Sam & Max: Freelance Police:
  • Season One has Loads and Loads of Loading and a critical Game-Breaking Bug — if your cursor hits the lower-right edge of the screen, it sticks. The textures have been hideously compressed to fit within the space limitations of WiiWare, to the extent that a lot of text is indecipherable, ruining quite a few background gags. What really puts this into Porting Disaster territory is that the game tended to freeze. Fortunately, the game has an autosave.
  • In the Season Two port, the entire video during the episode five credits is absent with still pictures from said video in its place. The cutscenes are also somewhat choppy like in Season One, but at least there isn't any dialogue that does weird jumps or cuts in Season Two, unlike its Season One predecessor.
• Sega Superstars Tennis suffers from god-awful motion controls (yes, you can choose from either the Wii remote on its own, the Wii Remote held on its side, or Wii Remote + Nunchuk, but no matter what, all of these control schemes play like garbage). With controls like that, even Tails can be a challenge to beat!
• The Sims 3 had passable ports to other consoles, but the Wii port was just plain awful as the free-roaming feature was poorly done and buggy, which did not help with its much weaker graphics. Also, the game disc cause annoying buzzing sounds to the disc drive's lens. Objects on lots (e.g. tables and seats) can take quite a while to pop in, and there's no intended ways to pause time in Live Mode, making the computer versions' micromanaging of active households imfeasible in the Wii version (There is however a workaround that pressing D-Pad Right to bring up the "Call Someone" menu does pause the game).
• Harvest Moon: Magical Melody completely removed the option to play as a female character, with the porter claiming the Wii disc somehow couldn't handle all the extra content—despite the original being on the GameCube (a system that uses 1.4GB mini-DVD discs compared to the full-sized 4.7GB DVD5 discs the Wii could accept). To make matters worse, this was the only version some countries got, and it also lacked the rival events. Worse, if the European/Australian version of the game is played with the language set to Italian, the game freezes when the player tries to talk with the blacksmith.
• Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time. Instead of using a subscreen — which they've been doing for the past two and a half decades — they decided to show both screens on the TV at once all the time. So you've got two mini-screens, a good deal of unused space, and since neither screen can be minimized (nor can they overlap), neither screen can be maximized either.
• Samba de Amigo used the Wii Remote and Nunchuk instead of the Maracas controllers used by the original NAOMI-based arcade cabinet and its Dreamcast port, resulting in some imprecise movement.
• Cruis'n was not so much a new console installment to the 90s arcade racing series, as it was the console port of The Fast and the Furious arcade game only with all references to the film edited out as Midway didn't have the home console license to the film series (Namco did). That wouldn't be so bad, as the arcade game was originally developed by Raw Thrills, a company founded by ex-Midway staffers after Midway shut down their arcade operations, including Eugene Jarvis, the creator of the original Cruis'n series who oversaw the arcade game, making it already the Spiritual Successor to the original series. However, the port suffers from long loading times (with wait times between races being as long as a minute), a terrible frame rate (with the game noticeably chugging when cars encountered any sort of collision, or outright freezing when the player changed a music track), overly-sensitive controls, barely existent sound effects, and a pocketful of glitches. Most damningly, Cruis'n was overall a pretty egregious case of being a quick-and-dirty port job tossed out to cash in on the then-new console: despite being a 2007 port of an arcade game made in 2004, the game looks exactly like the original arcade release, which graphically makes Cruis'n a game that has arrived one or even two generations too late (indeed, most reviewers cited Cruis'n as looking no better than a game released on the Nintendo 64). It stands as one of the worst-reviewed games released on the console; and put the brakes on the franchise until the release of Cruis'n Blast ten years later.
• Rock Band on Wii was delayed by nearly seven months after its original launch on PS3 and Xbox 360... and it was just a port of the PS2 version with five additional songs (thus, no character customization, downgraded career, no online play or DLC). Rock Band 2 on Wii addressed these limitations and was more in line with the other current-generation consoles.
• Disney Infinity on Wii suffers from cut-down graphics, the splitting of the Toybox mode into six different sets each with its own toys and heavily scaled back features, and lacks both online multiplayer and co-op mode on the Playsets.
• The ports of the Humongous Entertainment games run at twice the normal speed, but the kicker is that, unlike other examples, they were ported illegally. As people found out from looking in the game data, the ports used the ISO files and ran with SCUMMVM, while taking out any mention of the emulator being used. More information about the case is covered on their website. Needless to say, the games were pulled from store shelves after this was brought to light.
• Back to the Future: The Game has vastly downgraded graphics compared to the other versions in addition to severe framerate problems, which include the game often outright freezing for several seconds at a time.
• Already considered a bad game no matter what you play it on, the Wii version of X-Men: Destiny still manages to stand out; in addition to the downgraded graphics, the game cuts out a lot of content that was present in the other versions, including the entirety of the second act, leaving gaping holes in the plot.

