What Are Some Strange Ports Of Games?

[BassGuitari]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

No mention of 2600 PacMan?   Or is it a dead horse already beaten to death?

*Cough*

12 hours ago, BassGuitari said:

Quite a few of the games that were ported to the Atari in the early '80s were just strange, though, in the sense that they were often better described as interpretations shoehorned into the system's limited hardware and RAM. Pac-Man, Defender, Zaxxon, Miner 2049er, Burgertime, Tapper, and Star Raiders are prime examples.

?

[Tanooki]

On 4/12/2020 at 10:40 AM, mbd30 said:

Dragon's Lair for the Coleco Adam.

 

 

 

On 4/12/2020 at 6:23 PM, chuckwalla said:

 

How about Dragon's Lair for the SNES? 

Luring gamers to spend money and getting a cheap trick (bait and switch?).

Q.C. totally thrown out the window.

 

Well only due to the format do I find this fits the strange ports bit, but how about the laserdisc conversion to a 4MB GAMEBOY COLOR cart?!  2bit color, reduced audio, minimized frames to death sequences, and 6 moves removed from the long Smithy sequence to fit the game -- but it is strangely there.

 

[bluejay]

Mortal Kombats on Gameboy. MK with 2 buttons on a green and black screen? WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

Oh, and every single Tiger handheld and Game & Watch games. All games are too powerful for a slab of plastic with an lcd and a couple buttons.

Have you guys seen the prototype SimCity for the NES? Neat concept, not very neat graphics. I think SimCity was too powerful for 8 bit systems.

Also, arcade games on a PC 5150 don't seem right to me, with IBM being the boring business nerd it is. I'm not entirely sure they meant it to be a game system.

And I have to mention games like Doom and SMB on graphing calculators with monochrome lcds(games look fine on calculators with full color lcds.) You haven't lived until you've played Doom on a TI-83 Plus.

Edited April 14, 2020 by bluejay

[Steven Pendleton]

Some ports on the 32X are truly terrible. It's funny and sad that the regular Genesis cartridge version of Pitfall The Mayan Adventure is superior to the 32X version. You'd think the 32X version would be better, but it's worse. 32X Doom is apparently not great either.

 

On the subject of the 32X, After Burner Complete, Space Harrier, and Virtua Racing Deluxe are really awesome and every one of them is extremely enjoyable. Even regular SVP Virtua Racing is actually very impressive for a 3D arcade -> home console port at the time. I still play regular Virtua Racing even now just so I don't have to deal with the annoying 32X, which also doesn't work on the Mega Sg if you don't have the DAC.

Edited April 14, 2020 by Steven Pendleton

[+GoldLeader]

I had a couple of responses ready before I read what others wrote, so mine have basically been covered.   I thought of Mr. Do! and Joust on Atari because gameplay elements were changed...And I always wondered if the gameplay could have been done with more effort or if it really was impossible.

 

And already mentioned a ton;  Dragon's Lair.

 

To me the Arcade game itself is beautiful and completely unplayable.   Due to the concept, I've always wanted to like it, but let's be honest gameplay has to coexist with graphics.  Otherwise ya might as well look at a Frank Frazetta calendar and call it a day.  The ADAM version looks very playable and would likely be better than the actual arcade game to me, even if this is like saying you like a bar band's cover version of a song better than the original artist.

Then,  the NES version looks very cool, but as I own a boxed copy...Let's just say I've had more fun waiting in line at the DMV than I ever had with that game.  Maybe if it weren't so maddeningly difficult.  If everything didn't have to be so perfectly precise, they might have had a game there.   And due to fond memories of playing it a little bit  (after renting it BITD), and the cute girl who I was hanging out with at the time, I'll always have a soft spot for the SNES version.  To be fair, even though I own it now, I've barely played it again, but I liked the concept of making a video game of it rather than a FMV cartoon with next to zero control.

 

Oh, here's one that hasn't been mentioned.  Cosmic Chasm for Vectrex was a home version that later got an upgrade to Full-on Arcade cab! First of its kind.  So it's the arcade port that is strange because it usually doesn't go that way...

[bluejay]

1 minute ago, GoldLeader said:

To me the Arcade game itself is beautiful and completely unplayable.   Due to the concept, I've always wanted to like it, but let's be honest gameplay has to coexist with graphics.  Otherwise ya might as well look at a Frank Frazetta Calendar and call it a day. 

Get a copy of Back to the Future or something. Make it so that you have to press a button on the remote every once and a while to continue. There, the most graphically advanced game ever.

[Magmavision2000]

1 hour ago, Tanooki said:

 

Well only due to the format do I find this fits the strange ports bit, but how about the laserdisc conversion to a 4MB GAMEBOY COLOR cart?!  2bit color, reduced audio, minimized frames to death sequences, and 6 moves removed from the long Smithy sequence to fit the game -- but it is strangely there.

 

Was this talked about when it was released?!? It must've taken months to recreate every frame by hand! 

[+GoldLeader]

29 minutes ago, Magmavision2000 said:

Was this talked about when it was released?!? It must've taken months to recreate every frame by hand! 

