Sometimes coming up with a phrase to identify something as derogatory saves time and dissuades people from being identified as the pejorative term. So I would like to coin the phrase "cripple port" to identify games that sell you on a good name but are nothing like the system for which it was designed. Sure it has the same name as that awesome game you played before but when you pop the game in you realize you have just lost your money faster than betting on the professional wrestler with the name that sounds like it was made up five minutes before the match like "Tony the Tickler".
Game journalist often give one or two lines about the last generation SKU that will probably sell more than the fancy next gen version the review is really about. The one line is something like: "The PS2 version is not as sharp looking as the 360 version". No really? I thought the PS2 Emotion Engine would transport me into Virtual Reality like in that Aerosmith video with Alicia Silverstone. It would be really beneficial to know that a lot of features are missing, the controls stink, and it looks like garbage smeared on a television.
I like to list some examples to illustrate my point because people only read things in list form and most people already skipped this paragraph. All of my examples are from the DS because it's more interesting than writing about how how Beyond Good and Evil's PS2 version has the same frame rate as the filmstrip I had to watch on puberty in 1984. (I never get anywhere with the ladies because I keep waiting for the filmstrip ding noise to make my next move.)
Awesome Prince of Persia on my DS! Whaa?? No platforming here but a card game?? I am a sucker for $10 games and I got suckered. I couldn't figure out how to play this game but to be fair I seem to have a mental block on card games. A friend of mine tried to explain Magic: The Gathering to me for twenty minutes but the byzantine rules only generated empty stares. I think my ability to understand Magic was hampered by the fact that we were in a loud bar, we had no actual cards except for napkin drawings, she had been drinking, I had been drinking, and I had absolutely no interest in actually learning how to play a game with dragons on cards.
Super Mario 64 is a great game. This is not Super Mario 64. It should have been called Super Mario Cripple Port DS. The original being an early 3D platformer, already had suspect controls but the port to DS made it completely unplayable. I find it humorous that people knock the PSP for only having one analog nub when the DS sure could have used just one nub to save this disaster. I think the 64 is still in the name because it is the number of ways this game makes me want to curse at Mario. I think it only scored well in the gaming press because Nintendo delivered the game with attractive women carrying baskets of money.
I don't care if it makes me less "hardcore" to like Madden but I even liked the Wii version. (The only problem with the Wii version is that I kept slapping myself in the head with the nunchuck cord on field goals.) I have yet to find a GBA or DS version that isn't broken. The graphics make it impossible to see what is going on and after a while I realized it was easier to watch the X and O move on the bottom screen to pass. It is like I am playing one of those chalk drawings you always see in every football movie.
I know it is possible to play a good game of Madden on less powerful hardware because I played it in 1994 and it was called Madden 94'. Why doesn't EA just take the Super Nintendo code change the player names and put it on one of those cute little DS cartridges? We don't even need the expansion teams because nobody wants to play as the Jaguars anyway.
DS Racing Games
Here is a tip for readers looking for a DS racing game: if it doesn't say Mario Kart in the title the game is complete garbage. I think they called it Burnout Revenge DS, not because it has any resemblance to Burnout Revenge on a console or the PSP, but because it makes you want to take revenge out on the CEO of Electronic Arts. I won't go into details of my revenge plot after playing Burnout Revenge DS but it involves breaking the legs of EA's CEO in the exact same place with the exact same baseball bat every year and charging him $60 for the "new" version.
I think it was a mistake for Nintendo to include any kind of 3D capabilities in the DS because it almost always turns out bad. The 3D capabilities of DS are only really used well when it generates that creepy head of the "doctor" in Brain Age.
