![]() The slow pace gave players plenty of time to enjoy the lush pre-rendered graphics and think over some of the games more difficult puzzles. While not everyone agrees about just how well it aged, the original game and its sequels all enjoyed very favourable reviews on PC. Rather, a good word to describe the games would be “contemplative.” This isn’t to say that Myst is bad. The Myst series has never been known for its blazingly fast gameplay. The biggest offender was the constantly dipping frame rate, the unusually long loading times, and the version’s continuous lack of patches for well-known bugs which had already been eradicated on PC and Xbox 360. While most gamers would argue that the PS3 was at the very least a solid system, its version of The Orange Box did end up wasting the time of a lot of people. In an interview with the magazine Edge, Gabe Newell tried to simultaneously call the PS3 a “waste of everybody’s time” while assuring the console's owners that they would like his game. While Valve developed most versions, the PS3 port was handled by Electronic Arts. The Orange Box was also released on PS3, but it was a bit less enjoyable on that platform. A lot of people are still playing Team Fortress 2 and that game was released nearly a decade ago! Gamers rejoiced, happy that Valve’s quality products could be enjoyed not only on PC, but also on Xbox 360. That’s enough content to keep you playing for months. For the price of a single game, Valve introduced the world to Team Fortress 2 and Portal, and just to sweeten the deal, they included Half-Life 2 as well as a brand-new episode of the game. The Orange Box just might be one of the best gaming bargains in recent history. Have I mentioned that the developers had to compress the textures to fit on WiiWare, giving the game an unpleasant fuzziness? Good writing can only take you so far. The game’s autosave feature stops this port from being totally unplayable, although it is not for a lack of trying. The biggest issue with Sam and Max for Wii is its unfortunate habit of freezing in the middle of a puzzle, with the only solution being a complete reset of the console. There’s also the cursor’s tendency to get jammed at the bottom of your screen if you accidentally point outside your television and the constant slowdowns every time you interact with an object. Some of the puzzles require a lot of accuracy and while the remote is neat when it comes to sports games or general shaking motions, it feels too floaty here. The lesser of the game’s problem is the awkwardness of using the Wii remote as a cursor. The Nintendo Wii version is more or less the same thing, except that it adds several unnecessary obstacles to the experience. Sam and Max Save The World is a joyful adventure game full of charm and humour which features a detective dog teaming with a rabbit to solve a variety of crimes. However, the following games are all notable because they failed, in one way or another, to live up to the original product. We are not claiming that these are the worst ports of all-time. Because we are fun like that, we will take a look at the last category. While some ports only end up with minor differences, others end up being slightly less than adequate, while a few are simply awful and have no reason to exist. Unfortunately, a lot of ports were approached as quick ways to cash-in on an existing title’s name value instead of a dedicated project to be built from the ground up. It is a lot of work which can be rewarding if done right. In order for a game to run the same on every architecture, parts of the code need to be rewritten and assets need to be reworked. The hiccup is that porting a game to a new system is a delicate process. This crowd of console-only gamers is a sizable market which, money-wise, certainly deserves to be explored further. ![]() PC gaming can be rewarding, but nothing beats consoles for simplicity. Even keeping a system good enough to run the latest blockbuster game at decent settings can be prohibitive for many reasons. After all, a lot of gamers do not have the means or the patience to buy and maintain a gaming-level PC up-to-date. ![]() It’s easy to see why publishers of PC game would want to port their most popular games to the console world.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |