Videogame Ports

[hewantstolurkatad]

I mean the kind of ones to hugely incompatible hardware. Are there any that stick out to you? Ideally we can have some success stories here too, not just your Pac Man 2600s and the like. At 25 years of age, I feel like I mostly just missed the era of tons of wildly different ports and the like.


The GBA had a bunch of games like Tony Hawks 2 and Max Payne that seemed to be aware they could /just about/ make a faithful port via changing the viewpoint or some other constraint.

[Twed]

Check out Street Fighter II on the Spectrum if you want a giggle.  Or to cry if you owned it. You had too seek to and load the appropriate stage from tape, everyone single bout. 

[Bhazor]

I do have a soft spot for the Gameboy Color Resident Evil remake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRCd2VVmLXw

Sadly never officially released its still floating around on emulation sites.

[Twed]

I love 'demakes' (hobbyist developers creating versions of modern games for older systems for fun). The author of Retro City Rampage made a fantastic demake of his own game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il65FIKWgEk

[Ron Maels Moustache]

Check out Street Fighter II on the Spectrum if you want a giggle.  Or to cry if you owned it. You had too seek to and load the appropriate stage from tape, everyone single bout.

The Amiga/ST versions were also laughably shit (that was U.S. Gold for you), but even having to change disks every time a new fight started was not quite as insane as having to rewind the tape to the correct place, fucking hell.

Speaking of which, porting Robinson's Requiem - Simarils' ludicrously ambitious fully 3D open-world survival game - to the Amiga and ST was definitely an act of madness. In 1994 this would've taxed most PCs of the time (even something like Daggerfall was still two years away), but the ports were basically unplayable unless you shrunk the gamescreen down to the size of a stamp and put all the graphic detail to it's lowest setting. And dear God, the disk-swapping.

Here's some youtube footage of it running on a massively upgraded A1200, and even then the framerate is barely acceptable, so you could imagine how it was on a vanilla machine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDU1Fp5SUnI

And here's the ST version. Why did they bother?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b37QEIAiwy0

[biggytitbo]

The Amiga version of Streetfighter 2 also laughably tried to combine all the moves into the Amiga 1 button joystick, a flaw shared by tons of other Amiga arcade ports.

There were Atari 2600 ports of double dragon and even klax as late as 1990, somewhat improbably.


The Spectrum ports of chase hq, rainbow islands and r-type are famously rather brilliant, despite the incredibly limited hardware.

[Twed]

The developer of that R-Type port documented it in entertaining detail in this free ebook: http://bizzley.imbahost.com/