I tend to use my PC as a means of keeping up with the modern generation fancy graphics rather than buy an Xbox 360 or PS3. One would think this is a good option, considering all the other things a PC can do well. No need to have more devices around the house then you need, right? Hell, I don't know anymore.
For a few years now, console to PC ports have been getting worse and worse. Sometimes I am convinced that the games are actually partially running on crude emulators. The spec requirements are becoming ridiculous on this ports, and the games still don't stand a chance visually compared to native PC titles. Throw in dozens of game-stopping and otherwise unpleasant bugs, and you're in for pain, lots of pain.
Lets start with Devil May Cry 3. Now this was a nice effort at least. After the patches, it's actually not bad...if it weren't for one epic slowdown bug caused by the OGG Vorbis music decoder in the game's programming. For some one, this decoder is so unoptimized, that the very second certain battle songs kick in, your game will go from 60fps to 5-10fps, no matter what your settings or hardware are. No one can find a solution to this date, except for deleting all the music. You simply cant fight at this frame rate. It's impossible. Why was this ever released in USA?
Continuing with Capcom, we have Resident Evil 4. Now after the patch that actually integrated a LIGHTING ENGINE, the game looks pretty good. It's missing some of the advanced lighting effects on Gamecube, but really it plays well. The major issue is the cut-scenes. Every single one of them is pre-rendered rather than real-time, like on PS2. Unfortunately, some doofus decided to re-compress the PS2 videos to MPEG. For those who don't know, the PS2 version uses SFD for the videos....which is MPEG with additional audio options and a little bit more header information. One can easily demultiplex the video and simply recompress the audio. If those in charge were aware of this, the PC version wouldn't have had such completely ugly cutscenes. They are so ugly, that even those who are the newbiest of multimedia get on forums and ask if their computers are screwing up.
Something more recent to mention, would be SpiderMan 3. This is definitely the buggiest game all year, if not last year too. It runs slow on minimum, it has major stutters, texture settings seem to have no effect. Shadows, textures, light effects, entire objects all seem to completely and randomly vanish for no reason. The camera will often have a seizure and spazz out. The music will randomly cut out, or get super quiet, and seemingly play the wrong songs. I could go on and on. God awful port by a small company known for nothing but god awful ports. The best part is it wouldn't even uninstall.
Other terrible ports include Rainbow Six Vegas, Prince of Persia 3, Splinter Cell 4, and so on. There are many more, but I uninstalled them so quickly that I can't even remember them.
Guys, this is why I don't buy PC games, and why PC gaming overall is narrowing down to just FPS and RTS games, and I hate RTS.
Still Lego Star Wars II should have been game of the year.
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