For many many years, games have been limited on their approach on PC. But recently that changed, which is for the better, obviously. I’m gonna use 4 examples, and each of them have particularities.

Red Dead Redemption

Rockstar San Diego’s award-winning cowboy adventure was released on Xbox 360 and PS3 back in May 2010 and it took 14 years to reach the PC. Many claimed that the code was a ‘spaghetti mess’ (which is not what the term means), and that the PC port didn’t happen because of that. Well, thankfully these people were wrong and the game was ported to PC after receiving a ports for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 in 2023, with all three made by Double Eleven.

Overall, it’s just Red Dead Redemption but running on PC. It supports the latest tech bits but it’s still a game from 2010. Better late than never I guess. Although, Rockstar is asking 50 USD for it…

Tales of Xillia

Tales of Xillia was released exclusively on PS3 in 2011 in Japan and 2013 internationally with English audio. And nothing since then. Quite unfortunate. After many remasters of older Tales Of games, Bandai Namco finally decided to reveal that the remastered version of it would come to Xbox Series, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch, as well as the PC. The launch will happen on October 31st, Halloween. Spooky!

But yeah, Bandai Namco sure took their sweet-ass time to free this one from the PS3 Jail. Over 10 years! They are asking only 40 USD for it, so it’s already better than Rockstar’s offer.

The next two examples are unique in the ways that they were ported to PC but they were mostly horrible, until recently.

Grand Theft Auto IV

Rockstar North’s finest work in my opinion, Grand Theft Auto IV launched in 2008 on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and in the same year on PC. And it was… Rough. A highly unoptimized port that Rockstar patched it for several years to fix most of its performance.

Some time ago, Rockstar merged both GTAIV and GTA:EFLC on PC into the ‘Complete Edition’, similar to what they did on console, but didn’t really fix the performance, even on newer GPUs, you can get some issues. This is where DXVK and Fusion Fix enter the scene.

DXVK is ‘a Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 8/9/10/11 which allows running 3D applications on Linux using Wine’. Perfect… For Linux users. But it turns out that you can use DXVK on Windows, if you directly add the files to the main folder of the game, making it use Vulkan to render the game and thus, making it use with more of the hardware, thus making it better to run. It’s not perfect but it’s much better than before.

Fusion Fix is a project that aims to fix or address issues with GTAIV and the DLCs. It brings GTAIV up to speed with modern features such as Windowed Borderless mode, actual Windowed mode, skipping the Intro and many other features, including some console visual options.

Combine the two and you can get a very nice experience. It’s not the best but it’s good enough. There’s further mods that allow you to get a 1:1 console experience on PC, which can be desirable for some.

Saints Row 2

And of course, we can’t forget one of the worst PC ports of all time, Saints Row 2 on PC.

Saints Row 2 came out on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in late 2008 and the PC port was released in January 2009. It was made by CD Projekt (not to be confused by CD Projekt Red, although they are same company) and it was a disaster. An unstable mess that has no start and no end. For years it was firmly in the unplayable state, which is not good.

A community mod called “Gentlemen of the Row” was made to address some issues, at least initially, but eventually got a lot of feature-bloat. The person behind it was hired by Volition, the company originally behind Saints Row, in the hopes of making a proper remaster of the game, but sadly he passed away.

That’s where the Juiced Patch for SR2 comes in. Juiced is a collaboration between several modders that released individual mods and eventually banded together to make a larger one to fix SR2 to the realm of actual playable-ness. And guess what? It worked. The patch also brings SR2 up to speed with modern features such as Windowed Borderless mode, actual Windowed mode, skipping the Intro and many other features, including some console visual options.

This patch exists since last year and I haven’t seen that many news of it, but it makes the game finally playable! It’s still not perfect but it’s good enough and that’s enough for me.

Closing Words

I’m gonna say that while I like to praise companies for a good job, I really can’t in this case. These 4 games getting decent PC ports or fixed to be decent is pretty much what it should have been like in the first place.

Although GTAIV and SR2 have a reputation that preceded them on PC, I don’t think it was a malicious deal but more of an incompetence sort of thing that led for these ports to be as bad as they were initially. For the other two, maybe the priority was low, someone didn’t want the PC version to happen, who knows.

In any case, it was about time that some of the most requested games and horrible ports had something done so they can finally have their time to shine.