Worst Arcade Conversion

[saimon69]

Well, not from Tiertex super C was a darn travesty of a conversion too, despite tried to recreate assets and use 32 colors was simply too bad

[acidbottle]

Renegade.

Literally the worst game I ever bought. The 8 bit versions were awesome to.

[PatmanQC]

You guys are being too hard on Chase HQ. I thouught it was a pretty good conversion for the Amiga with a lot of the bells and whistles from the arcade game included.

I also thought final fight was pretty good too. It included the two player mode and ran at a decent frame rate

[jotd]

was Hard Driving mentionned as a bad port?

I had the luck to play the original arcade cabinet: awesome, with gears and all. Amiga version was disappointing.

[Kenshigros]

Finally why were the conversions that bad ?
Why the Sharp X68000 or Nec PC98 or Fujitsu FMTowns got so good conversions?
They are Japanese?
Better coders?
Those computers are stronger?
Perhaps our « Tiertex » did not have the time enough ?
I wonder why were the reason to have got so many badly converted games on Amiga knowing it could have been better......
Any idea anyone?

Alex

[mcgeezer]

Rolling Thunder for me.

Pretty much a 1:1 port to the Amiga could have been done if they'd tried, instead they cashed in.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Kenshigros

Finally why were the conversions that bad ?
Why the Sharp X68000 or Nec PC98 or Fujitsu FMTowns got so good conversions?
(cut)
Perhaps our « Tiertex » did not have the time enough ?
(cut)
Alex

Mostly that one in my opinion: coders were put to work for the lesser machine and port almost 1:1 to the more powerful, plus also had ridiculous deadline to catch with the best selling periods of the year; was all about $$$ and none about quality

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by BBOWL

You guys are being too hard on Chase HQ. I thouught it was a pretty good conversion for the Amiga with a lot of the bells and whistles from the arcade game included.

Chase HQ was a shocking conversion. The Amiga could have done far better.

[jotd]

Mostly that one in my opinion: coders were put to work for the lesser machine and port almost 1:1 to the more powerful, plus also had ridiculous deadline to catch with the best selling periods of the year

agreed but yet some very good ports were achieved on a less powerful machine. Porting an arcade game on X68000 is cheating.

Or maybe ports are good because they weren't rushed (AND made by Ocean/Sales Curve and not the-ones-you-don't-tell-the-name).

[dlfrsilver]

It's not really cheating since the X68000 was the japanese defo arcade development machine.

I read an article, in fact 90% of the japanese industry were coding and making their games on sharp machines.

Only Sega and a few others were using PCs with custom toolchains.

[hitchhikr]

Nobody mentioned Victory Road.

Basically most games ports following that scheme are rather poor: ARCADE games ported to ATARI ST and the ST version ported to AMIGA.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Bonus for a NON crappy conversion: R-Type, but was because i expected here an almost arcade perfect full PAL screen 25fps port too (btw this added fuel to the creation of Powder)

In a way, both the Master System and C64 ports were better. Note that the Amiga is basically a static scrolling background, albeit with some nice art.

Originally Posted by jotd

agreed but yet some very good ports were achieved on a less powerful machine. Porting an arcade game on X68000 is cheating.

It's not just the X68000 hardware — S.P.S. and Dempa really went all-out on their arcade ports, much more so than most Amiga developers.

[idrougge]

Another port that really stands out is Darius – it has barely any similarity to the original, and the legendary music was botched. Compare this to Ninja Warriors – made on the same arcade platform by Taito – which was ported by the expert Ronald Pieket Weeserik of Random Access.

[power]

what i find astonishing is that so many of the mentioned titles I spent hours playing as a kid and didn't know any better.

[005AGIMA]

Originally Posted by jotd

was Hard Driving mentionned as a bad port?

I had the luck to play the original arcade cabinet: awesome, with gears and all. Amiga version was disappointing.

You're right it was bad. Fairly slow but it was "playable" with mouse. Hopeless with Joystick/KB.

I also played the arcade unit, and I'd argue, it's what taught me basic car control before I ever got in my dads car for real.

I actually used to reference it during presentations on simulation in education.

