Well, I say the iOS port that became the PC port for Final Fantasy 5. The game is butt ugly. Nothing looks good in that version. The environment sprites: ugly. The character sprites: ugly. The character art is the original Amano art, but that just doesn't fit with anything ingame.

There is a nice blog article that talks about what went wrong.

Hard Reset Redux - a straight up graphical downgrade and unbalances the game quite heavily with the added dash and melee weapon.

Doom 3 BFG - kills the original's atmosphere. Makes it into a more run off the mill shooter than the more horror-like experience of the original.

Worms: Ultimate Mayhem - ensures that we will never see Worms 3D in its original form again because the game has been remade in the Worms 4 engine and included in this edition with Worms 4: Mayhem.

Serious Sam HD - while it improves the graphics, it changes the physics and some levels had to be simplified because the engine can't handle quirky gravity stuff.

Anything censored is automatically a bad version of a game.

Simon the Sorcerer CD-ROM.

Don't get me wrong - love the game, love the voices BUT YOU CAN'T HAVE SUBTITLES WITH THE SPEECH ON.

Ruined it for me.

The article doesn't touch on the gameplay at all, and the graphical differences are just aesthetic.


Actually, I just remembered another bad version of a game: Final Fantasy 4 Advance. It's based off the WonderSwan Color version of the game (which has many of the same issues, although it does have a good soundtrack), and they didn't bother to fix many of the issues, making the game much easier than intended. Furthermore, there's a bug that can freeze the game, and even worse, there's a bug that can result in the deletion of save data. The game was rushed for the holiday season, and it shows.

(Note that this refers to the 1.0 release, which is the one the US got. Europe got the game later, but they got the 1.1 release, which fixes many of the issues with the game, I believe including the save deletion bug. Japan also got that version, but unfortunately the US did not.)

I disagree.
* In some cases, a censored version can lack triggers that are in the original, allowing people who would be triggered by the original to play the censored version.
* Sometimes, censorship can be funny. For example, Final Fantasy Legend 2's illicit banana trade in the English version is much funnier than the original opium trade (and much better than what we see in the DS version's fan translation).

The Amiga verions of Castlevania is atrocious

Serious Sam (First Encounter) is one of my all-time favorite PC first-person shooters.

The little I played the PS2 version of Serious Sam, it was very poor. Naturally the controls were quite awkward compared to the high-speed gameplay of the PC version, and it seemed the gameplay was changed a lot to accommodate to the poorer controls.

The PC version was at many points like ballet with guns where you kept running backwards in circles or making split-second jumps and changes to your movement while massive hordes of enemy monsters tried to jump at you, while the PS2 version felt more like a shooting gallery game where you just tried to move the aim on top of single incoming enemies before they reach you.

Yeah, because the gameplay is intact. But how do you expect me to play a game when my eyes are bleeding and my heart is weeping since I know that it can look better and you are better off just playing the SNES or GBA version?
Are you one of those people who have no sense of aesthetics and claim 'graphics don't matter to me'? That's just sad.

Final Fantasy 7 on PC (original release), I think I ran into a game-breaking bug around the Dyne boss battle and that was it. Oh, and the MIDI soundtrack was a real travesty, I don't know why that was a thing. The only thing that was better? The grammar. But then you didn't get the iconic line "this guy are sick", so still a net loss.

Final Fantasy 8 on PC (original release). This one was fully functional and in fact the only version I've ever played (and played through it more times than any other game), but I believe it was a graphical downgrade from the Playstation version. It did come with a little extra chocobo minigame though.

Then it should be optional to disable, not forced on everybody. I've seen some games do it with spiders and such. The problem is, that the user usually has no choice left in the matter. This can also lead to preventive censorship or self censorship. Some things might get cut already during the development due to being too controversial or just because someone, somewhere, could potentially get triggered. In this world of Twitter dramas and other such nonsense, most will just play it on the safe side.
It might have been a good replacement but that doesn't change the fact that it's different from the original. It probably won't bother people who never played the original, but still.

Actually, from what I have seen on videos, there have been gameplay changes, though many are quite subtle.

One change I don't like is that they got rid of the pause that happens when command windows open. In GBA and earlier versions, whenever a character is ready to be given a command, there is a brief pause depending on the battle speed setting, giving the player a chance to choose a command before time starts running again. (Essentially, this mitigates the inherent disadvantage the player has relative to the computer in the ATB battle system.) That pause is gone in the later versions.

There's other differences, like certain combinations of equipment and abilities interact differently, some attacks have had their block-ability chanced (attacks that were blockable aren't and vice versa), and double cast behaves differently in situations like when a character is dead for the first spell but alive for the second.

Resident Evil 4 (retail version) - PC version :
This is the original version from retail, not the HD Remaster that got put on Steam.
PC controls were horrible with keyboard/mouse. Basically was must-play with a gamepad, which I did. Still a great game, but...the PC controls for KB/mouse are awful. If you have this version and you don't have a gamepad - just forget the original version of this game (which was at retail, published by UbiSoft in USA).

Deadly Premonition: Director's Cut - PC version:
Definitely a favorite game of mine b/c it's just so weird, so odd, so twisted, so bizarre. It's basically...another Resident Evil, but gone open-world and weird. It has tons of influence from Twin Peaks. And the lead character, named York, also call himself Zach...or is talking to another person, personality, or something. Dude's got issues. The game's just...so unique in so many ways, I don't know where to begin.

Regardless, this might be the worst PC port that I've ever seen. Set in one resolution, it needs DSFix to go high-res. There has to be a memory-leak bug, as eventually the game loses its FPS (frames per second) slowly but surely and then eventually crashes. Oh, and sometimes...the game will just crash out of nowere for...who knows what reason. It's a terrible port to the PC, but a great flawed gem rough-diamond of a game is there...if you can get actually through the technical mess.

Many remasters and remakes. 'Improved' graphics and nothing else at the cost of many new bugs (and too many bucks).

World Heroes on Mega Drive - I could forgive almost any lack of this version, I like the concept of semi-historical characters, so almost everything is working more or less fine... except of terrible, utterly terrible music. Which basically forced me to stop playing it quite quickly.

Sonic Heroes on PC - I really liked both Sonic 3 & Knuckles PC port (the first one from 1997 - IMO its soundtrack is better than MD one) and Sonic Riders PC port (so ports released before and after PC Sonic Heroes), but by some reason Sonic Heroes have completely messed up configuration of control, if you're using anything else than gamepad. You can't rebind control on keyboard (yet you can on... mouse). If you want to play in 2P mode, attaching one gampad is binding it strictly to player 1... as well as player 1 keyboard control (2P keyboard control is literally unplayable). Mouse is also by some reason strictly assigned to player 1. They never messed it up so bad in any other game with Sonic that I remember.

No, that's different.

Active/Wait affects whether time is stopped in sub-menus, like when you've chosen the "Magic" or "Item" command. (Well, FF4 and FF5 have different magic commands for each type of magic, but you get the idea.) The pause when the main window comes up is temporary and is governed by the battle speed setting.

To get an idea of how this works, try playing FF5 (GBA or earlier) with the ATB showing and with the battle speed set to 6 (the lowest setting); you'll *definitely* notice what's going on here. (I believe that 1 disables the pause entirely. Also, you know that one level 1 time magic spell that's called something like Speed or Drag? That spell sets the battle speed to 5 for the remainder of the battle.)