For a brief, shining moment, it seemed that the ghost of bad PC ports had finally been exorcised. Games like Marvel’s Spider-Man, Death Stranding, Days Gone, Resident Evil 2 Remake, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice all arrived on PC with graphics and display options way beyond what the base consoles could offer. We’ve also been blessed with many classic game compilations that accurately bring older console games to PC, like the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, the Castlevania Anniversary Collection, and the Atari Anthology.
But recently, the specter of the bad PC port has reared its ugly head once again with the catastrophic port of The Last of Us Part I. So, let’s take a look back over the years and run down the great games that stumbled trying to make the leap to PC.
10. The Last of Us Part 1 (2023)
Let’s address the elephant in the room right away. The Last of Us is generally considered to be one of the greatest games of all time, and for a decade was a firm PlayStation exclusive. The franchise recently got a shot in the arm with the HBO show, which saw sales of the PlayStation 5 remake skyrocket. This had long been planned to make the jump to PC, so players were quite rightly hoping we’d get a Sony first-party port that did the game justice.
It’s safe to say that didn’t happen. When it launched, the game was a buggy mess that frequently crashed, featured a variety of occasionally amusing graphical glitches, and harbored an inordinately long shader compilation process. Those who bought it quickly realized they had a lemon on their hands and it received “overwhelmingly negative” reviews on Steam. Naughty Dog quickly apologized, and work is underway to patch it into a better state, but The Last of Us Part 1 port is so bad, it was always destined to end up on this list.
9. Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition (2006)
These days, Capcom has a good reputation for its PC ports, but back in the 2000s, its games were renowned for being shoddy and half-baked on PC. The excellent PlayStation 2 game Devil May Cry 3 is a fine example of how bad they could get. On the original console, this is a balls-to-the-wall action adventure dripping with style. On PC?
Where to begin? This port is the definition of undercooked, best proven by it not even properly supporting controllers. We struggle to even imagine playing a Devil May Cry game using a keyboard, but unless you want to edit a .INI file, you’re stuck with them. Even if you manage to enable them, the trigger buttons don’t work and the analog sticks are reversed, forcing you to use the right stick to move. Even simple features like a fullscreen toggle aren’t present in the menu, nor is a prompt to quit the game (you just alt-F4 out of it).
Fortunately, the Devil May Cry HD Collection, which includes Devil May Cry 3, renders the 2006 port completely obsolete and delivers the experience you would expect. However, this busted port is somehow still available to buy on Steam. Avoid it like the plague.
8. Enter the Matrix (2003)
Shiny Entertainment bit off more than they could chew with Enter the Matrix. This tie-in to The Matrix Reloaded had a hard development deadline of the movie’s release date, was so enmeshed with the story that any alterations had to be run past the (very busy) Wachowskis, and was simultaneously released on PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, and PC. Something had to give, and in this case, it was the notoriously dreadful PC port.
Simply put, the graphics on PC are by far the worst of all four versions. Expect unfiltered textures, missing effects, broken lighting and shadows, and bizarrely low-detail models. The infamous best example is that the game’s cars literally have square wheels. Enter the Matrix isn’t a great game even when running well, but this PC port is an all-time disaster.
7. Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition (2012)
Dark Souls was almost instantly considered a classic on its 2011 PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 release. A year later, PC players were hyped to finally dive into its forbidding depths and experience the pain for themselves. But in this instance, it wasn’t the terrifying bosses and fearsome difficulty that caused frustration, but the awful PC port.
This was limited to 30FPS, had terrible mouse and keyboard controls, annoying Games for Windows Live integration, and had an internal resolution locked to 1024×720. Modders came to the rescue with the essential “DSFix” that improved things, but it’s a crime to see a game this good treated so shabbily. In a later interview, FromSoftware admitted that “our main priority was to get the game onto the PC as fast as possible,” they had a “lack of experience working on a PC platform,” and that PC-specific features “would have taken too much time” to implement.
Fortunately, the 2018 Remastered port solved these problems, leaving this creaky old thing totally obsolete.
6. Final Fantasy VII (1998)
Final Fantasy VII was a landmark title for JRPGs, instantly becoming one of the defining PlayStation games and an instant fan favorite. A year on from the original release, it landed on PC courtesy of a port by Eidos Interactive, and… it didn’t turn out great.
Problems include the battles running at a reduced frame rate, which had the unintended side effect of breaking any timing-based attacks (like Tifa’s limit breaks), minigames being locked to processor speed and becoming unplayably fast, animation and lighting bugs, and weird script errors that weren’t present in the PlayStation original. The worst alteration is that the all-time great soundtrack is delivered entirely in MIDI format, meaning no choir in “One Winged Angel.” Boo!
Apparently, this wasn’t entirely Eidos’ fault, as it was provided outdated source code for the port by Square. Interestingly, this version is still at the core of the more recent ports across all platforms, though has now been substantially fixed to bring it in line with the PlayStation original.