PlayStation 3

• Bayonetta was originally developed by PlatinumGames for the Xbox 360, with Nextech doing the PS3 port. Despite the noticeable decrease in graphic quality, the game is so unbelievably slow it causes truly atrocious framerate 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). Hideki Kamiya later explained that the port was so shoddy because the game was originally intended to be a 360-exclusive, but Sega commissioned the PS3 port late during development to maximize profits.
• BioShock arrived on the PS3 over a year after the original PC and Xbox 360 release with multiple 2K studios and Digital Extremes behind it. The result was long load times, downgraded graphics, a framerate that constantly drops to the low 20s, as well as numerous bugs and occasional freezing. It also launched with a detail destroying blur filter that was eventually patched out along with multiple bugs after widespread complaints.
• Brütal Legend is a decent port... except for the muffled sound effects and the 99% completion glitch. The sad thing is, Double Fine opted to release a patch that would fix the 99% completion glitch, but EA Games wanted to forget the game ever existed, and refused to let DF release the patch.
• Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening is pretty bad, especially the digital PSN version, having Kalina Ann's Grapple not work most of the time, crashing on menus at complete random, and there are times where the cutscene audio plays but shows nothing but a black screen (which also causes the game to crash).
• The PS3 port of Dragon Age: Inquisition is infamous due to the console not being able to keep up with the game's engine and scope, long load times and frequent console freezes on large areas like the Hinderlands and Skyhold. Not helping is the fact that later DLC and patches caused more instability and bugs to the game with the Black Emporium DLC causing an infinite load screen that leads to a console restart if the game is exited from the console menu.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has some serious lag issues on the PS3. About halfway through the game, many players will hit lag (referred to by Skyrim players as "rimlag") that slows the game down so much, it becomes unplayable. Especially bad because "halfway through" for this game could mean over fifty hours of playtime. This version also had freezing and save corruption issues related to rimlag. Bethesda denied the problem entirely at first, then told players how to reduce the lag, but not eliminate it. This Game-Breaking Bug was never fully fixed despite numerous patches attempting to fix the problem.
• The PS3 versions of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas also become plagued with increasingly worse slowdown and frequent freezing as the game "grows", as in the player progresses. Adding DLC data also aggravates the problems. Fallout 3's Game of the Year Edition and New Vegas' Ultimate Edition, which include all the DLC expansions and items, are known to be even more unstable than the already shaky vanilla versions.
• Fatal Frame 2 suffered missing graphics in the PSN port. It got so bad that they had to temporarily take it off the PSN store. Fortunately, it has been fixed and plays like normal now.
• F.E.A.R. was one of the first PS3 porting disasters, released early in the console's lifetime. The port had been hyped for a solid year before being released six months after the Xbox 360 version. What did PS3 users get? Long load times, an inconsistent framerate, no pack-in expansion content (neither of the expansions came to PS3), and reduced graphical fidelity compared to the PC and 360 versions. The latter was a cardinal sin for a console that came onto the market boasting about its technical hardware prowess and support for full 1080p HD resolutions at a time when 1080p was not widely prevalent. It may have even contributed to the PS3's initial bad reputation, as several magazines and sites at the time claimed that the issues were due to the PS3's supposed "inferior" hardware.
• Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix's port in 2.5 was plagued with bugs, including, but not limited to, awfully long load times for not only loading into the worlds and cutscenes in the game, but the Drive Forms as well due to the PS3 needing to read the data off of a Blu-Ray disc rather than a DVD like on PS2 (with no option to install it to the hard drive available), audio clips not playing correctly like on PS2 (despite them still being in the game's code), some sound effects not playing properly, and other things. Most of these issues and more were taken care of in patches for the PS4 port, but the audio glitches weren't for some reason.
• Mafia II got hit with this on the PS3 to the extent that developer Take Two Interactive actually apologized for making the PS3 version the least featured rich version, compared to the PC (which is the fullest experience) and Xbox 360 versions.
• The initial release of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor was borderline unplayable due to graphics and sound issues: Glitches will sometimes leave enemies floating in midair, and the sound sometimes cuts out during boss fights or larger hordes of enemies. The beautiful world from the PS4 and Xbox One releases didn't survive either: The game runs in native 960x540 resolution with a short draw distance, texture maps popping in and out of the frame, and a framerate that routinely drops into the twenties or teens. The Nemesis system also took a beating: The number of unique characteristics & appearances an Uruk can have has been severely reduced, making the entire game feel much more repetitive and simplistic than the PS4 or Xbox One versions. Here's Eurogamer's take on it. Thankfully, two patches fixed most of the problems, but that still doesn't give the developers an excuse to release it in the condition it was initially in, and even with the game fixed, it still occasionally slows down and has the sound clip.
• Minecraft is VERY broken on the PS3. Aside from suffering from a highly limited world size, the PS3 completely fails to keep up with the mobs and physics of the game, leading to a sharp difficulty decrease compared to other versions. TNT would take several seconds to explode and redstone machines will simply not work as intended. Chunk loading can be painfully slow, especially when using flight-enabling items like the elytra. Before June 2017, the game would often show up a "Failed to Load" error, caused by the very limited split-memory of the system - prompting 4J Studios to completely rewrite the UI code. Framerate issues are also very common, and game-breaking in split-screen modes.
• No More Heroes: Heroes' Paradise has almost hilariously bad motion controls compared to the Wii version, which makes the game harder than it was originally when it comes to recharging your beam katana, as it takes much longer and in boss fights can get you killed. It's especially frustrating seeing as how the PlayStation Move normally has much more responsive motion controls compared to the Wii Remote. Thankfully, the PS3 port does give you the option to play with a standard controller.
