4 Most Bizarre Video Game Ports

The thing we loved the most are the aforementioned web-swinging mechanics, and they’ve gone from:

to:

The total freedom of movement got replaced by only being able to use webs when the game shows a huge “SWING” prompt. No worries, though, because web-swinging is only cool when we have an awesome city to explore, and that’s gone in the PC version as well. The huge NYC that we’re free to roam in the original game is just a bunch of small levels, and the most efficient way to traverse them is to actually ditch the webs altogether and just run to the objectives – as absolutely no superhero would.

And that’s a serious problem because Spider-Man clearly doesn’t have a regular human’s ability to deal with street life.

1 Daikatana actually slapped.. on the GameBoy

There’s nothing new we can say about Daikatana for the PC. Following up on his ultra-successful run at id Software as DOOM’s level designer, John Romero rented the coolest offices imaginable to get his people to develop the coolest game of all time. Unfortunately, said offices turned out to be the hottest offices imaginable, literally so hot, in fact, that the heat emanating from their awesome windows prevented the dev team to work for a considerable part of their working hours. We didn’t make that up. The game’s promo campaign didn’t fare any better after a douchey marketing exec coerced Romero into creating billboards announcing that Romero was about to turn all players into his “b*tches”. With such hubris, it’s no surprise that the game wouldn’t end up meeting expectations. Daikatana ended up releasing mid-2000, just two years after Half-Life but feeling two decades older.

But this isn’t about Daikatana for the PC.

Even though Daikatana pretty much became a laughing stock at that time, and making use of that IP probably felt like commercial suicide, Kemco decided to keep on working on a previously scheduled port the game to the GameBoy Color. The release was canceled in the US because nobody believed in the brand, but it ended up coming out a year later in Europe and Japan…and it actually rocks.

Instead of going for the edgy ’90s FPS vibe of the original game, Romero asked Kemco to make a more traditional adventure in the vein of the old Zelda classics, and the game ended up getting showered with praise… from the few who got to play it. Remember: one should never underestimate the power of the GameBoy.

Top Image: Valve