MyFinalEdits
(Ten years in the joint)
GeorgePie
Since: Apr, 2012
Medinoc
Since: Jan, 2001
Dec 7th 2023 at 3:59:52 AM
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Also, from what I've read online, the ports of the first two games are fine. It's only Knight that's problematic, and as mentioned above there's still time to fix it.
"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."
GoblinCipher
Mx
Since: Nov, 2015
Mx
Sep 28th 2022 at 12:31:13 PM
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- 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.
We sure about this? I've played the Arcade Archives version of Athena, and it's only barely an improvement. The only meaningful difference I noticed was a massively increased number of enemies.
oknazevad
Since: May, 2009
May 14th 2021 at 5:50:06 AM
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Parking this here in case someone objects terribly, but a pirate ripoff game is not a fair topic for the actual article, as it can't actually be a proper port.
NES/Famicom (pirate originals)
- Cony Soft is infamous for their ports being disastrous. So much that none of their games can be considered playable. Even those outside the list.
- Their version of Street Fighter II. It has bleepy music, ridiculous hand-drawn graphics, AI that always spams Hadokens, and broken hit detection. There are 8 playable characters from the original game, but, considering the above statements, it doesn't help. There is also a mad amount of flickering. The Street Fighter V and VI rips are even worse.
- Mortal Kombat V Turbo and Mortal Kombat V plus Trilogy, ports of parts one and three respectively. Just about the only good thing you can say about these ports is that they have Fatalities, but good luck pulling them off thanks to the awful controls. What's worse is that the latter game uses the B button to block, meaning that you can only kick while jumping.
- In a rare example of ports being developed for Famiclone systems, the Gamezone II
has a few unofficial ports of early arcade games of varying quality, with the Missile Command and Asteroids ports definitely fitting this trope. The former is way too easy as the player's missiles are lightning fast and inexplicably ends after 5 levels, while the latter only lets you face in eight directions, has poor control (the B button accelerates and only lets you travel a certain distance) and a choppy framerate.
- Also, the Frogger port lacks the music the original game had and ends the level when you get two frogs across instead of five.
- Hosenkan Electronics also made ports of popular 16-bit games, and most of them fit this trope:
- Pocahontas (AKA Pocohontos). Unfinished and slow. Super Game's version did it better.
- Contra Spirits, also known as Super Contra 3. It's slow, some of the weapons were removed, the graphics are generally poor and level 5 from the original was replaced with a palette swap of level 3 (which is actually level 2 in this version). On the plus side, it did at least have the bike chase level, which was removed in the Game Boy version.
- Super Donkey Kong, which is actually based on Donkey Kong Land on the Game Boy. The controls are sluggish and the game only has five levels, which repeat several times. The graphics seem to be the original SNES prerendered graphics with reduced color, and overall, the game looks fine compared to the SNES original.
- Mickey Mania 7. The graphics were inevitably butchered due to the system limitations, the game can feasibly be beaten in less than 15 minutes and the loading screens were ported from the SNES version.
- The Toy Story port has only five levels from the original game and can be beaten in under 10 minutes. The Engrish during the cutscenes doesn't help.
- The Lost World: Jurassic Park which is actually a port of the SNES adaptation of Jurassic Park, despite the title, is a dumpster fire of confusing first-person building segments, an obnoxious 12-second music loop throughout the game, a gratuitously gruesome Game Over screen that wasn't in the original SNES version, and the game can be beaten in just a minute due to a glitch that allows Grant to jump through walls.
- Hummer Team a.k.a. Somari Team a.k.a. Yoko Soft a.k.a. Copyright. Infamous for lots of par and subpar ports of the existing games and a really squeaky sound engine... which pulled out some good music once a year. A surprising number of their ports manage to avert this trope.
- While they made a decent port, Hummer's first port of Street Fighter II qualifies, with only four characters playable, and the fifth (M. Bison/Vega, renamed Viga) as the final boss. As well as this, some of the characters' sizes were questionable. Also, the endings weren't the same as they were originally but filled with loads and loads of typos. Just look. An updated version of this game, Master Fighter VI, added the rest of the characters (along with a clone of each), made the bosses playable and replaced most of the graphics with those from Super Fighter III. However, the endings from the original port were replaced with a generic congratulations screen.