• The Orange Box had a vastly inferior PS3 version. Valve did not develop it, due to their belief at the time that the PS3 was "a waste of everybody's time"; it was done by an Electronic Arts internal studio. This was probably most noticeable in Team Fortress 2. The game was a playground for griefing as bugs that had been fixed for nearly a year even in the 360 version, which itself lagged noticeably behind the PC version and only got three updates before being abandoned, went completely unpatched on PS3. Every other game had an Engineer who knew the sky/underground sentry glitch.
• Persona 3 FES suffers from several emulation problems on its PS2 Classics digital release, such as the game failing to save or just deleting your saved games when you try to load, freezing, and lots of texture flickering. This has been fixed in a firmware update.
• The PS3 port of Zen Studios' Pinball FX 2 seems to suffer from the same random input lag and slowdown issues that plague Capcom's PS3 ports. It shares the problem of only running at up to 720p — The original Xbox 360 version supports 1080p. The title screen is also a boring static image compared to the original. Sure, they added 3D TV support and the ability to purchase extra tables that aren't available in the Xbox 360 original (but also available for the Windows 8 port), but any lag in games that requires hair-trigger response like pinball sims is inexcusable.
• Psychonauts plays much better than its PS2 counterpart, but a severe Game-Breaking Bug in the "Meat Circus" level can shut the console off with no warning.
• The ports of the first three Ratchet & Clank games all have some bad problems. For all of them, the music doesn't loop properly (instead it plays the first few seconds of the loop and then restarting), the tour on planet Todano in Going Commando has had the audio cut for some reason, and sometimes you can see through skyboxes and see the stars of the space box. Along with this, not all of the pre-rendered cutscenes from the first two games were scaled to fit a 16:9 aspect ratio nor were they actually converted into high definition. Up Your Arsenal gets it the worst with none of the cutscenes being converted.
• Ratchet: Deadlocked HD: Options in the menu are flat-out missing, such as the ability to turn off tutorials—this means you will always hear Clank instructing you on what to do, regardless of what difficulty you play on and how many times you beat the game. The pre-rendered cutscenes were not scaled properly or converted, and in-engine ones have the characters constantly jittering back and forth for no reason. The in-game cutscenes also have a terrible clipping issue, leading to an infamous image of the camera clipping into Ratchet's head during the cutscene before the first mission◊.
• The Playstation 3 port of Serious Sam 3: BFE came out in 2014 due to Croteam's difficulty adapting the game for the PS3 hardware (for comparison, the original PC version was released at the end of 2011 and the Xbox 360 port only took 11 months). While compressing the game down from its original 5 GB size to a tiny 869 MB is a moderately impressive feat, this version suffers from awful framerates even when no enemies are on screen, a ridiculously low resolution, textures that are muddy and barely recognizable even when they've loaded correctly (and look like the game is trying to run on a computer from 2006 that barely meets the minimum requirements when they haven't), and a veritable army of glitches which even a later update wasn't able to fully quash, as shown in this video.
• In Spring of 2014, Atlus ported several PS2 games from the Shin Megami Tensei series, including Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, the Raidou Kuzunoha series, and the Digital Devil Saga series, to the PS3 via PSN. Unfortunately, they all ran slowly and had their audio out of sync in all the cutscenes.
• The HD version of Sly 2: Band of Thieves is prone to random freezing, and sometimes, all sounds will go missing, and quitting the game when this happens will freeze your PS3 also. Despite all these problems, Sony has not bothered to patch it at all.
• The HD version of the original Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus is missing some music from the original version. For example, in the PS2 version's prologue, a saxophone and accordion would join the background music once you made it inside the police headquarters. The HD version, for some inexplicable reason, removes this dynamic element from its soundtrack — instead, playing the same music loop through the whole mission. The music often gets infinitesimally out of sync, which is very hard to pick up on and easy to ignore except for the Mz. Ruby boss fight. The notes can play a millisecond before or after when you need to press it, and how badly they are out of sync can change from section to section, so there's no adapting. The easiest way to win is to mute the TV and go by visuals.
• The Sega Vintage Collection releases of Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 were particularly nasty in that not only they had a serious controller lag problem and forces the game to run at 720p even on 1080p-capable displays, but the game doesn't even display the real title screen, instead of sticking you in its own interface where a video of the title screenplays in a small window on the bottom left side of the screen. Because of this, you can't enter the Cheat Code to get into the level select screens of either title.
• While Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) was a poorly-received game in general, at least on the Xbox 360 it ran with a relatively consistent 60fps frame rate, a rarity for a game so early in its console generation. The PS3 version, on the other hand, suffered from constant slowdown and significantly worse input lag, noticeably degraded textures, scenery pop-in that could be so late that it left you little time to dodge things, and the Loads and Loads of Loading the 360 version was already notorious for was made even worse.
• Splinter Cell: Double Agent suffers from framerate and slowdown issues starting at the opening cutscene.
• Splinter Cell Trilogy is a compilation of the first three games that omits fundamental features like the option to invert look controls - which had been in 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. The compilation also lacks the DLC for the original game, a pack of three missions that, regardless of their importance to the series' storyline, have remained needlessly difficult to acquire on any platform ever since the shutdown of the original Xbox Live (the only completely legit manners of acquiring it - only on PC, mind - before a rerelease on GOG.com being special editions of the later Chaos Theory and a separate purchasable "Mission Pack" that never left Europe).
• While the GameCube port of The SpongeBob Movie Game had several conspicuous issues, it was at least a playable game. The PlayStation 3 port is a different story: the game was plagued with issues because it was a direct port of the PlayStation 2 version with no proper optimization updates to make it run on next-gen hardware. The result? Blurry graphics, severe audio desynchronization during cutscenes, and button lag so bad that the gameplay was downright unresponsive at times. Overall, it was a very flawed port, and the game was taken down from the PlayStation Store in record time, though it's unknown if it was due to the poor quality or publisher THQ going bankrupt.

