A Sharps "King of Dragon Pass", MDickies "Wrestling Revolution Pro" and Trilobytes "The 7th Guest". I think those games speak for themselves. Would kill to see "Master Of Orion" ported. I'll buy "Baldurs Gate" as soon as it arrives on the Mac App Store, as I dont own an iPad.
From what I've played, my favourite ports this year have to be Lostwinds 2 Crazy Taxy Carmageddon Vice City hasn't been added due to it's contant crashing But the best port of the year will have to go to the walking dead...at Christmas, I'm going to buy myself an iTunes gift card just to buy that entire game
I'm a sucker for console ports. I'd have to Vice City is the best. Great games = great ports. They could have made the controls tilt controls and it STILL would have be a great iOS game. Other than that I'd have to say FFIV, The Bard's Tale (plus original three for free), Soul Calibur, and the Marathon trilogy are great ports.
For me, it's definitely Baldur's Gate! Yes, there's a few interface issues, and the Devs are working on an update, soon to be released that should fix the most glaring ones, but I'm still having the best iPad gaming experience yet with this game. This is the first really deep RPG on this platform, where everything is just right on point. Acting, writing, dialog, choices that actually matter, huge world, quests galore and fun ones too, I could go on and on... Yes, it may be hard to get to grips with if you're a newbie to the series, or indeed hardcore western RPG's, due to the relatively steep learning curve, if you persists through the first hour or so, you're really going to get the best experiences in this niche of gaming ever.
Baldur's Gate followed closely by Vice City, for me. Already logged in a dozen or so hours in each, even though Dragonborn came out on X360 around the same time. Depth of gameplay is something (with a rare few exceptions) that has been lacking on iOS prior to this week.
Without a doubt, easily the best port this year was Battle Academy. The game has a superb amount of content for both single and multiplayer. It's basically a more complex advance wars in 3D. Hopefully this paves the way for more serious wargames on the platform.
Battle Academy hands down the best port this year. Don't forget The Last Express, which surprisingly ages charmingly well on iOS. Another overlooked port is Ghost Trick which I enjoyed immensely. I would say this is one year where ports shine much brighter than iOS original games, at least for me.
But i think we only have ourselves to blame. If a large company releases a port, eg Sega and Sonic CD and it doesnt sell well then they dont get into financial trouble. If some indie devs spend 9 months creating a game, then sell it and it doesnt do well, people wait for it to be free or a price drop then they go bankrupt and dont create another game. I think in the 'old days' (year or so ago) people used to buy many more games, now freemium is so popular people seem to have a view that 'might as well wait for it to be free/or ask 100 questions deciding whether to buy a 99c GAME !'. If you want more creative indie style games then buy their games, if we all wait for price drops/games to be free then they make no money. Its depressing to hear when an indie dev releases a game, has 50 sales then they make it free for a few days and theres 10,000 downloads ! No wonder more and more people go the freemium route. I'm not saying buy every single indie game there is, i buy a lot of games i like the look of, i never wait for price drops. Its when people start asking questions about some 99c game its laughable, or people openly say 'i'll wait for this to drop in price' when a games the cost of a burger. If you dont want freemium games and dont want more and more ports then buy more games ! You think, if games sell so well then we'll get more and more indie devs creating games on iOS as they know they can make money, if they know they might make just a few sales then they wont bother.
I would agree if the DS wasn't the second highest selling game console of all time (just behind the PS2).
A lot of that is comprised of little kids or people who don't really game much though, and TWEWY got pretty hard to find pretty fast. The DS is the ONLY portable console, aside from the iPhone, that I really went out of my way to get a lot of games for and that's mainly because I was an adult when I got it and I wasn't playing on a home console at all. I had a number of other portables throughout my youth, but my libraries were pretty random and I didn't have most of the must-haves available on them. I think most console gamers, at least the kind of gamers who are likely to be really into JRPGs, choose to spend most of their time on home consoles anyway, even if they have a portable. It's been my experience with board activity and such that the DS "community" didn't reflect the system sales. The average quality of DS games is also rather low in comparison to home systems, even ignoring hardware discrepancy. I don't think I could name more than ten JRPGs on the DS that I would consider great. TWEWY is certainly one of them. Anyway, I'm not sure what my favorite port this year has been. TWEWY's up there, and I actually prefer the iOS version. Lunar is another game I've always liked, although I think the iOS version is sorely in need of a fixed d-pad in landscape mode and I'm not entirely sure how to feel about the audio being from Harmony. Vice City is another contender.
Lost Winds 1&2 combine to make one of my favorite games ever. I didn't know there was a Wii version until I looked up the devs after they decided to do a fricking rollercoaster sim next. I feel Max Payne is getting lost in all the rest though and that is just inexcusable!
Max Payne...if you could manage the controls (I did, but granted they were clunky before the update) that was just wonderful. Really put that junk 9mm in its place.
Co-sign The 7th Guest. Id always wanted to play that one but it was so old that no computer I owned would play it. Glad they decided to port it as it works really well on iOS. As a fighting game fan, I have to say, the last year has been a really good one for FG ports. We got Soul Calibur and Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 (which were both fantastic ports despite the control issues), and even Street Fighter X Tekken. But the best one IMO (and I'm not sure if this counts as a port, though it IS close to the console version) is King Of Fighters 2012. The game looks, sounds, and plays so well, you almost forget you're playing it on an I-device. SNKP really did a fantastic job with that one.