5. Resident Evil 4 (2007)
We recently went through every release of Resident Evil 4 and ranked this first PC release as the worst version of the core game (though it’s at least better than the wonky mobile ports). This is another victim of 2000s-era Capcom simply not caring much about the PC market. It shipped with broken lighting and shadows, no mouse support whatsoever, and replaced the original real-time cutscenes with pre-rendered videos at a shockingly low bit rate.
But in a welcome twist, in 2023, the PC is the best place to play the original Resident Evil 4. A new edition that fixed all these problems was released in 2014, and the incredible fan-made HD project updates all the textures to modern standards. The older PC port is now a footnote in the title’s history, and that’s where it should remain.
4. Street Fighter II (1992)
Street Fighter II was an instant arcade smash for Capcom, and it set to work bringing home versions to every possible platform. Some, like the fine Super Nintendo version, did the game justice. And some, it’s safe to say, did not. US Gold handled the early MS-DOS port and, while the game looks fine in still pictures, it’s a herky-jerky mess in motion.
But the real crippling blow is that the arcade version’s six attack buttons are condensed down to one single button, and you control it with the keyboard. This strips every ounce of nuance from the game, and to anyone who’d played the original, it feels like you’re playing with boxing gloves on. That, coupled with tinny music, extremely long loading times between fights, and glitchy movement makes it one of the worst possible ways to play Street Fighter II.
You might argue that an MS-DOS version of the game could never properly work, though a few years later, the PC got a surprisingly good port of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, so we’re chalking the terrible Street Fighter II port up to a rush job to get it on shelves as quickly as possible.
3. Deadly Premonition: The Director’s Cut (2013)
Cult classic Deadly Premonition didn’t run particularly well on its original release on Xbox 360, but the PC port went down in flames. You’re going to contend with limited display and graphics options whatever you do, though a bigger concern is that it’ll just crash randomly all the time. As usual, modders attempted to save the day with fan patches, though this port’s problems are so fundamental, it’s like putting a sticking plaster on a gaping open wound.
Back in the day, I managed to play through this on PC, which was a miserable experience that saw me spending as much time fiddling with Windows compatibility modes to avoid crashes as time spent in the game. Even now, the version available on Steam doesn’t work properly, so if you want to experience Francis York Morgan’s Sinner’s Sandwich for yourself, play it on literally any other platform.
2. Saint’s Row 2 (2009)
Where to begin with this disaster? Saint’s Row 2 is a great open-world crime caper with a wicked sense of humor, but on PC, the joke is firmly on you. The list of things wrong with this PC port is endless, ranging from a bizarre 32FPS cap, lack of widescreen display options, random crashes, absurdly bad performance, no mouse support in menus, and poorly compressed audio. But the most ridiculous is that this port is designed for a CPU that runs at exactly 3.2GHZ (roughly the same as the Xbox 360). This means that the game will speed up to Benny Hill-esque levels on anything more powerful than a toaster.
Once again, a fan stepped up to save the day. Modder Mike “IdolNinja” Watson took on the Herculean task of fixing the game, releasing the mandatory “Gentlemen of the Row” mod that fixed many of the worst problems. This mod was so successful, IdolNinja was given a job by developer Volition and began work on a “Revitalization” patch derived from the original source code.
Sadly, this story has a tragic ending as IdolNinja announced in mid-2020 that he’d been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. He continued to work on fixing Saint’s Row 2 but died in August 2021. The modding community united to pay tribute to him, and the newest game in the series featured an in-game memorial. Sadly, the Revitalization patch remains incomplete, though Volition has promised it’ll emerge someday.
1. Arkham Knight (2015)
Aka the port so bad, they yanked the game from sale. Arkham Knight is a fantastic game, but in 2015, it landed on PC in a truly miserable state. Not even high-end graphics cards were capable of running it well, with gliding and batmobile sequences dropping to an unplayable 10-15 frames per second. Experienced developer Iron Galaxy had handled this (and also did some work on The Last of Us Part 1…), though the consensus is that the port was rushed out of the door and its issues arose from the game being extremely tailored to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One hardware.
With players revolting, Warner Bros Interactive made the unprecedented decision in June 2015 to suspend sales until it was in working order on PC. It returned that October in a better state, though still far from perfect. Warner Bros then offered full refunds to players, regardless of how long the game had been owned or how long they’d played it for.
Thankfully, the hard work on fixing Arkham Knight continued. Modern systems can brute force through any lingering bad optimization, and all major bugs have been squashed.
After the Arkham Knight debacle, many assumed the lessons had been learned about rushing a PC port. But, well, here we are in the midst of the same old story about The Last of Us Part 1. Let’s hope this wave of bad publicity causes developers to think twice about shoving an unfinished port out and hoping to fix it later.