Ports

[The Great Citracett]

A very disappointing port is Grandia II on PS2. The original on Dreamcast is fantastic. Great story, interesting characters, and one of the best battle systems ever. The PS2 version released a few years later is just fucking lazy.

It's not upgraded at all, the only things changed are the button labels, the opening cutscene, and they made the title screen dark and edgy for some reason. Sound is fucked, music sounds weird and drowns out the voices and sounds during battle. Graphics are downgraded a bit, and you're lucky if you're just missing background textures in battles. Usually the background just doesn't bother to show up at all. Terrible loading times too. Also, sometimes your characters won't have faces, which is creepy.

There's an HD remaster based off the DC version on Steam which is apparently great, and a remaster of I and II coming to PC and Switch soon.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Another game with an interesting port situation is Silent Hill 2. When the game was ported to the Xbox, the "Born from a Wish" scenario was included. This was DLC before DLC, a small expansion that gives a backstory to an important character you meet throughout the story. Every port and release of Silent Hill 2 would have Born from a Wish going forward, even including the PS2 version's Greatest Hits rerelease. Completely unadvertised and everything. That's the only game I've ever heard of where the Greatest Hits version actually adds content.

The Xbox and PC ports weren't good graphically and I think the Silent Hill collections/remasters are built around those. The PS2 had some strange hardware that allowed for massive amounts of particles and alpha effects, things that the Xbox couldn't do due to bandwidth limitations, the same applies to PC but it is a bit worse. Metal Gear Solid 2 had some graphical downgrades for similar reasons and I think the later Zone of the Enders were affected in the same way.


My favorite port:

It was released for:
Acorn 32-bit (1993)
Amiga (1991)
Amiga CD32 (1993)
Atari ST (1991)
Commodore 64 (1992)
DOS (1993)
Game Boy (1993)
Game Gear (1993)
Genesis (1991)
SEGA Master System (1993)
SNES (1993)

In a gaming magazine where they tried to figure out which is the worst game of all time James Pond 2 took first place. Not because it is terrible but because it had so many fucking ports to cover, the Amiga version and the Master System version can't get the same score so all versions had to be played and individually rated. Too much work for a game reviewer.

Second place was awarded to Tomcat Alley, a FMV combat flight game for the MegaCD. The reason it got second place was because there was hardly any game to play and review, something that threatens the employment of a game reviewer. Games magazines used to be fun.

Some screens(not covering all formats)
James Pond Amiga

James Pond AtariST

James Pond C64

James Pond DOS

James Pond Gameboy

James Pond Game Gear

James Pond Genesis/Megadrive

James Pond Master System

James Pond SNES

Later it was released for:
Game Boy Advance (2004)
Nintendo DS (2005)
Nintendo Switch (2019)
PlayStation (2003)
PlayStation 2 (2006)
PlayStation 3 (2011)
PSP (2011)

James Pond GBA

James Pond PS1

 

[Sir Wesley Tailpipe]

Punisher on the Genesis is over an hour and a half long to play through? For a beat 'em up of the era, that's an epic amount of content.

Not to mention the branching plotline. Definitely a good one for replayability.

 

[BrunoMattei]

Another great Genesis port and this time it's superior to the arcade version:

This is an extremely rare 2 for 1 kind of game for this generation. You get a very accurate port of the arcade original and you get a brand new game that has RPG elements and unique characters to play as.