I know we’ve spoken about failed Vita Kickstarter projects before, and in particular, we’ve covered how Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night‘s Vita port fell through after being funded on that site. What’s more: Simon Plumbe, our Editor-in-Chief, was actually one of several thousand backers who opted for the Vita version of the game, that never came to fruition. The thing is, the developers behind this Castlevania tribute said they were shifting efforts from the Vita port to the Switch port. It’s a move I don’t agree with, but it’s an understandable one, considering the current state of the Vita. How did it work out then?
In one word: horribly. You see, it used to be that Vita ports, particularly of independently-developed games aimed mainly at home consoles, got tons of performance issues originating from shoddy port work. You might have had to visit whichcasino.com and see if the ball landed on your number to see if you got a good or bad port. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night‘s Vita port got cancelled to focus on the Switch version of the game, and lo-and-behold, the Switch version of the game is also plagued with performance issues, frame-drops and a severe decrease in graphics quality.
505 Games have already spoken out about it and said that they’ll be focusing mainly on bringing the Switch port up to scratch. Did you buy a physical version of the game? Well, then, I hope it wasn’t on the Switch, because as the game released this week, your physical version will contain a sometimes-unplayable build of this thing.
If you ordered a Vita version back when they were crowdfunding, you had the chance to switch to another version, or get a refund. Either way, you got the 8-bit game Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon thrown in. That’s nice of them, no? Well, it turned out to be a bit cheeky, as not long ago that “freeby” got a physical release from Limited Run Games. And guess what? That one you could have on your Vita. Hooray?
I guess my point is this: I’m tired of companies promising things they won’t be able to deliver. We spent years dealing with that on the Vita, despite the hardware being clearly capable of outstanding things, as seen in games such as Killzone: Mercenary and Uncharted: Golden Abyss. Even though the curse has now moved to the Switch, I’m constantly asking myself why companies release these half-baked games, with the promise to fix them later? I want to buy a game that is finished, please. Call me old-fashioned, but I want the physical version of my game, at least, to be the definitive one. Even as recently as earlier this year, Limited Run Games released a physical version of The King of Fighters ’97 for the Vita that did not include balancing patches.
At this point, I think it comes down to the fact that they’ve seen they can get away with it. And it bothers me a lot. Limited Run Games won’t get my money, and 505 Games won’t be seeing me as a customer, either. But this is just a pair of examples of what’s really an industry-wide plague. I don’t want half-baked ports. I don’t want framerates in the teens. I don’t want patches for games that should have been released properly to begin with. And to be quite honest, it’s one of the reasons I’ve gone back and started collecting older systems and neglecting my current-gen stuff: simply put, I just want something that works.
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