Wii U

• For a while, the Wii U port of Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed had quite a few Game Breaking Bugs: Boost pads on Boost Challenges wouldn't load (rendering the stage Unintentionally Unwinnable, and it was required to proceed), one mission loaded a boat on land, among many other glitches. While the other versions do have quite a bit of bugs, none of them are as bad as what the Wii U version originally had. Thankfully, SUMO Digital released a patch that fixed these.
• The Wii U version of Rodea the Sky Soldier is a particularly weird example. The game was originally envisaged and developed as a Wii game, completed, and left to simmer while the Wii U came out. In the meantime, a 3DS version of the game was created, obviously changing up some gameplay and downgrading the graphics to fit the hardware. Come 2015, and the game is released on Wii U and 3DS—and the Wii U version is simply an HD port of the 3DS game, not the superior Wii version. Yes, that means the Wii U version of the game is objectively worse than the Wii version. You know it's bad when Yuji Naka himself tweets "Please play the Wii version." Even stranger is the way the game was distributed — players could only get their hands on the coveted Wii version as a bonus with the first batch of copies produced. Granted, the game sold so poorly that that it's uncertain if it even received a second, Wii copy-less print run anyway.
• While all versions of Mighty No. 9 suffer from technical issues one way or another, the Wii U port has it the worst with lower quality sound effects, fewer frames of animations on some enemies, frequent crashes, extremely long load times, and the worst of the frame-rate issues on the main consoles. A patch was quickly released at launch to mitigate most of the crashes and somewhat shorten the long (albeit still frequent) loading times, but the rest of the port's issues remain unaddressed.
• The Wii U port of Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two was clearly rushed out in order to meet the console's late 2012 launch, as the port barely makes any use of the Wii U's improved hardware compared to the PS3 and Xbox 360 ports, doesn't allow player 1 the option of playing with the Wii Remote, and worst of all has terrible framerate lag. Wii U owners are better off just playing the Wii version (the primary version of the game) via the Wii U's backwards compatibility.
• After a few years of The Pinball Arcade being on the other systems but not any of Nintendo's, it finally arrived on the Wii U. The reason for the delay in the first place was that Farsight Studios submitted it shortly after the Wii U's launch, but it was found to be so full of glitches that Nintendo turned it down and demanded that they ironed out most of the glitches before they release it on that platform. A few years later, Farsight finally managed to do so, but after its initial release, it was quickly forgotten: The Wii U was the only version to not have any monthly additional content, meaning it rapidly fell behind the PlayStation 3, PSP, Android, iOS, and later on the Xbox One versions in terms of total content.^note The Xbox 360 version had even less content, but it still received the monthly additional content for some time. It just started with less due to coming out earlier. Most likely, Farsight was not taking the Wii U seriously, considering press releases constantly mispunctuated the system's name with a hyphen instead of a space, as "Wii-U."
• With the Wii U's port of Watch_Dogs having been delayed for the better part of six months over both the previous-generation (Xbox 360 and PS3) and current-generation (Xbox One and PS4) versions, many fans held out the slim hope that Ubisoft had spent the time optimizing it into a Polished Port that might land somewhere between the two generations. And then the port landed, and it soon became obvious that if anything, Ubisoft had likely required those extra months just to get it working on the Wii U at all. Even then, it came at the cost of many graphical details being cut back even compared to the ports on the older systems, much worse input lag, and a framerate that was just barely acceptable in interior scenes, before dropping to virtually unplayable levels (sometimes even locking up for seconds at a time) in the open world. For good measure, it even introduced a few Game Breaking Bugs that weren't in the other ports of the game, which had themselves caught flack for their Obvious Beta status on release. It ended up making for an ignominious end to third-party support on the Wii U, which all but dried up — outside of a few rhythm and toys-to-life games — after its release.

Xbox One

• When it was announced, Halo: The Master Chief Collection was considered to be the reason to get an Xbox One. Four games for the price of one, the return of the matchmaking system that defined the birth of Xbox Live and a long-awaited release of the Halo 2 anniversary edition. Upon release, while single-player performed decently well, multiplayer was another story, with local play requiring enormous downloads (due to MS's cost-cutting by shipping only one disc instead of two) and the matchmaking system at best taking forever to connect to imbalanced and underpopulated parties, and at worst could search for hours and not find a viable game. Worst of all is that 343 Industries was quite open about the fact that the graphics overlay for Halo 2 and the matchmaking system "update" were the only changes they would be making to the existing Halo games, meaning half the work they were supposedly doing turned out broken and in some cases worsened by their attempts to fix it. The good news is that after months of patches, multiplayer is finally up to a playable standard, although matchmaking still occasionally takes minutes. To compensate for the botched launch, 343 offered a remastered Halo 3: ODST campaign as free DLC to early adopters.
• PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds was ported to the Xbox One with poor results. Lots of glitches were present such as the interior of buildings not loading correctly, poor loading performance in general causing objects to be at the low visual quality for long periods of time (to the point that textures can look as blurry as in a Nintendo 64 game), low frame rate during gameplay even on Xbox One X, and delayed inputs. Patches have since managed to bring the One X up to respectable performance levels, outside of instances where server lag is the main issue, but performance on the earlier models is still lacking.
• Metal Gear Survive is clearly a case where all the optimization efforts went into the Xbox One X version. On that console, you get easily the highest resolution of any console port, and a near-perfect framerate. Users of the earlier models have to put up with a 720p resolution — something that would have been poor even for a launch title, and pathetically low by 2018 standards, especially considering that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain managed 900p with a far better frame rate — degraded visuals throughout, and a much poorer frame rate than any other version of the game.
• The port of Kingdom Hearts 1.5+2.5 to the system is clearly a budget release. While it benefits from the majority of issues being fixed for PS4 already and the free DLCs added to its base code, as well as the ability to skip the opening cutscene in KHI, KHI on Xbox One has a choppy frame rate for prerendered cutscenes for some reason, KHII still suffers from the physics and sound effects issues in the PS4 on top of apparently the HUD not being changed from the PS4 buttons to the Xbox One's for the Data Xemnas fight when you take over Riku, and Birth By Sleep has a glitch where Aqua spikes the fruit in the Fruit Ball minigame at the ground instead of in front of her for some reason.
• Dynasty Warriors 9 didn't run especially well on either of the main console families when it was launched, but the Xbox One family definitely came off worse. The Xbox One X version can boast the highest resolution of any of the game's console ports, but it comes at the cost of a noticeably poorer framerate than either of the PS4 systems and for some inexplicable reason the game's "performance" mode just disables V-Sync rather than actually lowering the resolution to improve performance. However, the version for the original Xbox One is just a travesty, with so many cuts made to the graphics that it barely even comes up to PS3 standards, and the already-poor framerate of the One X version being even worse, along with worse loading times and noticeably more input lag.
• Elden Ring is yet another instance of a game getting a passable One X port, but a severely mediocre port for the older versions of the system. Not only do you get the usual graphical cut-backs and sluggish frame rate, but enemy animations often take place at only half of the already-poor frame rate (something that can also happen on the base PS4 it should be noted, but at least there the issue usually clears up after a few seconds), creating an effect like something from one of Ray Harryhausen's cheaper films.

