Hello.

As i have seen GOG has some of those KONAMI games or ex-konami games released now.

The initial feeling was "oh great, finally some metal gear solid without having to import it for the old dusty PS1 and/or X."
But my second feeling was "oh great, another cheap cashgrab plus all the badly ported things that come with it, do i even run this stuff on my PC?"

So i ask some of the people here. Possibly with a little experience with consoles and console ports.

I used some of the early console ports on PC i think back in the early 2000s and they mostly don't run so well because of either visual game breaking bugs, or non keyboard controls / unbindable or general lag.

That being said, i enjoy playing on my old consoles especially the classics like SNES, some PS1 stuff and even semi-classics from old and "medieval" ages of CAPCOM on any console or port.
Things is i had some pretty bad experiences with lazy ports from console, no matter if from the US or infamous Japanese publishers, who i usually like for many reasons. The thing i do not like though is how they treat customers with basically only half-playable or enjoyable console ports nowadays, sometimes it was even back then.

Too Lazy To Bloody Read: What are your console port recommendations of any games you tried on GOG.com or elsewhere?

For example i remember enjoying Dark Souls on xbox but to be a bloody mess when it came to pc controls and general quality of life adjusting like resolution, i think there are more fanmods out there that fix several problems than dev updates.

Usually multiplatform developed games don't bother me much, it's games made for consoles only and then ported to PC later that you really have to look out for.

The original Final Fantasy 7 and 8 ports were really bad. Changed music, bad controls, some other problems I don't recall. I think the current Steam versions are better.

I hate using a controller so I guess I'm bias, but Dark Souls (even the remaster) annoys me because its camera control feels like emulating an analog stick instead of true mouse control. Some of the older Assassin's Creed games have this problem too, like Rogue. Anything 3D that makes me reluctantly use a controller is bad IMO.

The original Resident Evil 4 was a well know trash fire of a port. It got a newer port, thankfully, that is much better.

I remember Lost Planet launched every prompt was Xbox buttons even if you used keyboard and mouse. Maybe it's still like that, I dunno.

bah that final fantasy 12 remaster... talk ' bout some bad shit, almost of the same proportion as the skyrim one, stay away from remasters unless your emotionally bound to a game in any way

Other issues with Final Fantasy 7 PC:
* On period hardware, load times get longer the longer you play in a session, eventually becoming infinite (the next area never loads). (This made me nervous whenever an FMV cutscene would come up.)
* Game would crash frequently. (In a game that only lets you save on the world map (which you don't even reach for way too long) or at save points, this is a very bad thing.)
* Default controls used exclusively the numeric keypad. This, of course, made the game unplayable on a laptop that doesn't have a numeric keypad.
* There's no way to quit in the middle of a mini game. This is an issue with one particular minigame that lasts 10 minutes (IIRC) if you don't win before then, but where it's very difficult to win if you don't win early, forcing you to wait the rest of the time (or force-quit the game) if you want to retry.

By the way, back in the day, many of the early computer WRPGs got console ports, and they vary in quality. Some change a lot of stuff from the original. For example:
* Ultima 3 NES is fairly similar to computer versions, though there are a few changes to account for the changed controls, with new quest items and learnable commands replacing parts where you had to type in things.
* Ultima 4 NES is quite different from the original, but manages to be a good game on its own terms. Some times I actually prefer it to other versions.
* Ultima 4 SMS is a nice faithful port, with some changes (most significantly dungeons being changed to overhead view for some reason). It's nice when I want console controls but still want something faithful to the original.
* Ultima 5 NES is kuso garbage. It's so bad that I've compared it to games like ET, Superman 64, Arabian Nights (PC game, not the Amiga game with that title), Big Rigs, and Hoshi wo Miru Hito (Stargazer). To put it another way, if it ever gets run at a GDQ event, it is going to be in the Awful Games block; it really is that bad.
* Might and Magic NES, from what I've seen, appears to be a decent port except for a bug making Locus Plagues unfair. Basically, if you're fighting a Locust Plague and it gets a turn, you can expect your party to be wiped out before you get to enter another command.
* Might and Magic 2 Genesis, from what I've seen, appears to be a reasonable port, though I prefer the DOS version hee.
* Might and Magic 2 SNES, from what I've seen, appears to be a horrendously buggy port, to the point where I can't recommend it. (Note that I'm talking about the version released in Europe; there's a *different* version that Japan got which I have no experience with (whether playing or watching). The US was going to get the European version, but that didn't happen for unknown reasons; my guess is that they couldn't get the game past Nintendo of America's QA.)
* Might and Magic 3 SNES is playable, but is rather sluggish and I would not recommend it. Also, there's a bug that makes one particular attribute much harder to raise.

These early WRPGs also were ported between computer platforms, and some end up better than others.

(Fun fact: The MSX got two versions of Ultima 3, one based on the Famicom (Japanese NES) version, and a more faithful version based off another Japanese computer port.)

Are these in the original retail PC releases, or the Steam releases?

I finished the retail PC versions a long time ago and I don't recall those two issues. so I wonder if they are some incompatibilities with modern hardware and newer Windows versions?

Not quite sure which Windows versions I was using for the games. Most probably it was either Windows 2000 or XP (definitely not Vista or newer), but it could have been also Win9x. FF7 PC I played on my old desktop PC. while FF8 I played on my (work) laptop.

I know I am a heretic, but I feel FF7 PC General MIDI music sounds much better with Roland SCC-1, than the original PSX version. The only exception is the Sephiroth music in the final battle, as it is missing the vocals (singing) in the General MIDI version. If you had a Soundblaster AWE32 sound card or such, then you got the vocals too.

