Far. Too. Negative: Porting Disaster

Now that there's criteria, can we take this out YMMV?

Objective or not, the problems outlined in the OP are still present.

edited 29th Nov '10 3:34:41 PM by SpellBlade

Major cleanup is needed.

I've roughed out a sandbox version of the page:

Sandbox.Porting Disaster

Feel free to edit.

@Raso,

I can see how the 2nd might not fit, but the first is a definite example. The levels have been cut down falls under missing content.

Only the GFX was cut down from my understanding. Which is what that quote is talking about. But meh not a fan of those types of games.

edited 30th Nov '10 9:11:19 AM by Raso

Hmm... Why not try this?

1. Take Porting Disaster out of the YMMV tab. 2. Make a neutral page for ports such as Porting Decay or Porting Altercation. 3. Move all the problematic examples from Porting Disaster and put it under Porting Decay or Porting Alteration and lable them as YMMV.

That should solve the problem.

edited 4th Dec '10 11:50:38 AM by SuperSolidus

No comments on the sandbox draft?

Sorry I didn't reply to this first.

I don't think there are enough of these to warrant having genres having their own pages.

Looking at the proposed version:

It was a good choice to simplify or eliminate the technical details. That material is more suited to a Useful Notes article. Also good to drop the assertion that everyone thinks porting is easy. The developers know it is hard since they do it, the public probably know it is hard because it goes wrong fairly frequently.

I expect you are looking to drop problems with ports that are annoying but not disastrous. I wonder if we might be dropping too many cases:

These seem like real deal breakers:

• Worse camera control, which is often a result of different display resolutions.
• The screen size is way too small — a trait very common in GBA ports.
• Clumsy controls, even if you try to forget the old control layout. For example, imitating pad control badly on a keyboard, not supporting mice or customized control setups in a console-to-PC port, trying to cram too many hotkey functions onto controller buttons in a PC-to-console port, or forgetting entirely that a console-to-PC port even has a keyboard at its disposal.

This seems interestingly bad, but vague:

• Mechanics of gameplay become broken and glitchy.

I think the original version might be better for this one?

• Controversial or "edgy" content is censored or cut to appease the Moral Guardians. Common with PC-to-console ports, especially when the PC version is freeware.

These seem "iconic" of bad ports, particularly the rescaled graphics. But you were probably right to drop 'em:

• Added content, perhaps even well-intended to make up for the removed material appears hastily-crafted or of much lower quality than the original game.
• Important information presented in the original title's manual omitted entirely for the port.
• Badly-redrawn or scaled graphics.
• Sound glitches or loss of quality.

This is interesting but quite unclear:

• Applying graphics filtering to pixel art, rendering it nigh-unrecognisable. Common for new ports of old, old games.

Finally, do we want some version of the original last line? The link to So Bad It's Horrible) is wrong since we don't link to Darth Wiki from main articles, but Porting Distillation is the sister trope. Perhaps something like:

See also Porting Distillation, where a game is greatly improved during the development of a ported version.

edited 5th Dec '10 9:29:43 PM by Camacan

I think your points have already been covered by the broad categories in use on the sandbox version.

I have gone and added the see also line, though.

That's probably true — but I found the specifics interesting food for thought but the generalities to be rather bland. So I think we should retain at least the dealbreakers and possibly expand/clarify the unclear ones. I understand that having too many minor issues makes it look like any and all complaints are valid examples — but it seems a shame to iron out all the concrete info from the article in order to be safe.

edited 6th Dec '10 2:56:19 AM by Camacan

I added two of the "deal breakers", but left out the one about screen size, given I'm finding it unclear.

Nice work, Roxor. I don't see any glaring opportunities for improvement to the sandbox version myself.

So, start moving examples to the sandbox page, then?

Support rename to Porting Decay. (Sub-Trope of Adaptation Decay?)

IMO: Somewhat negative is fine. Really negative is whiney.

(Nevermind other problems with strong negativity, which are numerous.)

edited 6th Dec '10 9:13:43 PM by rodneyAnonymous

Just to make things clear, are we watering down, for lack of a better term, the Porting Disaster page? Or are we making a Porting Decay page for less extreme examples?

I don't really know why we need to rename it, we're changing the trope's criteria to things that are objectively bad, at least in comparison to the original.

A few notes: On the subject of the removal of 'edgy' content, I think that's well covered by the Bowdlerise page, to the point that THAT page probably needs to be broken into separate pages.

Secondly, this trope STILL can be subjective, in some senses: My brother got a recommendation from a friend of a Kirby game on GBA. My brother purchased the game and found not only was it a port of Kirby's Adventure for the NES, but also that it had had nearly half the levels (especially the more challenging ones) and minigames removed in the porting process. To my brother, the game was unplayably bad, being a mediocre port with much of the content removed. The friend, however, who had not played the original, enjoyed the game, even though OBJECTIVELY it was a drastically cut down version, simply because he had not had the original to compare it to.

edited 8th Dec '10 10:20:49 AM by savage

"Objectively negative" is not a solution to the problem of negativity being bad.

That doesn't make it subjective, though. I'm sure some kids loved the Atari 2600 version of Pac Man, but that doesn't change the fact that it was a terrible port of the arcade game.

Exactly my point.

I'm considering removing the sub-point about bad camera control being due to different display resolutions from the sandbox draft.

In my experience with programming cameras for use in 3D, the use of floating-point maths in the camera doesn't result in different behaviour at different resolutions.

Maybe I'm just writing good code and all the games I have played just have good screen-handling code. [shrugs]

Explain to me how the resolution can affect the camera control and I'll leave that sub-point in.

edited 10th Dec '10 4:07:36 AM by Roxor

@savage,

Nightmare in Dreamland was missing levels?

It's not resolution. It tends to be a bi-product of controller set up which has the camera mapped in some unintuitive system that's hard to use because of the physical controls.