03-24-2020, 02:37 AM
Here's some good ports I can name off the top of my head
Rainbow Islands - Genesis, NES, and Master System. Rainbow Islands is a game you'd have to try hard to fuck up, the Spectrum version if I remember wasn't very good but my god the NES version? Total gem, it shouldn't be hard to find on eBay either.
Samurai Shodown 2 - NGPC. It's a port of Samurai Shodown 64 if I recall correctly, everything about it is absolutely superb. An NGPC is totally worth getting just for this game alone, if not most of the fighters for that system.
Samurai Shodown - GB. A fighting game on the gameboy sounds like a terrible idea, but this is one of the few times where it sounded bad on paper, but it turned out much better than expected. I swear SNK back in that day had a super high quality control that made sure even the lowest functioning systems got good ports.
Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure - GBC. Bootleg ports are always terrible, but not this one. I guess the bootleggers really loved Dragon Ball, because it plays so damn nicely, even the sprites look exactly like they would have if this was an official game.
Tower of Druaga - PC Engine. The original ToD wasn't very good, the console ports were inferior ports of the arcade game. It wasn't until this remake came along that we got a decent version of what was one of the pioneers in video games. We wouldn't have gotten Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Earthbound, or even Undertale if it hadn't been for ToD! Sad it didn't come out to the west though, like most of the other games in that series (yes, this game spawned a series of it's own).
Bad ports?
Double Dragon - Sega Genesis. One of the first consoles that could produce graphics that were similar to the arcade, and they managed to screw it all up.
Battletoads in Battlemaniacs - SMS. Why the SMS got a port of an SNES game is baffling to me, it's like a reversed scenario of the Genesis getting a port of the NES Battletoads! It was said to be incomplete by the time it had to be published, and it shows. There's tons of graphical issues, music is in the wrong places, everything.
Castlevania - Amiga. The only Amiga game I've ripped sprites from so far, and I gotta say I might be in for some real shit with the Amiga if there's games like this. The music is again in the wrong places, like why did they use wicked child for the first stage? Why is vampire killer the title screen theme?
Pac-Mania - MSX2. Pac-Mania shouldn't be hard to make a port of, yet they managed to fuck it up. Jumping feels very stiff, turning is also an issue, and overall while the graphics are nice it doesn't really help the game any.
Mega Man - Game Gear. They were trying to make their own version of the Game Boy games (which were their own thing rather than ports of the NES games) by taking the exact level layouts and throwing them in there, not realizing how bad the screen crunch would be. MegaMan's sprites are really weird too, the helmet got messed up in the graphics conversion I suppose, but they couldn't have just gone back and fixed it? StarMan's portrait being green is also another oddity, but that turned out to be a genuine mistake from the developers. The Game Gear (and Master System)'s sound engine doesn't sound that good, so the music can be excused.
Altered Beast - SMS. I inherited my older siblings' Sega Genesis, Altered Beast was one of the games that was with it. It played fine, even with those crusty voice samples. But the Master System version? It makes the Famicom version look amazing by comparison! For one thing, the graphics look like they were all sloppily resized and recolored to fit the graphical limitation. The music is once again in all the wrong places too, what is it with bad ports and music being misaligned? Oh and the controls are pretty much terrible as one might assume.
Golden Axe - GBA. The music and sounds sound like they've been possessed by a demon, there's nothing else on the GBA that sounds as bad as this!
Ghosts 'N Goblins - NES. Yeah this is one of those "classic" NES games that are notoriously hard, but you see a lot of the reasons why it's hard is because of the bad controls. The jumping is stiff, there are times where you can't get up from ducking when you need to which is how you end up dying. I was going to put Ghouls 'N Ghosts for the SMS here but after extensively playing the NES version, it's so much worse.
There are so many other bad ports I could talk about, but this post would reach it's character limit by the time I'm done.
Rainbow Islands - Genesis, NES, and Master System. Rainbow Islands is a game you'd have to try hard to fuck up, the Spectrum version if I remember wasn't very good but my god the NES version? Total gem, it shouldn't be hard to find on eBay either.
Samurai Shodown 2 - NGPC. It's a port of Samurai Shodown 64 if I recall correctly, everything about it is absolutely superb. An NGPC is totally worth getting just for this game alone, if not most of the fighters for that system.
Samurai Shodown - GB. A fighting game on the gameboy sounds like a terrible idea, but this is one of the few times where it sounded bad on paper, but it turned out much better than expected. I swear SNK back in that day had a super high quality control that made sure even the lowest functioning systems got good ports.
Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure - GBC. Bootleg ports are always terrible, but not this one. I guess the bootleggers really loved Dragon Ball, because it plays so damn nicely, even the sprites look exactly like they would have if this was an official game.
Tower of Druaga - PC Engine. The original ToD wasn't very good, the console ports were inferior ports of the arcade game. It wasn't until this remake came along that we got a decent version of what was one of the pioneers in video games. We wouldn't have gotten Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Earthbound, or even Undertale if it hadn't been for ToD! Sad it didn't come out to the west though, like most of the other games in that series (yes, this game spawned a series of it's own).
Bad ports?
Double Dragon - Sega Genesis. One of the first consoles that could produce graphics that were similar to the arcade, and they managed to screw it all up.
Battletoads in Battlemaniacs - SMS. Why the SMS got a port of an SNES game is baffling to me, it's like a reversed scenario of the Genesis getting a port of the NES Battletoads! It was said to be incomplete by the time it had to be published, and it shows. There's tons of graphical issues, music is in the wrong places, everything.
Castlevania - Amiga. The only Amiga game I've ripped sprites from so far, and I gotta say I might be in for some real shit with the Amiga if there's games like this. The music is again in the wrong places, like why did they use wicked child for the first stage? Why is vampire killer the title screen theme?
Pac-Mania - MSX2. Pac-Mania shouldn't be hard to make a port of, yet they managed to fuck it up. Jumping feels very stiff, turning is also an issue, and overall while the graphics are nice it doesn't really help the game any.
Mega Man - Game Gear. They were trying to make their own version of the Game Boy games (which were their own thing rather than ports of the NES games) by taking the exact level layouts and throwing them in there, not realizing how bad the screen crunch would be. MegaMan's sprites are really weird too, the helmet got messed up in the graphics conversion I suppose, but they couldn't have just gone back and fixed it? StarMan's portrait being green is also another oddity, but that turned out to be a genuine mistake from the developers. The Game Gear (and Master System)'s sound engine doesn't sound that good, so the music can be excused.
Altered Beast - SMS. I inherited my older siblings' Sega Genesis, Altered Beast was one of the games that was with it. It played fine, even with those crusty voice samples. But the Master System version? It makes the Famicom version look amazing by comparison! For one thing, the graphics look like they were all sloppily resized and recolored to fit the graphical limitation. The music is once again in all the wrong places too, what is it with bad ports and music being misaligned? Oh and the controls are pretty much terrible as one might assume.
Golden Axe - GBA. The music and sounds sound like they've been possessed by a demon, there's nothing else on the GBA that sounds as bad as this!
Ghosts 'N Goblins - NES. Yeah this is one of those "classic" NES games that are notoriously hard, but you see a lot of the reasons why it's hard is because of the bad controls. The jumping is stiff, there are times where you can't get up from ducking when you need to which is how you end up dying. I was going to put Ghouls 'N Ghosts for the SMS here but after extensively playing the NES version, it's so much worse.
There are so many other bad ports I could talk about, but this post would reach it's character limit by the time I'm done.