Bad Ports and their Consequences

It should come as no surprise that I love old games, after all its in my name! Its an entire world of experiences that unfortunately, many gamers just miss out on in favor of the newest releases. Not to say there was a time where gaming was better, no that would be plain dumb. But there's so much more out there to the interactive media than just the past few years! But I wouldnt blame anyone for ignoring it, because often times the ports, remasters, and emulations butcher these games without anyone even knowing.

So you convince someone to try an old game, right? So they're gonna go buy whatever pops up in the steam search bar. They don't know anything about version differences, mods, or even the known issues. Whatever is on steam right now is going to be their first experience with the game. When they see the game having all sorts of technical problems displaying all those effects that were just fine in the original, they aint gonna go "wow this is a bad port", they're gonna go "wow this is an ugly looking game". Through (usually) no fault of the original devs, the crappy versions of their games are overwriting the originals in people's consciousness. 

Whats worse is that this results in a sort of, port-inbreeding. The devs of the new port only have the bad port as a basis, causing whole new problems that stack atop the old ones! Then it repeats, repeats, and repeats. This is what got us to the Grand Theft Auto Definitive Trilogy. What you're buying isnt the PS2 originals. They're ports of the mobile versions, which were ports of the xbox 360 versions, which were ports of the original xbox versions, which were ports of the original PS2 versions. A port of a port of a port of a port. Low and behold, they launched with not only new issues, but the same old ones from multiple generations ago. In my opinion, the Old GTAs didnt even need to be remastered completely, just give us restored versions of the originals! I bet even the dev team would agree, but unfortunately most arent looking at the original for reference, but the primitive work of lazy development and broken drivers from bygone years.

"Oh, but can't you use mods and research online?" yes you could, but why should I need to do that? Why is my PS2 game just fine in my PS2, but when I want the convenience of it on my PC or new console, I have to put in extra work just so Im not playing an inferior version?!

All I ask of this is please, I dont care if people find fault with old games, there's plenty to find! But they should be things that were always there, not the remains of a once visually gorgeous game turned into a flatshaded mess.