I just want to play these damn games. I heard this port is infamously bad, but....is it really? Or is it just annoying things that get in the way a bit?
Yes, it is
really that bad. It's the go to example of how bad a remaster can be. The list of problems is too intense to count. You've got the well documented ones like the fog isn't thick enough so you see unfinished assets and dead ends you weren't supposed to see. You've got visual and audio bugs at every corner. Assets are unfinished. So on and so on. The roads look so smooth and unfinished that the art director of SH2 expressed bafflement openly on twitter they actually released it like that.
Then you've got deeper problems like they redid all the voice acting and while the actors are all A-list voice talent, the delivery and direction is a lot more... anime, for lack of a better word. It doesn't really fit the tone of the game in a lot of places.
This is what happens when an inexperienced dev team used to low budget mobile games are given an unfinished beta build of a game and told to clean it up and make an HD port out of it. Yes, if you didn't know, Konami lost the final build so they gave them an older one that had tons of unfinished assets and unfixed bugs the original team had fixed themselves before release. And then on top of that you add a bunch of disagreements between Konami and their old voice talent.
All that being said. If you don't have a computer that can emulate the PS2 versions or run the fan patched versions of the native PC ones, and you're never going to spend the money on the PS2 version themselves... I suppose it's better than never playing it at all. I'd try and wait, though.
