Hit Console Games that Bombed on the PC

Hit Console Games that Bombed on the PC - II

Jayesh Limaye, Feb 20, 2010 0930 hrs IST

Some games are better off only on consoles.

Expert Review

There has always been competition and rivalry of sorts between PC and console gamers and games. But there are quite a few multiplatform games, which are available on the PC as well as console. Many of these are designed with the console in mind, and then simply ported to PC. Some do well, but many do not. Here are a few games that did not do as well on the PC as their console versions. In case you missed part one of this series, click here to read it.

Halo 2 Vista

Halo from Bungie was the game that helped sell the Xbox. So hugely popular did it become that a PC port was brought out by Bungie (with help from Gearbox Software) and was met with an equally critical acclaim. The success of the PC port was partly attributed to the improved graphics and extra content. Naturally, when it became known that a PC port of Halo 2 was in the making, the gaming community anticipated a similar success. But that was not to happen.

Firstly, the PC port was released very late in 2007, which was more than two and a half years after the original Xbox version was released. The delay was partly stated due to the appearance of nudity in the game, which they had to remove.

When the PC port of Halo 2 was released by publishers Microsoft, it was found to contain many errors in the PC port of Halo 2. One of the blunders they committed was that they did away with Gearbox, opting instead to create their own in-house team for porting the game. Yet another mistake was that they did not improve the graphics of the game; the only thing they did was include some higher resolution textures. One of the biggest mistakes was to make the game exclusive for users of Windows Vista (even though it did not have any Vista specific features such as support for DirectX 10), leaving Windows XP users in the lurch. It was 2007 and Windows Vista was not adopted by most PC users (and this situation continues to date), thus meaning that Microsoft as losing out on a lot of potential PC gamers who would have otherwise bought the game. It is little wonder that this game failed miserably on the PC and the required sales figures were never achieved.