A better game was a rip-off of Hard Drivin, which was 4D Sports Driving (aka Stunts).


From memory this "felt" like Hard Drivin, but was faster and more playable. And if memory serves me correctly, it had a track editor?

EDIT: After reviewing some YouTube vids of this game, I think I actually played 4D on my PC possibly. Memory is blurry lol. But the Amiga 500 version seems just as slow as Hard Drivin. I recall it being smooth, which on a 386 DX 33 it would have been.

Originally Posted by BBOWL

You guys are being too hard on Chase HQ. I thought it was a pretty good conversion for the Amiga with a lot of the bells and whistles from the arcade game included.

Na it was slow, odd graphics style that didn't really replicate the arcade very well, and very very odd controls (like how you skid off of a corner, even though you're now on a straight).

It was however, heaps better than Outrun.

From Memory Chase HQ2 (CSI), which featured a Z32 Nissan 300ZX (I've had one of those) and the ability to shoot at the bad guys, was a better port.

Chase HQ did at least include the tunnels and related sparks. I always found that kind of cool for some reason lol.

I put plenty of hours into it regardless. I mean, you did back then if you'd saved and saved for a game only to find it sucked.

I dont know about anyone else, but I often found myself overplaying it on first purchase because of the financial outlay. Then I'd leave it for a month or so. Then I'd go back to it thinking "it wasn't THAT bad was it?"

Chase HQ was one of those for sure.

And yes, yes it was "THAT bad"

[roondar]

Originally Posted by idrougge

In a way, both the Master System and C64 ports were better. Note that the Amiga is basically a static scrolling background, albeit with some nice art.

The really interesting thing about the C64 (and IIRC also the Amiga, though I am not 100% sure) version of R-Type is how little time was spend on making it.

The developers had made Katakis, which was very much R-Type with a different name, bosses and looks. This got pulled by Rainbow Arts after Activision, who had the rights to R-Type home versions in Europe, threatened court action (I can't recall if it actually went to court).

Then, in a twist of irony, Activision commissioned the Katakis team to make the C64 & Amiga versions of R-Type. The C64 version was done in six weeks (though obviously reused a lot of Katakis code).

For a six week conversion, it's an amazingly good job. Almost all of the game made it in. If the Amiga also had such a short time to market (which I don't know) then it's also pretty good. However, on the topic of the Amiga conversion itself, I found it less impressive than the C64 one - it missed the background trickery and rather needlessly ran at half the frame rate.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by roondar

it missed the background trickery and rather needlessly ran at half the frame rate.

They could have been done a bit better, but at the time I felt it was an amazing conversion. Best of all the home computer ones I saw at the time.

I think at that time these coders were coming to grips with the OCS hardware a bit, and R-Type shows it.

[Phantasm]

While it's true that many of these conversions could have been done better given more time or more competent programmers that wasn't a top priority for the companies who had purchased the license.


Getting the game out on time so it is in the shops making money was always the top priority. There was no quality control on any of these home computers unlike with consoles. Sega (or Nintendo) wanted to ensure top quality releases to try and attract people to buy their system. There was no such concerns with home computers.


Consoles were not affected by piracy to the same level so developers/publishers just would not have been willing to go the extra mile to get a quality product when you could just push out something that is barely even recognisable as the game.


We also all know that the Amiga was held back by ports from the Atari ST for a long time but why would companies spent months tweaking an Amiga port for minor benefit in sales.


Obviously i am not speaking from experience but its entirely possible that putting out quality product was not cost effective. If the cost of creating a quality product outweighed the extra cash being brought in you can start to see why tiertex and the like survived for so long.


In addition in this time of bedroom coding many of the top titles that were released were probably developed by hobbyists and then taken to a developer/publisher more or less completed. These would not have been under the same time pressures as the arcade conversions that had been licensed and needed to be on the shelf ASAP to recoup the outlay.


So basically what i'm saying is that while the Amiga has plenty of bad conversions, it's pretty much the same on every home computer system and some of them really do get a bad name and (some) actually seem quite reasonable given the hardware and time/cost limitations.