It's funny because I have that game, too,...but after I ordered it off of eBay, I set it aside amidst a bunch of stuff and completely, I mean completely,  forgot about it.  One day moving some stuff around I found it.   I think I looked it up in my email records to remember that I had gotten it off of eBay.  Kinda felt like Christmas!   I chalked it up to there was a time I was ordering various versions of Dragon's Lair, and then (separate event) I also think I had a concussion in there somewhere...Heh...

[homerhomer]

Frogger on the Genesis is an oddball to me. It was released in 1998 and is the last game for the system. Why would Konami and Sega even bother with this release? 

 

Granted I think it's cool now.

 

 

[zzip]

11 hours ago, Tanooki said:

 

Well only due to the format do I find this fits the strange ports bit, but how about the laserdisc conversion to a 4MB GAMEBOY COLOR cart?!  2bit color, reduced audio, minimized frames to death sequences, and 6 moves removed from the long Smithy sequence to fit the game -- but it is strangely there.

 

 

I was always impressed with the Atari ST/Amiga version-  it ran off a set of floppies.   I think 360K floppies in the case of the ST.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INaJ4p0B8U8

[Lost Dragon]

On 4/13/2020 at 7:11 AM, BassGuitari said:

Xenophobe, Ikari Warriors, Rampage, and Commando were some gutsy and unexpected latter-day arcade ports to appear on the Atari 2600, of all things, arriving at a time everyone else was playing Altered Beast or Super Mario Bros. 3. Quite a few of the games that were ported to the Atari in the early '80s were just strange, though, in the sense that they were often better described as interpretations shoehorned into the system's limited hardware and RAM. Pac-Man, Defender, Zaxxon, Miner 2049er, Burgertime, Tapper, and Star Raiders are prime examples. Even more capable Atari hardware had some odd-duck ports, like the 400/800 version of Space Invaders, the 5200 version of GORF, and the 7800 version of Double Dragon.

 

The Commodore 64 was another platform that hung around longer than it probably had a right to, and became home to a regrettable (yet weirdly compelling) port of the NES original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that is somehow both worse and better than the DOS port.

 

Demon Attack, Atlantis, and Turtles! for Odyssey 2 are strange because...they were licensed arcade ports on the Odyssey 2. Brazilian and European Odyssey/Videopac users could add Frogger, Q*Bert, Super Cobra, Popeye, and Tutankham to that this (and maybe others I'm forgetting--I usually just stick to North American stuff). Speaking of ports that are strange purely for existing in licensed form on hardware not known for them: Frogger (TRS-80, TRS-80 Color, Timex Sinclair), Zaxxon (TRS-80, TRS-80 Color), Demon Attack and Dragonfire (TRS-80 Color).

 

Basically every Game.com game was weird, but Resident Evil 2 and Duke Nukem 3D stand out in particular as why are these games on this system and what has it done to them? And speaking of Duke 3D, there was also the weird and improbable Brazilian port for the Genesis.

Mentioned this elsewhere, but the C64,Amiga and ST etc got the NES Turtles game because Image Works felt it followed events of the film more closely than the Arcade game and since more people had seen the film,than played the Arcade game, The NES title was the one to convert.

[Lost Dragon]

34 minutes ago, zzip said:

 

I was always impressed with the Atari ST/Amiga version-  it ran off a set of floppies.   I think 360K floppies in the case of the ST.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INaJ4p0B8U8

If you had the money and a laser disc player, you could play the Laser Disc version on your ST, think you got a copy of the game and an interface to connect your ST to your L.D player.

 

 

[Lost Dragon]

Carrier Command on the C64.

 

 

CPU too slow to handle the maths for the 3D of the ST/Amiga original,  so they turned the C64 version into a top-down, 2D affair:

 

 

 

[BassGuitari]

3 hours ago, Lost Dragon said:

Mentioned this elsewhere, but the C64,Amiga and ST etc got the NES Turtles game because Image Works felt it followed events of the film more closely than the Arcade game and since more people had seen the film,than played the Arcade game, The NES title was the one to convert.

 

There are at least two distinct versions of TMNT for C64 (and IIRC Amiga)--North American and PAL/Hero Turtles. Apart from some of the turtles' attacks working differently (Michelangelo and Donatello essentially become Leonardo in Hero Turtles IIRC), and I think some of the music being slightly different or rearranged, there are some crucial timing differences between them, presumably due to the nature of PAL vs NTSC. For instance, the roller cars in the overworld move at a normal speed and are actually avoidable in the PAL version, whereas in the US version they appear out of thin air and move at warp speed and are impossible to avoid--there are areas you have to learn to just not go, or risk instant death. Another example is the boomerang guys; there is simply no avoiding their boomerangs in the US version.

 

Never heard that about Imageworks, but it's interesting since they later published ports of The Arcade Game anyway.

 

Incidentally, the UK version of the DOS port fixed the infamous "impossible jump."

[Cobra Kai]

I wanted to say ESWAT for the Genesis, but it doesn't really compare to the great examples you guys mentioned. I think ESWAT might just end up in a discussion about bad ports, not strange ports.

[Lord Mushroom]

Super Monaco GP for the Sega Master System. It is totally different from the arcade game, they added two player mode, and it is great.