- Street Fighter Alpha. The problem with graphics was solved, but infinite supers and repetitive gameplay killed the cat.
- The King of Fighters '96 falls into a similar migraine. Even Word of God states that they were planning to make J.Y. Company release it with more characters, but something went wrong so it was never released per se... while the Obvious Beta build was sent to Ka Sheng instead.
- Fatal Fury Special, YuYu Hakusho Final and Dragon Ball Z 2 were also done on the same engine, with no original gimmicks put in, leaving the gameplay being a la Street Fighter II, big time.
- Tekken 2 (which is actually a port of the first game) is no better, and essentially plays like their other fighting games without the projectiles.
- The port of the first Mortal Kombat 1 game is not clearly a disaster, considering there are far worse ports on Game Boy and Sega Master System, but it includes Sub-Zero and Scorpion throwing "hadokens" instead of ice balls and harpoons.
- Mortal Kombat 2, now known as Mortal Kombat II Special, averts this in many aspects by adding blood (although Fatalities and the other finishers are still conspicuously missing) and making the special moves more in line with the original game.
- Ture Mortal Kombat 3 plays it straight and adds happy music. And one song comes STRAIGHT from Fatal Fury Special.
- Super Mario World is a very strange case. The graphics are surprisingly good, resembling the original SNES sprites, and the game even proved Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Mario series, wrong on one point — Miyamoto stated that Yoshi was impossible to program on the NES. Hummer Team put forth an impressive effort. This all said, the music was ear-bleeding at times; the jumping physics were not accurately ported, making certain levels all but impossible; and finally, the cartridge doesn't even contain the full game, as it's missing the final 3 worlds! The only way to get the complete version of the game is to find a rare 45-in-1 multicart.
- Somari: Also known as Mario in Sonic's World - The Game. Technically, it's a port, because it doesn't change the game's original idea, save for adding Mario instead of Sonic and making him able to spindash. But, as in the case with Super Mario World, the controls aren't clearly responsive, plus the lack of checkpoints makes it three times harder (not five times harder because Scrap Brain Zone just isn't here), not to mention that the game is incredibly glitchy. And the Buzz Bombers with insanely good accuracy. You can't even move fast without getting sniped by one out of nowhere.
- While they made a decent port, Hummer's first port of Street Fighter II qualifies, with only four characters playable, and the fifth (M. Bison/Vega, renamed Viga) as the final boss. As well as this, some of the characters' sizes were questionable. Also, the endings weren't the same as they were originally but filled with loads and loads of typos. Just look.
- Rex Soft, also known as ASDER, also known as Caltron:
- The King of Fighters '95: Without any doubt, this is the fastest fighting game in the world. In some instances, it's too fast! The roster is cropped and the graphics are abysmal.
- Boogerman II: The Final Adventure. Includes the boogerhero protagonist who moves even slower than the in-game snail enemies.
- Lethal Enforcers also received one, under a moniker of Lethal Weapon (not to be confused with the licensed NES game which was based on the movie series with the same name). On a side note, this game's engine has also become the base for Cobra Mission (which already can be confused with Mission Cobra, an NES vertical-scrolling shooter made by the forementioned Sachen), complete with Lethal Enforcers' reloading method and car chase scene.
- Sachen is another example. Gaiapolis was initially an obscure arcade game made by Konami (which never got an official home port), but it seems like Sachen was lucky enough to play the machine with this game while it was alive. Despite the speed and extremely wild amount of flicker, as well as traditional beepy Sachen music, however, it's still fairly playable (mainly in part due to the 99 continues you get at the start).
- Most of their games were ported to Game Boy, which automatically means a porting disaster of a porting disaster. No, we're not making this up.
- They also did bootlegs of Rally-X (as Jovial Race), Pipe Dream (as Pipes or Pipe V), Galaga (as Huge Insect), Battle City (as Final Combat), and Buster Brothers (as Super Pang).
