5 Worst Arcade Ports on Home Consoles Ever Made

Nowadays, the technology in home consoles and PCs makes porting an arcade game no big deal, but it wasn’t always like that. In the early days of home video game console generations, porting an arcade game wasn’t easy, as the technology wasn’t up to par. Arcade cabinets had dedicated hardware that could outperform 8-bit and 16-bit systems, so when a game was ported to the Atari 2600, the Nintendo Entertainment System, or even 32-bit systems like the Sony PlayStation, it didn’t always work. These games are five of the worst arcade ports ever made for home consoles, and they all pretty much sucked.

1) Double Dragon

There was a pretty good port of Double Dragon for the NES, but the one for the Atari 2600 was probably something that shouldn’t even have been attempted. The game was incredibly popular, so it’s understandable why some folks wanted it on the system, but by the time it landed on the Atari 2600 in 1989, the system was already long past its shelf life. The game, developed by Activision, seems like a cash grab on an already antiquated system, and it shows. There’s no hardware capability at play here, as the 2600 couldn’t come close to emulating the arcade game, resulting in a true stinker of a port.

2) Dragon’s Lair

Dragon’s Lair was an amazing arcade game released in 1983 that used a LaserDisc player to display full-motion video animation by Don Bluth, which the player interacted with. It was a literal game-changer, bringing plenty of people into arcades. Fast-forward to 1990 and the game found its way onto the NES, sans LaserDisc player. That meant that the game had to be significantly pared down for the 8-bit system, and it shows. Not only does Dragon’s Lair look terrible on the NES, but it’s so badly coded with its hit detection that it’s almost impossible to play. Dragon’s Lair was already an incredibly difficult game to begin with, but on the NES, it’s not even worth trying.

3) X-Men vs. Street Fighter

Capcom knows how to make great fighting games, and it scored a huge winner when it began pitting its Street Fighter characters against the X-Men. While the arcade version of X-Men vs. Street Fighter is an amazing game that should absolutely have worked on the PlayStation, it didn’t. The fairly robust console couldn’t keep up with the game’s speed. This resulted in missing frames from the animation, making it appear choppy. It also slowed down constantly, had fewer background details, and had cumbersome load times. On top of all that, the port lacked the arcade’s tag-team gameplay, which enraged players, as it was one of the game’s best features.

4) Ikari Warriors

Ikari Warriors is a pretty straightforward run-and-gun game that did fairly well in arcades, garnering ports to various systems over the years. It made it to the NES, and while you’d think it would do well, it didn’t. The problem didn’t have anything to do with the game’s graphics or sounds — it was the controls. The arcade cabinet used rotary joysticks, which the NES lacked. To overcome this obstacle, the devs opted to force players to slowly rotate to point at the enemy they wanted to fire at, making them a slow-moving target. This makes the NES port of Ikari Warriors insanely difficult, removing the fun of the OG arcade version. Still, even if you mastered the awful controls, the repetitive gameplay across its four levels isn’t worth the bother.

5) Pac-Man

I’m conflicted about this one because I absolutely hated the Pac-Man port on the Atari 2600, and you can see why from the picture. It’s not the same game, and the gameplay was awful. The conflict stems from the fact that Pac-Man was the best-selling game on the Atari 2600, with more than 8 million copies sold. I can’t explain this without assuming that 8 million people were duped into buying it (including my parents). Regardless, the game was terribly coded and barely resembled the original arcade hit that effectively made Namco a major player in the gaming industry. 

What’s your all-time most despised arcade port? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!

5 Best Comic Book Arcade Games, Ranked