7th Dec, 2007

You know what it’s like. You’ve just created a brand new videogame and you want to show it to the world. You’re proud of your creation. It’s taken you months, if not years, to make and you want as many people as possible to share in your joy at its release. It’d also be nice to make a bit of extra money out of it.

So you start porting it to different formats.

But somewhere along the line you get greedy and decide to find out just how many formats you can make your baby play on, capable or not. And rather than the glorious collection of dedicated versions of your game you'd wanted available to every man, woman, child and foetus (once you got that tiny handheld that rubs off amniotic fluid up and running) on the planet, you actually end up with just a couple of decent versions and a whole load of reviewers sitting with their heads in their hands.

Sometimes though, it doesn’t go that way. Sometimes, by a random flash of design genius or just plain old good luck, games end up being great on a system that by rights they should play horrifically on. Sometimes, a low-powered machine forces developers to get really creative, and just sometimes, an inappropriate port can match or even beat the original…