I don’t like console to PC ports of video games.

You’ve probably played one or two, maybe even lived to tell the tale. You probably dislike them, too. Recently, Resident Evil 4 had a port by Ubisoft that was so horrible players couldn’t even play the purchased game without downloading mouse hacks to straighten up the awkward aim and messy controls. I don’t know about you, but I like to be able to play the games I buy right out of the package after a short install—not after hours scouring the internet for fixes upon finding Ubisoft’s homepage link to the hot fix dead. I also like to be able to use my mouse when playing a game involving shooting in real time. Somehow, while transferring it from the Gamecube and PS2 to the computer, Ubisoft managed to completely deface one of the best games of this decade almost two years after its initial release.

Of course, it’s not all Ubisoft’s fault. A lot of it is really Capcom’s fault for giving up its rights and encouraging a port to milk an obvious cash cow. But if you want to blame Capcom for something truly horrendous, look no further than Mega Man Legends.

MML is even worse than RE4’s port. I don’t even know how to begin to describe this game’s port, except maybe using the words “fucking” and “awful.” The list of problems the game’s port had is phenomenal. For example, when they ported the game to the computer, they ended up making the music into wav files which caused it to fail to loop properly and frequently get stuck. I can still hear the theme song skipping like a broken record, the only salvation found to be tabbing out to mute my computer’s sound since the game itself didn’t have an option to turn it off. Of course, while tabbing out, the PC version inevitably crashed and caused a blue screen. It was, in fact, common for it to crash during saves as well or demand a memory card be inserted in order to continue.

Damn, I guess I got cheated by Dell because my laptop doesn’t have a spot for a Playstation 1 memory card.

It’s not like Capcom is king of the bad ports, either, or else this article would end right here. Their PC ports of Dino Crisis and Resident Evil 3 were actually impressive for the time. No, you see, it wasn’t even the first time a gaming company had done it and failed so horribly. There were others like Capcom; others who took the leap and failed, scarring both PC and console gamers alike.

Before the days of Square-Enix, Squaresoft had a dream. It was grandiose and egotistical. They wanted to not only dominate the Playstation market, but assault the computer marketplace as well. Assault is actually the best description of what they did; imagine trying to move Cloud Strife through Midgar using your keyboard arrow keys. In the PC port of i>Final Fantasy VII , the commonplace WASD wasn’t even an option and the mouse was useless. You could literally unplug your fucking mouse, throw it around, feed it to your dog, give it to your baby brother, throw it off a cliff–it wouldn’t matter. You didn’t need it, even if you desperately wanted it, and there was no option to switch to it anyway. And now that I think about it, maybe that was half the problem; if PC gaming isn’t half about the mouse, then I don’t know what it is about.

Final Fantasy VIII was a little more tolerable, I guess. Yeah, unsurprisingly Square didn’t learn from its lackluster sales of FFVII for the computer. It went on and ported the next Final Fantasy six months after the console release. Once more, the mouse sat and gathered dust. Once again, the game was ridden with bugs and instability. Supposedly smoother graphics were nonexistent and most computers stuttered to play it properly without crashing. The only reason why it was more tolerable was it included the Japanese only port of an oddly pixilated Chocobo game called Chocobo World starring Boko, the baby Chocobo. I never played the mini-game, because it fucking sucked and Boko was about ten pixels on my monitor that I had to squint to see, but at least they added something for us American and European players who didn’t have access to a Pocketstation.

It was the thought that counted.

Thankfully, Square stopped with bad ports of excellent games after two train wrecks. Well, if you don’t count Final Fantasy XI anyway, which I’m not, because it may be the one game in history where its port to the PC made it better. Honestly, I’d say only bad gamers played the game, regardless of version, but I played it for three months and I’m awesome so I can’t. I will say, however, that it was a bad MMORPG with a bad community and terrible party systems. Even if you liked it, you can’t attempt to justify its clumsy interface and empty landscapes. I had a further rant here I had to remove to be politically correct, but the gist was about Everquest and Final Fantasy hooking up to produce the worst demon child in the history of demon children known as FFXI. I mean, totally a knock off the Exorcist block but with the extra perks including, but not limited to: mandatory grouping, outdoor raids, and inherent racism via poor community management.

Konami also had its fair share of misses during its adventures into porting. While its Silent Hill series generally did favorably (although lacking once again in the mouse department), Metal Gear Solid suffered vastly. Ported ungracefully from a port of a port—the PS2 to Xbox to PC, to be exact—Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty port (known as MGS2: Substance) stumbled all over itself. Like every port thus far, it once again featured poor controls that led to an unpleasant gaming experience. For some reason, it didn’t allow customization from original presets of controls, making it unplayable without a gamepad. Hilariously, the Xbox controls remained in game as well for command prompts and in the manual when describing what to do. Unpolished and unfinished, the game couldn’t ride on the series name and excellence when put onto the PC. Would it really have killed the developers to replace prompts for the joystick to the arrow key?

Or, hell, let us gamers set our own controls to make up for the developer’s bad judgment?

World of Warcraft wouldn’t be so successful if you couldn’t bind whatever you wanted wherever you wanted. No arena team would work seamlessly if their Druid couldn’t add Lifebloom to the 1 key and Bear Form to a side mouse button. Or whatever they wanted. I can’t imagine having to look at the keyboard, trying to figure out which button the game had pre-assigned my abilities to. Just imagine the Druid turning to a Rogue in the middle of a match while pillar kiting, and saying, “Okay, wait a minute Mr. Undead Rogue, I have to find the semi-colon to cast Cyclone, or wait, was it the question mark?” Not only would the Druid die, but the Rogue doesn’t even know Darnassian!

Seriously, though, the game simply wouldn’t flow like it does if things were written in stone by someone who had no idea of what the player would play the game like.

And the above scenario is exactly what some ports–the really bad ones, at least–do constantly. For some reason, their developers don’t get that while console games work well with their set-up, controllers aid the process significantly. So they don’t change the controls, ignore the mouse, and make the former buttons into awkward keys. Most PC gamers don’t use controllers or even own one. Honestly, that’s the entire point of a port, to make it playable on a different platform with different tools. It’s stupid to build controls for a port for another system around the previous platform’s controls. It’s different. It’s supposed to be different. It’s okay to be different.

So why don’t they do it already?

When you look at the best ports–the ones that truly were equals on any system–they’re frequently not direct ports. They are different. Mass Effect, Fable, and even Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas; can you tell where the port begins and ends? Well, even if you can, it’s not an entirely rant-worthy experience or something worth analyzing. These games were released at the same time as the original game or within a six month span, and were specifically tweaked by an entirely different team. Their controls work. Mice are used–and used well. The good game ports go from a console to a PC flawlessly and gainthe feel of the platform it’s on, instead of clinging to the original platform’s controls in a new skin that simply does not fit.

In the future, I hope they learn from it. I hope ports evolve. Because I fear if bad console ports are continuously made, they will only help widen the gap between PC gaming and console gaming. They will perpetuate the misconception that you must go to the pc for one type of game and the console for another and the two shall never meet.

Someday, somehow, gamers should be able to play every game on every platform—and not get headaches. For now, though, there’s always ibuprofen.

Or vicodin.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Game Design, Rants, Editorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.