Played a good port lately?
In the world of games, a “port” stands for something other than the place where a cruise ship docks. Instead, the term indicates a game programmed for one system that’s eventually recoded for another.
And like any translation, if done right it retains the flavor of the original. Do it wrong, and the result turns into a mumbled mess of bad resemblances and damaged copies.
Fortunately, “Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars” and “Rayman Raving Rabbids” survived the conversion to the Xbox 360 and live to delight another group of gamers.
Whether you choose to lead futuristic armies in a battle for planetary domination in “”C&C” for either the PC or the 360, or if you’d rather kick back on the couch with the 360 version of “Rayman” as opposed to the on-your-feet, motion-controlled action of the Wii original, either way, you’re pretty much playing the same game.
And that’s what really marks a port – the simple distinction that you could, if you wanted to, play the same game, more or less, on some other system. In its simple-minded way, ports even out the competitive field of the video-game business by reducing every fan-boy argument to a trivial choice of platform, recognizing that they could, if they wanted, play the same game on a different machine.
PC players might feel cheated watching a franchise title such as “C&C” sneak out for a rendezvous with another platform. But for most gamers, the increased choice helps spread the fun around. And more and more, game producers have seen dollar signs in giving their growing base of game consumers what they want.
The economics of ports dictate that even if it costs a zillion dollars to create a game, it still costs a lot less to pay a smaller group of developers to figure out how to make the same code run on a new technical architecture. Even if it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to take a game designed at great expense for the PC and put it on the 360, then that’s OK. You might have to sell millions of copies of the original game to make money, but thousands of copies of a port turn into a profitable proposition.
So while the financial wisdom of the port remains sound, the question nags at the consumer: Are ports any good?
If you weren’t paying attention and picked up “C&C” or “Rayman” for the 360, you’d never know that you had anything other than the real deal. In both games, changes to the original slightly customize the titles to work on the new platform. In “C&C,” some of the interface elements have been revised to work better with a joystick rather than a keyboard and mouse. And in “Rayman,” the motion-control features have been replaced with joystick input as well. Both of these games strut with the confidence born of a popular run on a previous game machine.
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Same game, new platform
“RAYMAN RAVING RABBIDS”|For Xbox 360; also available for Nintendo Wii|$49.99| Rated E for everyone “COMMAND & CONQUER 3: TIBERIUM WARS”|For Xbox 360; also available on PC|$59.99|Rated T for teen