PlayStation 4

• Ultra Street Fighter IV on PS4 was handled by Other Ocean Interactive, with the original game itself being handled by a team other than Dimps (who developed all the prior Street Fighter IV editions up until Arcade Edition 2012). This resulted in the PS4 version launching in a very sorry state, with graphical errors, audio errors, and other glitches that didn't appear on the other platforms. However, all of the issues have been fixed with patches in the month following its release, and it became a Polished Port for it, becoming the new standard version for tournament play.
• The PS4 version of Tetris Ultimate, a game that demands quick thinking and precise piece placement at later levels, became infamous for a framerate that could turn horribly choppy at random, including when manipulating pieces or navigating menus. It led to widespread mockery, with one review in particular pointing out that the classic Tetris game on the Game Boy had no such issues. Some point out that thanks to the Tetris Guideline — a series of requirements by The Tetris Company imposed on every new Tetris game — there's a Double Standard in which a game like this is allowed to pass, but highly-regarded games like Tetris: The Grand Master aren't simply because they deviate too much from what the TTC wants in a Tetris game.
• The PS4 version of Broforce has a few issues compared to the PC version - the frame-rate is locked at 25-30 FPS and one of the covert operations simply won't load, trapping the player on a black screen^note Luckily the player can just quit to the home menu and close the game. However, there is a bug where the game will simply stop reading player movement 2 seconds into the level as well as occasionally through the level which makes one covert op harder than it should be^note The player has to perform a running jump off the ledge they begin on - attempting it too quickly will lead to the player falling into a Bottomless Pit many times. Plus, the 'Random input failure' makes the level harder since it's a speedrun against a large exploding trail which the player needs to run on top of to get by) as well as the main level mission (Deathfield) near impossible.
• LittleBigPlanet 3 is this within itself. Levels intended for 2 or 1 may not function correctly due to subtle engine differences, some of which can make more complicated, precision-requiring levels completely unplayable. Of particular note are the chatting teeth in the Joker level of the DC Comics pack. In 2, the teeth stood still, whilst in 3, they move and rotate, often flipping over and rendering themselves undefeatable. While this isn't normally a problem as they're easy enough to skip, three prize bubbles require you to bounce on top of a teeth's brain to reach. One, in particular, has teeth that constantly shoot far away from the box, requiring you to wait for when it's close to the box and the right way up. Oh, and if you went from PS3 to PS4, you are required to do this as your DLC progress isn't carried over. Hope you like constantly playing half the level with barely skippable cutscenes just for one bubble! Worse still, the Space Background material from the same DLC doesn't work, being rendered completely black and thus removing much of the magic of the Watchtower levels and any community levels that used it.
• The PS4 version of Deadpool suffers from a stuttering problem that results in the game freezing for a few frames every 30 or so seconds. Luckily, the port is otherwise solid, since the bug is easily fixable by disconnecting the console from the internet while playing the game, and trophies are still able to be earned.
• The European/Australian PS2 Classic versions of Jak 1, II, 3, and X are almost unplayable due to massive framerate drops, a myriad of audio issues, cutscenes not playing correctly, and severe input lag.
• Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 ReMIX, the first PS4 port of Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II, was panned upon release. The port increased the FPS to 60, but never adjusted for physics, meaning that certain bosses, like Data Vexen, became harder due to their mechanics not working as intended. None of the crashes from the PS3 port were fixed either. Last but not least, the game had a chance of crashing when you tried to save. Fortunately, these issues have since been patched, properly adjusting for the 60 FPS physics and fixing the crashes and glitches. However, some small things remain with broken physics in Kingdom Hearts II and they haven't fixed the issue of missing sound effects and voice clips that are still in the game's code not playing properly from the PS3 version of the game.

