Console ports-what do you think?

L

Lynx

Spaceman
Recently I browsed the Deus Ex: Invisible War forums and there were pretty bad reviews from some of the persons there. I haven't downloaded the demo yet, since I'm approaching my limit(damn I should spend those few bucks for a 3GB limit!) so I can't really judge on it. While it seems to be rather good, nearly everyone is complaining about the weird consolish interfaces, the controls which seem to be not really good, everything is written in Goliath letters and the graphics are not bad, but not as good as they should be. And it seems that not much is going to be changed since it'll get int stores in two weeks or so(though the demo is at least one or two months old by now).

So what do you think about console ports. I think very negative about them(the PC port of Resident Evil 3 showwed how to totally fuck things up that way), they often influence the PC version in a bad way. On the other hand, i haven't played that many console ports. Can anyone tell me how ports of ather games were compared to the console versions. Were they still dumbed down for the console kiddies or did they have decent controls etc? What do you think, will this trend continue?
 
It depends entirely on the game - Wing Commander 3 3DO, for instance, is an amazing port... whereas Wing Commander 3 PSX is fairly mediocre.

Recently, however, development for multiple consoles/systems has become much more standardized - so doing simultaneous PS2/X-Box/PC/etc. versions is no longer a big deal.
 
Just played Halo for PC...good that game is bad...waited 1 or 2 years and what does the PC get...poor graphik with nearly no advancement of the PC capabilitys and the worst leveldesign I know.
Also played FF8 on PC...no changes to the PSX version...they even forgot to give the program an exit option...or I haven't found it yet. I have to go ctrl-alt-del or the Windowskey to got back and then kill the task/game.

For me Consol to PC converting stuff was always quite bad and I haven't seen a game yet that was a good conversion...not played WC3 on 3do, because I haven't got one.
 
Yeh but the thing with Halo is not that it was ported(mostly not...the mediocre graphics are of course) but that it was hyped up to the point where no man has gone before and everyone thought it's the computer gaming messias; and surprise everyone fell out of the sky when it was just mediocre. :p

One big problem with the ports are the cretinus interfaces of the console games taken over in some cases, and the simplistic and often sluggish controls(a mouse or joystick is more sensitive than a gamepad). Of course that shouldn't be too hard to fix but in some cases no one does it.

PC games ported to consoles have often a problem with controling too. Because of the higher complexity of PC controls there are wierd button combinations required up to a point where you'd need a third arm, sometimes; and the consoles often can't cope with the graphic detail of PC games(WC3/4 for PS for example, or DX for PS2).
 
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