Give Me Those Nasty, Terrible Game Ports

Look, I know a lot of people are mad that Mortal Kombat 1 on the Nintendo Switch doesn’t run that well. Heck, folks, sounds like it runs pretty terribly! Textures are blurry. Frame rates drop. The eyes of all the characters look like Judge Doom from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. While it’s admirable that this version contains as much content as the PC, PS5, and Xbox Series Whatever, it’s also kind of outrageous to charge the same amount for an inferior product. Except, I kind of love it?

Just give me those hot, nasty, terrible video game ports. Give them to me all day long. Love them. I want all your buggy, awful ports of next generation games that run on the tech worse than what comes in smart refrigerators. Send them my way. Straight to me. You know those TikTok videos of people losing their goddamn minds when someone does a magic trick on the street? That’s how I feel about ports that should not exist.

Related: Mortal Kombat 1 Knows That Some Of Us Have No Friends

I’m not defending Mortal Kombat 1 costing $70 on the Nintendo Switch. I’m also not defending bugs shipping with any product. I’ve said it a thousand times and I’ll say it again: nobody on Earth should have a lackluster experience accidentally uppercutting someone’s head off because it’s become way too easy to do a Brutality in the last few games.

But it is very cool that this game exists at all on the Switch. Because it shouldn’t. We all know it shouldn’t. For the love of God, even the previous game in the series, Mortal Kombat 11, shouldn’t have been on the Nintendo Switch. This is straight up Jeff Goldblum, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” Except I’m the lawyer who’s an idiot and thinks it’s great until I’m eaten by a T-Rex. I guess, in this metaphor, the T-Rex is my credit card bill? I don’t know.

Even though I already owned The Witcher 3 and its expansions, you can bet your ass I bought it on the Nintendo Switch. One, to be completely fair, the saves cross over between versions and the Steam Deck wasn’t a thing yet. Two, I just wanted to see it run. Does it run well? Eh. Not really! It’s pretty dodgy. Geralt looks like he has the skin of a Funko Pop in his bathtub scene. But it does run, and god help me if I didn’t drop hours into marveling at a product that has no right to ever have been made.

There’s something special about all that jank. There’s magic in those washed out, flat textures. And, speaking of Steam Deck, running portable PC games on low resolution settings has given me a better appreciation for just how far you can lower the bar while a game stays playable. I want to see the boundaries of a video game. I want to see the lowest possible hardware that can run something. I got Cyberpunk 2077 running on my parents’ ancient ass computer by cranking everything so deeply down that the game was basically a series of colors that talked about dying a legend. But it ran!

A lot of this probably comes from growing up with my primary console being the original Game Boy. I owned the original Mortal Kombat Game Boy port (it’s terrible). I owned the original Street Fighter 2 Game Boy port (it’s awful). I owned the original Killer Instinct Game Boy port (actually not that bad!). Even though I had a Super Nintendo, Game Boy games cost less, so those were usually the ones that got bought. Because I was a child and had no money. Side note, that’s another good reason Mortal Kombat 1 on the Switch shouldn’t cost $70. Although if we’re being honest with ourselves, we know that its price is going to drop like a rock come the holidays. And if I’m being honest with myself, I’m probably going to buy it at that point.

Playing those ports - and often with them as my only option - gave me a deep respect for just how hard it is to reduce a game down as far as possible and still have it be, at its core, the same basic concept. I recognize that I’m seeing achievement in what many see as a cash grab. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. I’m fascinated by the point at which a company says, “Good enough” for a port. To stick with Mortal Kombat ports - the original game on the Game Boy runs like garbage. But its sequel, Mortal Kombat 2, runs amazing on the Game Boy! It’s not nearly as good as the arcade. It’s janky as hell. But it’s closer to the original than it has any right to be. Also, if you’re keeping track, Mortal Kombat 2 is ten games before the current Mortal Kombat 1.

Again, I don’t want to reward poor ports. I’m not absolving companies of their duty to not screw customers. But I’m glad these ports exist. It’s fun to see hardware pushed to its absolute limit. I want to see just how far the Switch can go before it melts in on itself with a final, relieved sigh. The same goes for other consoles. I asked for Doom for the Super Nintendo for Christmas one year. Not because it was the only way to play Doom; because it was the weirdest and stupidest way to play Doom. By all accounts, it was one of the worst ways to play Doom. And when it came out on the Game Boy Advance, by golly, I bought that too. I wanted to see!

I respect that some people feel swindled by this port. I’m unclear on how they’re surprised by it, but I accept that they feel cheated. I think we all kind of knew it was going to be a mess when NetherRealm Studios announced a graphically-intense fighting game with quick-changing scenes for every next generation console and also a low-powered tablet from 2017. Still, if you pre-ordered the game before seeing how it turned out, it makes sense to be pretty angry at the final product.

We’ve reached a point in gaming in which odd ports are almost foreign to us. And that’s probably good. Expecting parity between every available version of a product is normal. We’re probably never going to see a game as wild as StarCraft 64 again. Which, by the way, was StarCraft running on a Nintendo 64. Sorry, but that was cool as hell, too! And speaking of Nintendo 64, remember when they shoved every FMV from Resident Evil 2’s multiple CDs into a cart and it still pretty much worked? We didn’t need it! But we got it! Ports!

Yes, games should run as well as possible - especially when you’re taking people’s hard earned money. And, yeah, it’s okay and possibly even good for a company to take a pass when a console isn’t powerful enough to give their game a proper presentation. But at the same time, I will always “ooh” and “aah” like it’s a fireworks show when a new game runs on an old system with the smoothness of a baby horse being born through a garden hose.

Next: Mortal Kombat 1 Should Have Never Made Shang Tsung A Pre-Order Bonus