Nintendo Switch

• Despite some graphical downgrades, the Nintendo Switch version of Dragon Quest Heroes II seems to suffer some performance issues, usually dropping from 30 to 20 FPS during combat while docked, while it almost always runs at sub-30 FPS in portable mode, and fails to reach HD resolutions. For such an action-focused game, this is less than optimal.
• The Nintendo Switch version of Troll and I suffers from poor optimization, resulting in an atrocious framerate in both cutscenes and gameplay, poorly textured shadows, and game-breaking bugs that include the game softlocking and putting the Player Character in a bottomless void, save data corruption, crashes, and loading the Player Character into the wrong area after a cutscene, resulting in a game over. That last glitch can happen not even half an hour into the game.
• The initial release of Kingdom: New Lands on Switch was plagued with Game-Breaking Bugs ranging from poor framerates, graphical glitches, map patches failing to load, NPCs spontaneously disappearing, buildings staying half-built, certain structures like Ballistas not behaving as intended, game crashes and more, which led to complaints from fans. The devs have assured fans that they are aware of these issues and are working on fixing them.
• The initial Switch release of WWE 2K18 was plagued with many performance issues. If the game was played in any mode other than one-on-one the game would suffer from major frame rate issues. The game had major audio issues and lag issues as well as problems with loading times.
• The downloadable port of Zero Gunner 2 suffered from a large number of bugs at launch and inaccuracies to the original game, such as missing graphical effects, bosses having far too little health, bullets appearing out of nowhere, and invisible bullets killing the player. In a blog post made immediately after its release, the president of the company responsible for the port explained that they did not have access to the original development resources and titled the Switch version Zero Gunner 2- as an apology for any potential inaccuracies with the original version. Fortunately, the first patch released two weeks after releases fixed most of the major bugs, although the difficulty and many mechanics are still inaccurate to the original game.
• PAYDAY 2 was never a console darling to begin with, what with OVERKILL's track record of stiffing console ports on content (the PS3 and 360 versions only got two of the DLC packs, and the PS4 and Xbone versions have consistently lagged six months or more behind PC in content) and the fact that the Diesel Engine it runs on is so ancient that it fails to run well even on PC. Sadly, the Switch port isn't much better; it too is a good step behind the PC in terms of content (despite releasing in February 2018, it was actually developed around the time of the "Most Wanted" edition for PS4 and Xbox, which only contained the content up to around Update 100 on the PC in June 2016 - and was apparently never updated in the almost two years between then and its release - and on top of that, it was even missing some content from before that point for no good reason too), poor graphical fidelity and framerate issues, especially in large firefights. Then there are also the detriments that granted are more down to the Switch itself, like a lack of voice or text chat in a game where you need to cooperate with others. At least the port had its own unique content through heister Joy, the Hacker Perk Deck and the Signature SMG (for what little the latter is worth)... until all three of those got added to the PC version with the Icebreaker event that August, leaving the Switch port completely inferior. OVERKILL later admitted that the Switch port was made by a third party, meaning that any further updates to fix its various issues, or even an attempt to add the almost four years' worth of content that was missing at the time of that admittance, are incredibly unlikely.
• While ARK: Survival Evolved was never that great of a performer on the other consoles, the original Switch version is awful beyond belief, with Nintendo 64-level graphics that are consistently rendered at a sub-standard definition resolution — Digital Foundry discovered that in the absolute worst case the resolution can drop to around 304x170 pixels; for perspective, this is a lower vertical resolution than the Atari 2600 operated at — objects that either fail to load at all or pop in only a few feet away from your character and waiting times of around three minutes whenever you start or load a game. More than one reviewer deemed the Switch port of the game to be the single worst-looking major title from the entire eighth generation. In 2022, it was replaced by a brand new second port called Ark: Ultimate Survivor Edition (which offered as a free update to those who owned the first porting attempt), and this version would go on to be seen as one of the most technically impressive Switch ports available. Talk about a turnaround. Ironically, the redone Switch version was developed by Grove Street Games, who were the developers of the infamously bad "Definitive Edition" remasters of the PS2-era Grand Theft Auto games.
• Grandia: Most sprites (except for the ones they missed) are put through a Super Eagle-esque filter, backgrounds are filtered with bilinear, and Nearest Neighbor is used for shadows. Because these assets are filtered individually and at the source, not only are some of them untouched (creating inconsistency) but there is also no option to disable the filter. The port boasts widescreen support, but it's simply forced by cutting off the bottom and the top of the original 4:3 resolution, meaning there's less of an image present. Despite claiming to use the Saturn version as a base, the backgrounds, lack of extras, and the fact the Japanese audio option is based on an incomplete and broken fan patch for the Playstation version (as indicated by containing the same errors, switching back to English in battle, and the last third of the game having almost entirely English voice acting) strongly suggest this is not the case. Numerous sound effects during gameplay (e.g. battle) and on the UI are missing, as well. Luckily, a patch was released on March 25, 2020 that fixes a number of these issues, making it a more competent release.
• The Nintendo Switch version of Fall Guys took over a year since its announcement to release but unfortunately it suffers from Loads and Loads of Loading, low framerate and has a tendency to crash with one Youtube commenter even saying it's like the game is trying its best to keep them from playing it. Additionally, elaborate character outfits could take quite a while to properly load, even when its only the one on the main menu, and some outfits in a full-capacity match not being loaded until halfway into Round 1 (equal to roughly 40 seconds when including the start grid waiting). And in order to assure the Switch version had full support for cross-platform matchmaking, many levels were removed from matchmaking in all versions of the game to avoid flashing lights that were only known to occur in the Switch version. Initially this included most of the levels from Free for All season 2 (Season 8 de facto) and the Slimescraper, with the side effect of creating the Vault system that made it extremely hard for most people to play those levels in any version. Many of the levels were however gradually restored to matchmaking from the August 2023 Summer Breeze update onwards.
• The Switch version of Dark Souls Remastered suffers from in-game audio (including music, dialogue, and sound effects) that is of significantly lower quality than any other version of the game, as a result of Namco-Bandai wanting to fit the game on a 4 GB cartridge to increase their profit margins.