- Most of their games were ported to Game Boy, which automatically means a porting disaster of a porting disaster. No, we're not making this up.
- There was a NES pirate of R-Type titled Magic Dragon, developed by... Magicp. The presentation is mediocre and at one point, there's an Invisible Wall that precludes further progress.
- Super Contra X, developed by Chengdu Tai Jing Da Dong, some members of which founded the aforementioned Waixing, and published by Micro Genius, developers/publishers of Aladdin II and Thunder Warrior.
- Aladdin II itself is also worth mentioning. Ostensibly a port of Aladdin on the Mega Drive, the game is a broken mess with a plethora of glitches, poor control, all of the cutscenes removed and horrible audiovisuals. It's so bad, it makes the NMS version look like a Polished Port in comparison.
- Super Donkey Kong 2, a port of Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest for the SNES, initially seems to avert this until you find out that it only has three levels.
- Waixing and Nanjing deserve a separate page because 99.9% of their games are made on the same RPG engine. Good luck beating them all. And notice that these are all in Chinese — there are barely any English translations, and if there are any, they're from fans.
- M&M Heroes, the port of the first Heroes of Might and Magic is playable indeed, but only if you can get over with the scrappy graphics, not-so-humble interface and bleepy music. Otherwise, you'd rather play the Game Boy versions instead.
- Biohazard a.k.a. Resident Evil was a third-person survival horror game, but became a top-down RPGish type game up until you got into random battles with zombies and other assorted horrors, wherein it switched gameplay to the combat model used in Resident Evil Gaiden. The music is of... dubious quality, too.
- Commandos. Apart from the title and WWII setting, it has nothing else to do with the original. By the way, it comes with Biohazard music.
- Warriors Orochi. The port includes loads of barely beatable mazes, even bigger loads of enemy hordes and, of course, the non-existent balance, which turns the game into complete madness when you've gotta fight 20 enemies at once. Have fun.
- Subverted with Nanjing's Pokémon Yellow, which remains accurate to the original game, more or less... While Mars's Pokémon Red and Gold fit this trope to a T.
- Final Fantasy got mistreated by both companies, except while Waixing produced cheap title hacks of the first two games, Nanjing went further and reconverted parts IV, V, and VII. But, seeing that Final Fantasy VII got a fan translation to English, that says something.
- Chrono Trigger. Drastically cut, compared to the original, and reportedly, the balance is so bad that it's literally impossible to beat Magus, the final boss (a character who, in the real game, happens to be a Disc-One Final Boss) without using a cheating device.
- The King of Fighters R1 and R2. Knowing both the universe and the games very well, you'd expect this to be direct-to-NeoGeo Pocket Color ports., but no. In reality, these are KOF: Kyo clones, except they take place during the events of '95 and '96. Even if these weren't dumped yet, the ad booklet, which was once available on the net, says it all.
- One more game by SNK, Samurai Shodown RPG, also took a critical hit from Nanjing.
- The Chinese love Koei's games based on Three Kingdoms epics, so expect a lot of Nanjing/Waixing's crappy/not so crappy ports. Especially funny to see Legend of Cao Cao, a Japanese-only PC tactics game with an isometric view being translated into a straight top-down RPG.
- Nanjing's NES version of The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is yet another case of "barely even a port": the storyline and even some graphics remain intact, but that's about the extent of it. Pity the poor child who expected Zelda's famous active battles and soundtrack, only to find random turn-based encounters and music from Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire in their place.
Medinoc
Since: Jan, 2001
May 14th 2021 at 10:03:42 AM
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I object non-terribly, mostly on historical grounds. We've considered these ports pretty much since the page exists.
Plus, we'd need a place to put them, it would be a shame to lose these pearls.
"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."
Piterpicher
(Series 2)
May 14th 2021 at 10:15:29 AM
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I mean, I think they kinda count as ports, just pirate ones. then again, I don't know if crappy unofficial Adobe Flash ports would count for the Computers page.
Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)
Should Batman: Arkham Trilogy for the Nintendo Switch be mentioned?
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