I wanna circle back to this and just say there are so many interesting console ports that kind of fall under this nebulous topic of discussion and I’ve been thinking about it since my initial post.
Borderlands 2 on the Vita was SO interesting in that it answered the question of how Borderlands would run on a PS2-ish type of platform, but it was never like…..GOOD. The switch today has a few ports that feel like it answers a similar question of “how would this game feel if we took it off the PS4 and asked it to run on the Xbox 360??” Doom, Wolfenstein TNO, Witcher 3, etc…..are such interesting technical feats. None of them are particularly impressive as a stand-alone experience, but in context they are FANTASTIC.
And the 90s consoles are full of these like impressive technical “square peg in a round hole” kind of ports. Doom on the SNES, Half Life on Dreamcast, Quake on the Saturn, MOST of the arcade ports for so many late 80s and 90s games. They had a target set or hardware and NOTHING was going to stop the game from running on it. Resident Evil 2 on an N64 cart? Hold my beer they said. And it’s even more impressive when you consider the intensity of the programming languages used.
maybe I missed the point, but man I love these messy ports.