Metroid Prime Hunters & GoldenEye: Rogue Agent
One of things that made me go out and buy a DS during the short period when the PSP was cool and everyone was laughing at the DS, was playing the Metroid demo in a Target. The controls were awesome and I was sure that first person shooters would be better on the DS than even on dual stick consoles. I was wrong. The problem with Metroid isn't the controls but that all of the bad things about Metriod are here: backtracking, getting lost, long periods between saves, and scanning are now in portable form. The missions in Metroid are 30 minutes long which does not do well on an airplane when I am about to complete a mission and the stewardess makes me turn off the DS to prevent the plane from going down in a ball of flames. Playing Metroid for hours gives me Metroid shriveled hands the next day which makes people think I have some sort of new disease that needs it's own telethon.
Rouge Agent doesn't have all the Metroid problems but has a little problem in that the controls are unusable. Do you think someone at EA could have called up Nintendo and asked if they could cut and paste the good control code? This isn't Goldeneye on the N64 but more of a want to poke yourself in the eye with the stylus game. I think the perfect FPS on the DS would be a marriage between the two games and maybe that will happen with Halo DS. If Halo DS does come out, everyone should play through it really fast because the four horsemen of the apocalypse are not far behind.
Not really a game unless you find frustrating yourself into wanting to see how far you can throw your DS out a window a game. The Web Browser would have been great if all websites were like they were in 1997. In 1997 the DS would only struggle to process the BLINK tag and that animated GIF of that dancing baby. However, in 2007 CNN will load but the news might be a couple of years out of date so you would be like twenty-three Britney Spears breakdowns behind.
Using numbers to spell your game does not make it cool. I never liked Tony Hawk so I have no idea why I bought this. Maybe my thinking was that since all the games I love on real consoles stink on the DS, a game I hate on the PS2 will be awesome on the DS. This game gets points for a cartoony look, not killing you with phony skate culture, or putting in any annoying Jackass characters. It fails for locking you into so many goals that my whole Tony Hawk strategy of pressing random buttons is totally blown. I don't know what a triple gab double aussie face belt dogtown 180 timeshift really is but I like to be really surprised when it happens.
The future of Tony Hawk should be a plastic skateboard controller on the floor. People will pay for it just like Guitar Hero. Just like Guitar Hero is for people who don't want to spend time learning real guitar, Tony Hawk Fake Plastic Skateboard Controller Edition will be for people who don't want to break their face.
Staying a generation behind for financial reasons probably won't save me money if I continue to buy more cripple ports. I will be buying a PSP this week mostly because it has Darth Vader on the back. I am sure it will be impossible to find any cripple ports in UMD format so I should be safe.
Note: Hyperlinks are provided for outdated references to readers under 20 years old.
Also I just realized that the DS game was actually Burnout Legends but that still didn't prevent me from fantasizing about injuring corporate executives.
Comments
Another thing that often happens is a DS version won't necessary be bad but despite have the same name it bears no resemblance to the console versions. Examples are Age of Empires, licensed games like Spider Man, and Tiger Woods.
Thats the worst i can think of, but theres other examples, like lost planet, and games designed mainly for consoles but slightly changed for pc, like rainbow six vegas (and many other unreal engine 3 based games). They all require a much better system than they should, to get good performance with decent graphics. Some of them dont even bother to change the 'help' popups from telling you to 'push a' or 'move the right stick' or whatever. Its a real pity, since most of them are very good games.
Also that mario ds game is awesome. Not for the actual game at all, its probably as bad as you say. But the minigames rock!
Game. Set. Match.
@bmaisey - I totally forgot about bad PC ports. I played the Lost Planet PC demo and that was a sad joke. I am surprised PC Halo 2 is bad because I thought the original Halo was quite good on PC. The mini-games on New Super Mario are very similar but better than Super Mario 64 DS.
I'm not sure about the other games on the list though as I haven't played them. Oh, except for Mario 64 which I do agree was pretty much unplayable because the controls weren't suited to the game at all.
Again I mean no offense by the term because I am not referring to people.
I don't see why you're picking on the DS so much.
Now, if you want a real "Cripple Port" on the DS, look at King Kong and Elf Bowling.
