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Is it just me, or have the past few months (since about November, I would guess) been extremely scarce, in particular for PC gamers? And when we got games, it's been mostly ports, and not the good kind. I've seen more lazy ports in the past few months than I care for. Seriously, developers and publishers need to stop this; these things do not sell. We've seen myriad examples of bad ports not selling well, and getting poor reviews, and the list is growing steadily. Let's start with Saints Row 2; an absolutely phenomenal game and hilarious fun, especially co-op. But what have they done for PC? Botched it entirely. The game is riddled with bugs. A recent patch added between 10 and 20 % increase in framerate, yet still it's nigh-unplayable. There's strange pauses in the game because of some bug with the way the system reads and writes to drives. Although the game is fantastic, I would advise anyone not to buy the PC version simply to show the developers that this won't fly. Then, if you happen to own an XBox 360, buy it for that platform because it's worth every penny. Additionally: shame on you, THQ; you're ordinarily such a great publisher, and you let this kind of nonsense bear your logo? Tsk.
Now, this is an overly long intro to the actual point I am making: Lost Planet is fantastic proof that good games deserve good ports, and will not sell if ported poorly. This game is fundamentally great, originally developed for the XBox 360 where it scored an impressive metascore of 79. It got good reviews, and although the intro sequence was mocked by Unskippable (click Read More to watch the video right here) it got generally good reviews. Succesful game, all around.
Insert bad PC port: Bad reviews which even seems to make reviewers forget the XBox 360 game is pretty damn well-received. Capcom gets punished for their lazy porting and attempts to cash in easily by receiving a Metascore of 66. This caused sales to be so poor, apparently, that Steam is now throwing the game into the bargain bin: $5 for a premier XBox 360 title on PC. Sure, it's not exactly a new title, but Steam isn't known for giving big discounts for old games, I refer you to their "reasonable" price for Doom II, released in 1994, which is $10. That's 5 dollars more than Lost Planet, released in 2007 (which is apparently equally valuable as Commander Keen).
Do I recommend you pick up Lost Planet for PC? Yes, for the simple reason of its pricetag. There's very few titles that would not be worth 5 bucks, and for the money you do get a bad execution of a good game. I, for one, remember the good old days when storylines were allowed to be paper-thin, as long as the action was remotely decent. The days of the Genesis, Doom II and Commander Keen...
Click "Read More" for the Unskippable video.
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