• Despite releasing on a system more powerful than the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 — which, in fairness, didn't have particularly good ports either — the Switch version of Saints Row: The Third ends up the worst incarnation of the game by far. The graphics somehow manage to look even uglier than the older console versions despite running at a higher resolution, there's Loads and Loads of Loading, the controls are screwed up to the point of making precise aiming virtually impossible, and the frame rate goes from mediocre in portable mode to simply atrocious in docked mode. Digital Foundry deemed it second-only to the aforementioned Ark: Survival Evolved as the absolute worst Switch port they had tested to that point, and even then only due to Ark having far uglier graphics. Fortunately, the developers learned from this and managed to produce a reasonably passable port for Saints Row IV.
• The Switch version of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was widely lambasted for its numerous performance issues. While many expected its lower resolution and slower FPS, the other issues were less acceptable. The numerous graphical issues, dodgy framerate, and especially the input lag, regular crashes, and excessive loading times have all greatly soured the fanbase's opinion of the Switch version, leaving many fans wondering if the devs even tried to make the Switch version good. After a fairly substantial battery of patches, the Switch version is generally considered to be a better port aside from the occasional bits of lag, though its old reputation as one of the most notorious bad Switch ports has still yet to be forgotten.
• The Switch version of Don't Starve was criticized for being very glitchy, having poor performance, lacking the Quality of Life update, and the multiplayer mode.
• The Switch version of The Outer Worlds simply downgraded the graphics from the original version rather than come up with bespoke graphics for the Switch. This resulted in everything being blurry and looking like it was missing a layer or two of texture and, as Digital Foundry put it, made the game look like it was an attempt to port it to the PlayStation 3. The original version's beautiful design aesthetics were more or less ruined. However, the real killer is the framerate, which struggles to stay stable even when you're just exploring the game world, and utterly tanks the minute you get into any combat. To boot, there's also a glitch that causes performance degradation the further you get into the game, much like the PS3 port of Skyrim. The result of all this is a port that, while admirable in that they were able to get the game working at all, in practice is up there with ARK: Survival Evolved, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, and Saints Row: The Third as one of the absolute worst ports on the system.
• The Switch version of A Hat in Time was initially met with excitement given how highly requested it was. However, when it was released, it unfortunately turned out to be this, suffering from a wide variety of problems such as far longer loading times, framerate issues, the loss of various graphical effects, muddied and compressed textures, various technical and visual glitches that can make the game borderline unplayable at times, frequent pop in and was even prone to crashing and save data corruption on occasion. While many of the worst issues have thankfully been fixed thanks to several patches, putting the game in a more functional state, it's still regarded to be a rough port and the worst version of the game amongst fans.
• The initial release of the Switch version of SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom Rehydrated had items noticeably pop into view, substantially longer load times, a rather low resolution, and framerate issues. Thankfully, these were mostly fixed with patches, and now the game leans much closer to a Polished Port, though some framerate issues remain.
• The Switch port of Resident Evil 0 has longer loading times compared to any other version of the game (and it's not just a few more seconds, a loading screen in this version can go up to 35 seconds), and due to the long loading times, getting an S rank in the Switch version is close to impossible (as the timer still works during the loading screens). There are also missing textures and shaders (the box for the gondola in the treatment plant being the most egregious example), and the last few cutscenes have audio issues due to the long loading times making the whole thing off-sync. There's also a Game-Breaking Bug reeking of Obvious Beta only in this port when Billy and Rebecca split up, if the non-controlled partner dies, the game implodes on itself and just crashes or reset to the prologue cutscene if no save data is detected.
• While Balan Wonderworld was already noted to have some issues (particularly with its gameplay, which came off to several reviewers and players as clunky) on most other platforms, the Switch port combined that with weaker graphical performance and heavy frame-rate issues, turning a game that was already noted to have a few problems into a nigh-unplayable trainwreck.
• While Sonic Colors Ultimate isn't a perfect release (see the list of Disastrous Multiplatform Ports), the Nintendo Switch version seems to have it the worst out of all the versions released. Players took notice of an issue where hopping between planets will cause the graphics to flicker or take on garish colors, due to memory leaks occurring if the player does so. To rub salt in the wound, the original game was designed for and ran just fine on the Wii, which the Switch is much more powerful than.
• The Switch port of Kingdom Hearts 1.5+II.5 ReMix, as well as the Switch port of Kingdom Hearts II.8 Final Chapter Prologue and Kingdom Hearts III, are zero-effort ports with the game actually running on cloud servers and streaming to a fancy client on the Switch console itself. The problems become immediately obvious to any poor schmuck who ignored the alarm bells and are living in areas where good, fast, low latency internet connections aren't available (which makes up a surprising number of Americans, especially those living in rural areas) - stuttering and the game intermittently disconnecting being the most common issues. And that's not even taking into account the Switch's already unreliable wifi hardware, meaning you would need an Ethernet cable plugged directly into your router to get a remotely stable connection, tethering the game to the dock and defeating the entire purpose of playing the game on Switch.
• Sol Cresta's Nintendo Switch version is regarded as the worst way to play the game (compared to the Windows PC and PS4 versions), due to not only having worse visual performance but also being saddled with 10 frames, or 1/6 of a second, of input lag. In a game where a few frames can make the difference between life and death, this is simply not acceptable.
• The Nintendo Switch Online version of F-Zero X is regarded as a terrible emulation of the Nintendo 64 edition. The controls are weirdly over-sensitive and even machines with good grip slide out if you turn with any meaningful force, making it a harder game for all the wrong reasons. It doesn't help that the game's iconic 60 FPS visuals (something not frequently seen with polygonal N64 games, as most run at 30 FPS) frequently bog down to 30 or even 20 FPS, when literally no other F-Zero game runs at anything short of 60. About the only improvement in most players' eyes is the addition of online multiplayer (by having each player take control of one simulated N64 controller).