I just bought a PSP yesterday because there has been a real slowdown in good DS games and there are several PSP games I want to try out. If I had a PSP before I am sure several games would have made the list. But unlike many people I don't trash games that I haven't played. More people talk about Superman 64 and Big Rigs than copies of those games sold.
I thought my last line was pretty obviously sarcastic but I guess I shouldn't have labeled it with the BLINK tag because it no longer works. :-)
DS games can shine (Phantom Hourglass, though not nearly as hard as, well, any Zelda game ever, is still very well done and a blast to play) and sometimes they SUCK. Wii has been completely denigrated to a party game system.... a "I have a bunch of friends over, and we can't play Halo 3 over LIVE, so.... umm.... who wants to bowl?" system.
Every system has its cripple ports, but the difference on DS is jaw-dropping. Theres potential there to make it different, to make it better dare I say.... then there is the very real, very painful letdown of "top screen is a map.... again." Nintendo always gets bad ports. On Gamecube, if you can find it (i may have the only copy not destroyed by angry owners over it's crappiness, which is why i saved it.) get Rainbow Six 3... "Now Saving, please do not remove your PS2 memory card from the memory card slot." It touches your soul to see it, albeit inappropriately.
I just think that sometimes, in their righteous crusade to be different, Nintendo forgets that the little loser kid who no one sat with at lunch in school was "different" too.
and oh yeah, i do want to play as the jaguars.so stfu and go buy a real console if you want to play good games
(dont even care if i get modded cuase no one disses the jaguars)
I can't imagine the torture on the DS. My condolences to your thumbs.
And as for Metroid Prime: Hunters, it was a massive dissapointment. The controls made my hands sore and I was afraid of crippling myself so I stopped playing it. Now, is it smart to make a game that makes people NOT want to play it? NO!
And yes Tony Hawk is dumb. Go get a life you skate punks and stop using "leetspeak" it's stupid.
Most of your other examples I agreed with (although I think that arguing the problem with Metroid Hunters was that it used the same formula as every other Metroid game is a weird way to make your point), but Super Mario 64 DS is a game that I spent a lot of time playing. It got to the point where I could play it just as easily as the N64 version.
I suppose we could sit around arguing about how long it should take to learn controls to a game, but if you ask me the extra characters and levels in the DS game make it possibly the best version of Super Mario 64.
Just my opinion. To Tlygiwya:
"I just think that sometimes, in their righteous crusade to be different, Nintendo forgets that the little loser kid who no one sat with at lunch in school was "different" too."
Well if no one was sitting down with that poor kid then how the hell do you know he wasn't worth sitting with? I mean seriously--are you really using HIGH SCHOOL as a logical analogy for something? High School is filled with petty stupidity and people too busy trying to grow up to treat one another like human beings.
Hell, I was that little loser kid who no one would sit with.
Though I must question why you are using just the DS as an example as there have been some truly horrific ports over the years that aren't on teh DS.
"I don't know what a triple gab double aussie face belt dogtown 180 timeshift really is but I like to be really surprised when it happens."
Extremely funny!
And maybe that kid is worth sitting with. Gamecube owners, Dreamcast owners.... they were happy with their systems while others were giving them hard times for it. But sometimes, they're just... *too* different.Good point on the Metroid thing though, I missed that the first time.
All in all, I think the point of this whole editorial is there is wasted porting potential.... why play Tony Hawk, Super Mario, or whatever bad port on the DS or some other system when you could play it better elsewhere, and have a more enjoyable time with it?
""I don't know what a triple gab double aussie face belt dogtown 180 timeshift really is but I like to be really surprised when it happens."
10/10.
Now Capcom ported RE4 to the Wii but were smart enough to A) offer the addition content from the PS2 version. B) make it control WELL c) slash the price though I thought $30 was still a little high.
In the end developers simply try to make a little extra money off someone who already bought the original.
Popadophalis