LogFAQs > #973208336

Monopoman posted...

That kinda proves my point though the port was s*** but people knew the game was good so they worked on it.

Ah, but then we get to the heart of the question: If it needs modding to be good, is it actually a good game? That ends up in a weird place when it only applies to one version of the game and there are other ways to experience it without those crippling problems, since saying "the game is good" about one version and "the game is not good" about another version of the same game isn't a great way to express that, but the question remains of whether or not having the potential to be a good game with help from modders actually qualifies as being a good game.

Mostly, though, I'd just like to see more publishers held accountable for releasing inexcusably bad PC ports. We can philosophize about what mods mean in the context of appraising games all we want, but when an amateur can fix a near-broken port with an amount of work that would cost the publisher maybe $500 tops, that's a very real issue that gets a free pass all too often. Unfortunately, I don't think there really is an avenue to do that, since enough people want to play these games that having to install a mod to get them running isn't enough of a barrier to really hurt sales, and if ever it did come to a point where a publisher couldn't sell a PC port because no modders were willing to make it playable, I suspect their first reaction would be to drop the port altogether and not to spend a little bit of extra time and money solving the problem.