10 Awful Versions Of Iconic Video Games You Didn't Know Existed
Great games... not how you remember them.
Video game ports are just part of the gaming industry and there's nothing wrong with that.
From a business standpoint, getting your titles onto as many platforms as possible means more ways for gamers to play and potentially leads to higher sales numbers. From the other perspective, it's important that beloved and classic titles are made as available as possible so that they don't get lost to time.
That being said, there are some versions of classics that perhaps should be left in the past.
Not every version of a game is going to be the definitive classic. In fact, some are far lesser. After all, different hardware across the industry sometimes facilitates major changes in order to make the game work at all. When handling iconic video games, it's sometimes all the more upsetting to see what they have become when they've been dragged kicking and screaming to a new format.
This list will cover some of the absolute worst ports of games that are typically loved and respected, but should by no means be remembered this way.
10. Tomb Raider - N-Gage
It would be cheap and easy to fill a list of terrible video game ports with mobile games but what’s important is that the Nokia N-Gage positioned itself equally as a handheld games console as it did a phone.
Getting an icon like Lara onto the system was Nokia’s biggest bet at pulling in a hardcore gaming audience. Whilst the original Tomb Raider was seven years old at this point, the promise of being able to play this classic on-the-go had a certain allure to it.
The N-Gage version of Tomb Raider was the console’s biggest seller at launch which sounds impressive until you realise it didn’t even shift 3,000 units.
Whilst ambitious in scope, this mobile port just shows why the N-Gage is flawed by design. With its tight buttons and sticky d-pad, moving Lara’s tank controls have never been harder. Being able to pull off any of Lara’s jumps is consistently challenging, and not in a fun way.
Worst of all, Lara now moves with an auto-run. Players push "up" to get her moving and then "down" to make her stop. Combine running off the same ledge over and over with the console’s painfully small buttons and it’s safe to say that even the few people who played Tomb Raider on the N-Gage scarcely made it out of the opening stage.