Xbox Series X|S

• While the Series S console can handle up to 1440p 120fps (otherwise 1440p at 60fps for most multiplatform developers), backwards compatibility is limited to the base Xbox One (or S) version and not the enhanced One X, despite the system being more powerful than the One X in some respects^note It shares the next generation CPU with the Series X but, its GPU, while over 3 times as powerful as the One S's, falls short of the One X's. Additionally, it has only 10 GB of total RAM in comparison to the One X's 12. The combination of the latter two factors are what limits it to the One S versions of games.. Because developers are forced to use all the full feature parity (excluding graphical options) on the Series X|S (mainly the flaw in the latter's hardware limitations), there are consequences for poor optimization with the S having the inferior version compared to the X:
  • Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin saw the resurrection of an unfortunate trend from the tail-end of the previous generation, namely the higher-end Xbox console (the One X/Series X) getting a port that was at least passable, and the lower-end Xbox (the One (S)/Series S) getting a terrible port. Some graphical downgrades are an inevitability in any Series S port, but that's no excuse for what Digital Foundry described as PlayStation 3-level models with PlayStation 2-level textures, which combine with poor, overdone post-processing effects (that somehow looked much better on the Series X) to create a game that looks inexcusably bad by 2022 standards. The only saving grace is that the Series S's maintaining the eight Zen 2 cores of its big brother means it powers through the game with a virtually flawless framerate.
  • Wild Hearts has one graphic option in dynamic 900-1080p 30fps and an inconsistent frame rate, despite the game featuring seventh gen models and sixth gen textures as mentioned on Stranger of Paradise above.
  • The Lord of the Rings: Gollum on the Series S is a rare example of a game that qualifies for this label despite already running horribly on the Series X (and PS5). Not only is the frame rate absolutely abysmal even in the "performance" mode, but a bug that causes character and animations to glitch out and become stuttery and blurry — something that admittedly happens on the Series X as well, but not to nearly the same extent — renders the game damn-near unplayable.

Miscellaneous Consoles

• A DVD player example: After Digital Leisure did an overall good job on porting the first two parts of that series with Dirk the Daring, they suddenly decided to port Dragon's Lair 3D: Return to the Lair as well. As the result of a recursive Genre Shift (interactive movie → third-person arcade → something resembling an interactive movie), as well as completely non-cinematic camera angles during the gameplay and the badly decreased "clicks per minute" count (mainly caused by the fact that in the original DL3D, not everything was trying to kill you), Dragon's Lair III is probably what you should ignore just to buy their Dragon's Lair Trilogy alone. Other illnesses include Bonus Feature Failure^note From the start, you've got a lot of "extra art" which is either screenshots from the game, or screenshots from the original games, or, in very rare cases, some concept art and figurine photos; and when you complete the game, you get access to five bonus levels... with untextured Dirk and enemies. Yes, he will be white even before he becomes a skeleton., Anti-Climax Boss^note During the Mordrok boss battle, you should tap only one button, save for the moment when you have to turn right. And that's the final boss!, Scrappy Mechanic^note Some of the actions are clearly performed in a way different from the obvious way: You see a platform behind Dirk, which is obviously situated above his head, perspective-wise, and you have to fly forward. What do you press? The down button. ^{Wait, there's more!}The three-minute Smithey battle is also screwed up: At the first round, you have to get rid of the sword, the spear, and the anvil. Three more rounds and Dirk dodges them all by himself. On the fifth... you have to dodge the anvil yourself. Just dare to call that fair. and Yet Another Stupid Death.^note Except, this time around, it's played literally; sometimes, you have to wait 30 seconds watching Dirk stupidly standing in one place while Giddy Goons try to mash him up; bonus points for the fact that you can't skip these anyhow.
• An old Visual Novel, called Exodus Guilty Neos, which has been previously released on PlayStation and Sega Saturn, was ported to DVD players a few years later... and, apart from having fully voiced characters this time around, it throws all the interactivity it originally had out of the wall, so now, you have to wait till the end of any of these 30-minute chapters just to pick a decision. Side note: no alternate endings, three DVDs with 6 hours of video on each. While the originals ran on a single CD and had additional endings to run on. With such a level of interaction, no one can call it a game... or a port, for that matter.^note Calling this a port would be like calling those pirated Final Fantasy VIII VideoCDs containing only cutscenes from the game a port... Or calling a Let's Play a port...
• Most games released for the Neo Geo were Arcade Perfect Ports, thanks to the arcade's MVS hardware and the home AES hardware being the same. Unfortunately, as a result of the Sasebo slashing incident where a grade school student murdered a classmate, the AES release of Samurai Shodown V Special was delayed while the developers removed the game's gory finishing moves. This also had the unintended effect of introducing some nasty bugs into the game, forcing SNK to do a recall of the game's AES cartridges to iron out the bugs and partially restore the finishing moves (they could be executed, but the blood and gore were absent). It would be years until fans could finally play an arcade-faithful home port of V Special without having to rely on emulators.
• Microconsoles (which are relatively low-cost consoles with games pre-baked into them) like the NES Classic Edition and the Sega Genesis Mini are already not exactly known for input response, often having around 5-7 frames of input lag, but the worst one by far is the Sega Astro City Mini V, a collection of vertically-oriented arcade games, with many of the games receiving additional input lag ranging anywhere from about 6 frames for Moon Cresta to 10 frames for Armed Police Batrider (and just to add insult to injury, this is Batrider's first and only home port) — the general trend being that the more modern the hardware that the game was originally released on, the worse its input lag (and the fact that Moon Cresta, itself a game running on early 1980s hardware that 2020s technology should be able to emulate with little issue, has that much input lag is saying something). As many of the games on this device are shmups, a genre where having low input latency is absolutely important, it makes many of these games nearly unplayable, and left a horribly sour taste amongst the shmup community.

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