This was the original PC retail release of FF7, which came with 4 disks (an install disk and the 3 disks that PSX FF7 players are more familiar with), and it was on hardware available at the time of release. I believe it was on Windows XP, and I believe it was in the earlier days of Windows XP.

I'm thinking that they could have handled the final boss music better even without the vocals; they just should have chosen a better instrument for the melody. (I can say that Disgaea DS had a similar constraint with not being able to use vocals, but it handled it better than FF7 PC did.)

(Note that I never actually got that far in FF7, as I stopped at the beginning of Disk 3; however, I did do all the sidequests except for the superbosses (which are a bit disappointing as they don't have dungeons with hard monsters attached to them, and they just use the normal battle music).)

By the way, I read that there's apparently a PC remake of Hoshi wo Miru Hito (albeit only in Japanese). Has anybody here tried it, and is it any good (or at least decent, since the original wasn't)?

It is possible I was still using Windows 9x (possibly 98SE) at that point. Not sure if that affected it.

It is possible I've also just forgotten about the constant(?) crashes or the slowdowns, but I don't recall such.

I played it on a Win95 OSR2 machine and a WinXP machine, and had no stability or loading time problems. (According to the gears.pdf file I'm looking at the game 'does not run on the Windows NT type kernels due to some far-flung misallocated pointers', but if I had to use a fan patch on XP I've forgotten all about it. I only remember having to download an alternative config file to get around the laptop's lack of a numpad--though on a desktop machine, I seem to be one of the few people who actually liked the default numpad controls.) Apparently the initial release had particular problems with Cyrix and AMD hardware.

The default controls work reasonably well once you learn them...

...until the game throws a mandatory minigame at you and changes them; the control prompts for the minigames don't tell you what keys on the keyboard, but instead use the names used in the settings like [switch] and [cancel].

Ugh... I remember that.

Console to PC I am very cautious about. From not providing resolution options, controller setup, lower system settings etc. The vast majority turn out to be quite poor. The sensible method is to build for pc, then decimate it down to run on consoles. It’s never going to be that way though, lowest common denominator in all things.
It’s not just console but no we are seeing ports from mobile platforms, and these suffer as well.

It's one of the reasons I ended up not liking Final Fantasy 7, and it's also bad for accessibility.

(Of course, it's not the only game to have this sort of issue; see Ultima 1, for example, which has a mandatory action minigame despite otherwise being turn based.)

Yeah. You seem to get it more than most of those companies out there, who just try to make a extra bug or two without thinking twice about the actual quality.

Anyways thanks for the contribution and sharing of experience from you all.

I'm gonna try to put it in more accessable informations later but for now a quick list of games i remember on top of my head that may or may not have worked with the "fitting" PC setup, OS or just circumstances that worked for IT.

Killer is Dead: xbox 360 port: working with controller despite many Steam reviews claiming it has issues working; mein reason: issues like cutscenes ending in a loop.
Personally had that "infinite" loop of a cutscene fixed by itself basically after a few times letting it play. Other players claim it basically is a literal game breaking bug.
Other than that: worked for my high resolution windows 7 and windows 10.
side note: game was advertised as non steam game on online games platform so i ordered the physical copy, thinking it is like in the Witcher games 1 and 2 where i have a physical copy that also works without any Steam or you name it.
Other than that this game worked like a charm. Also i am biased because Suda 51 made this game. (see: maker of killer 7, no more heroes, lollipop chainsaw etc.

CAPCOM's Dead Rising 2 plus the basically stand-alone DLC "off the record": worked on windows 7 and windows 10.
warning: the original versions for PC were on games for windows live, a online "feature" of microsoft that basically forced you to be online for even offline sessions (see Valve Steam)
It had multiplayer, but many sessions ended in a connection loss of one or more players, The microsoft "GFWL" closed some years ago now it is only purchasable on Steam as far as i know, and said online retailer let me convert it basically to their online library with GFWL not working anymore.
works with keyboard and mouse but only with a standard control that, to my knowledge, you cannot change on the normal versions. At least the last time i plaid it.
Other than that games work.

Honorable mention: Street Fighter 4 & Standalone DLC
WORKED on Vista plus online multiplayer worked most of the time with a huge BUT: connection was reliant on area of host, (peer to peer?) and also reliant on on GFWL before closing. On present day i have not tested it due it now is on steam /and/or playable with certain mods that ignores the old online only forcing of microsoft which makes it basically a offline game as far as I know not many people play it online anymore.
Keyboard was highly customizable, graphics too, only issue is the diagonal moves of for example character like "zangief" were a huge pain in the butt even with gamepads.
Reason: Gamepads like the 360 pad was not really made for proper 2D control with those analog sticks.
If someone tested it with a PC version of the PS3 controller you may know more about it. As it is much more playable in terms of precise movement.
Side Note: While quite enjoyable at times, it was too reliant on which players you get online unless you only play local coop with people you know. Also ragequit rate was pretty high aka online salt and other nasties.

Another Thing about that whole "games for windows live" thing.

I think that multiplayer rating thing was one of the most inaccurate when it comes to rating systems.

Also it introduced me to a new form of hate i never experienced before in a online game 2004 or 2006

After some raging person does not like how you win or lose a game it goes like this.
Person sends you hatemail, now if you rate that person obviously not good this person can just make a fake rating with some clique that also rate you without even playing once with you. Now that is even more abusable than most fishy stuff i have seen on steam, be it fake reports, spoiled brats that can send you hateful messages without you being able to block them before they send it or just put your profile on private.

So as a online platform it was not that good even compared to stuff we have nowadays.

I take teabaggers and salty cheating cyrillic name using players over this anytime.
And I'm NOT saying Valve is much better on that behalf...just a little bit.

At least every 10th third reich fan profile gets removed....