Angry-mob mentality threatened to engulf the Internet when The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt arrived looking less shiny than its announcement trailers, but those who lived through the '80s and '90s can tell you a thing or two about downgrades.
Back in the days when consoles and home computers were barely more powerful than pocket calculators, concessions were expected when blockbuster arcade titles made the jump to the living room - and there were some particularly bad offenders.
1. Donkey Kong on the Atari 2600
Donkey Kong was a coin-op smash when it hit arcades back in 1981, and Nintendo's famous ape fared equally well when he debuted on NES two years later.
But sandwiched between those versions is an Atari 2600 port that looks like a hollowed-out shell of the original game.
The eponymous Kong resembled a half-baked gingerbread man, Mario (or Jumpman, as he was known back then) appeared to be wearing pyjamas, and his love interest Pauline had no limbs. Barrels of fun this was not!
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2. Street Fighter 2 on the ZX Spectrum
Credit where credit is due, it's a minor miracle that developer Tiertex Design Studios managed to port Capcom's mega hit Street Fighter 2 to the ZX Spectrum. But the results were far from pretty.
This was a Frankenstein's monster of a conversion where characters and backdrops clashed, and the sprites looked like something Blanka had coughed up.
It didn't play any better than it looked, and users had to manually load each level and fighter up by swapping over the cassette tapes the game came on for the privilege.
3. Out Run on the ZX Spectrum
The Speccy version of Sega's driving classic Out Run might not look like a car crash, but it did play like one thanks to a video-related issue.
While the monochrome visuals suffered from the same colour clash as Street Fighter 2, this didn't hamper gameplay as much as the sluggish frame-rate of 2-3 FPS.
Not only did this kill all sense of speed - which is what the game was all about - it made that vintage Ferrari Testarossa nigh on impossible to control, slamming the brakes on the possibility of fun.
4. Popeye on the Odyssey 2
Popeye isn't easy on the eye at the best of times, but the spinach-eating sailor man hit a new aesthetic low when he appeared on the Odyssey 2 in 1982.
Porting Nintendo's Popeye arcade game to a console with just 64 bytes of memory required one of the most drastic graphical downgrades of all time - the sprites became stickmen and players were limited to just one level.
All the spinach in the world couldn't give us the strength to subject ourselves to this again.
5. Mortal Kombat 4 on the
We wouldn't recommend Mortal Kombat 4 on any platform, but there's a special place in the Netherrealm reserved for the
This was a classic example of a game being ported to a platform where so many concessions were needed that its essence was stripped away, with the developers unable to replicate the 3D effects that were fundamental to the arcade and console editions.
The Mortal Kombat series never translated well to early handheld consoles, but the fourth instalment was unrecognisable after the conversion process was complete.
6. Pac-Man on the Atari 2600
Pac-Man is one of the most iconic coin-op games of all time, but there's one version of it that really bites.
The Atari 2600 port of the dot-munching classic is a port so legendarily bad that it is often credited with causing the North American video game crash of 1983.
Pac-Man mutated into something ugly as sin on the second-generation console - dots became dashes, fruit became wafers, and the Power Pills made way for flashing squares.
It was just as offensive on the ears too, as the trademark 'wakka wakka' effect was replaced by a grating noise that sounded like a primitive operating system in its death throes.
7. Virtua Fighter 2 on the Mega Drive
What was Virtua Fighter 2 without those cutting-edge 3D graphics? Not much, as Sega found out when it ported the arcade brawler to its ageing Mega Drive console in 1997.
The Mega Drive had quite the track record when it came to arcade ports, but it couldn't handle 3D, and thus its version of Virtua Fighter 2 was an in-name-only conversion.
We could have forgiven the graphical downgrade if the game was any good, but it was based on a ropey clone of the original game's engine, and lacked the grace and fluidity of its coin-op counterpart.
8. Double Dragon on the Atari 2600
Double Dragon is the granddaddy of the beat-em-up genre, but expectations were somewhere in the Earth's crust when Activision revealed plans to bring it to the Atari 2600 in the late 1980s.
We're not going to be too harsh on this one because the fact they got it up and running on the 128-byte machine to begin with is an achievement in itself - even though the end result looks like it was drawn with crayons.
The graphical adjustment was understandable, but we'll never fathom why the developers even attempted to mimic a three-button control scheme on a system with a single-button joystick.
