As video games become more culturally relevant, the skills and artistry needed to create such media becomes more appreciated. The occasional name-drop such as Will Wright, Sid Meier, or Hironobu Sakaguchi gives deserved credit and helps gamers to find and follow those responsible for their favorites. However, like movies or music bands, many of the other important and project-defining people are rarely listed or known.
One such under-credited job are the teams responsible for porting a pre-existing game to different hardware. Like a movie's editor or lighting director, if the job is done well it's easy to forget them, but if something goes bad...
And gaming has certainly had its share of bad ports;
From the passable (Killer Instinct on SNES)
to the abysmal (Street Fighter II on ZX Spectrum)
to the notorious. (Pac-man on Atari 2600)
Despite the fact that the large majority of gamers do not have any working knowledge of how a video game is made, many assume that the process of porting a video game from one console to another, especially onto more powerful hardware, is a simple and straightforward task. For example, the original
Sonic the Hedgehog was released in '91, so putting a version of it on much more powerful hardware made ten years later should be a cinch, right? For anyone unfortunate enough to pick up the glitchy, frame-rate stuttering, tinny sounding
Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis port that came out on the Game Boy Advance, apparently it's not as easy as CTRL-C and CTRL-V with a few touch-ups.
It is perhaps more understandable to have problems when a new game is developed for multiple systems around the same time.
Battlefield 4 has become a poster child for the disaster of releasing what appears to be an unfinished, buggy game with intentions to patch later. Frustrating as it is, one thing to keep in mind is that within a fairly short window, the game released for (count 'em!) PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Windows. Four consoles and PC, each with very different hardware and challenges, two of which are completely new to the developer. Sure, other games have released across this spectrum, including EA's own much-better running
Need for Speed: Rivals. However,
Battlefield 4 has a massive online player count, a (mostly) high frame rate, and many features and components that arguably push the respective systems beyond contemporary releases. In short, to have such a massively complex game with five different builds release close to the same time is an undertaking the average game player honestly cannot comprehend.
Don't think I'm letting EA or Dice off the hook, mind you! I've had the PS4 version of
Battlefield 4 and Premium since day one, and it's been a yo-yo of excitement and disappointment. Certainly, I think if the game wasn't ready for release, it should have had longer to cook, and likely some systems are requiring more work than others to fix completely unrelated issues across platforms. Even games released for a single system can wait months, or indefinitely, for corrective patches. That
Battlefield 4 has seen multiple patches across all five platforms since release (and still has issues across the board) speaks to the monumental challenge of making each version work as intended. Obviously, even with the money and manpower behind one of gaming software's biggest juggernauts, these problems cannot be easily resolved.
In a completely different area of ports, there are the challenges for Farsight Studios, makers of
The Pinball Arcade. Whereas Zen Studio's popular
Pinball FX series takes pinball into magical realism with tables that only exist in the virtual realm,
The Pinball Arcade is an attempt to replicate, as close as possible, original real-world machines. From buying and deconstructing the actual pinball tables, digitizing all the art, and creating 3D models of each visible component, Farsight Studios takes a painstaking, documentary-like approach usually only seen in series like
Gran Turismo or
Forza.
Here's a glimpse at their process:
http://www.nintendolife.c...wii_u_3ds_and_kickstarterNext to the eye-candy of
Pinball FX2's tables (including my favorites,
Plants Versus Zombies and
Empire Strikes Back) the extraordinary work involved in a digital replica of original tables can easily go unappreciated. Sadly, here Farsight Studios often doesn't help itself. I own most of their physical collections, and the most recent disc copy of
The Pinball Arcade has an ultra low-budget feeling front end. Despite being released for multiple systems, there are no cross-buy options. There have been occasional sound and support issues, and the patch list of fixes and soon-to-come features is even larger than
Battlefield 4's. Yet despite all this, (and undoubtedly having a small team to work with,) Farsight's underdog work in keeping pinball alive in a digitized form has kept me on their virtual tables much longer than
Pinball FX, and despite its clunkiness the PS4 disc has stayed put in the system.
But my favorite example of a recent port brimming with passion for the source is definitely
Galaxy Force II on the 3DS, part of the Sega 3D Classics line. As much as I like
Ecco the Dolphin,
Sonic the Hedgehog, and
Shinobi III, adding 3D to these classics comes across as a nifty but completely unnecessary parlor trick.
Galaxy Force II, on the other hand, was designed as a 3D perspective game using nifty sprite wizardry. Out of SEGA's back catalogue considered for 3D ports, those with 'Super-Scalar' technology are the premier chance to put the effect to great use.
Initially, I had no real interest in
Galaxy Force II for the 3DS. It had many strikes against it as a digital-only release of a game with a history of unimpressive home ports, whose only notable new feature was something I never use. (To be fair about the home ports, I never imported the PS2 Sega Ages version, though now price and not interest is the barrier.) However, a chance read over at
www.hardcoregaming101.net lead to this interview:
http://blogs.sega.com/201...erview-with-developer-m2/And after reading about the crazy amount of passion for this project, I was enamored with how the team tackled each challenge. Despite the massive increase in hardware power the 3DS represents over a 1988 arcade board, their description of the process involved requiring encyclopedic knowledge of the original hardware and a constant search for efficient coding tricks in order to get the game running. Then running at 60FPS, then running with sound, then running in 3D, then running in 3D with a perspective of riding the original moving cabinet. It's a fascinating read, especially to gamers who assume that a simple copy-paste rom and some tweaks are all it takes to get a game running on hardware other than the original.
After becoming so impressed with the effort involved, and since the fruit of their efforts was available for six bucks, I decided to give it a shot, and now I realize that reading developer interviews may be dangerous for my wallet.
You wouldn't expect a game from 1988 to be the showpiece for the 3D on the 3DS. But after viewing the game with the slider almost all the way up, this was the first 'wow' experience I've had that stayed that way through the entire game. Even jostling the screen around and having the angle occasionally pop in and out of 3D while getting into the game, I never wanted to move that slider.
Galaxy Force II felt as if it were a game designed around the effect, and the fluidity and responsiveness made the game play more like a nostalgic mind's eye version instead of a cruel reality version of an old classic.
Sure, it took longer to read the article than to complete the game (admittedly with some helps turned on to relieve some of that old-school quarter-munching gameplay) but the game is so much fun to play, I want to go right back to it. Every ounce of dedication I read about is visible onscreen and felt in the action. What could have been a cheap, quick cash-in on an old name feels like a true labor of love and a reminder of why SEGA's arcade days were so lauded.
It's a cheap download with no substantial marketing, a quickly-finished arcade experience in a list of hundreds of games for a system who's namesake feature has been abandoned even by its creator. Developer M2 no doubt knows just how niche this little game is, and yet they treated it as if they were given a precious gem to shine and display brighter than ever before.
When ports go bad, everybody points a finger and moves on. When a port is good, gamers tend to shrug and just pick it up for their system of choice, often not giving a second thought as to the immense work it likely took to get there. When a port is a passion project, built with care and attention, sometimes it becomes even better than the original and deserves attention.
So kudos and thanks to all the artists, programmers, engineers, and talent that occasionally, quietly produce a port that shows their passion.
