AI-assisted development is bringing old games to platforms we'd never have thought possible. That's exciting, but the growing flood of unfinished ports is beginning to raise an uncomfortable question: how many of these games are actually worth playing?

Some of the ports we’re seeing in the retro handheld community lately have been great, and I love seeing developers push these little devices beyond what they were ever intended to do. But I’ve definitely noticed what feels like a growing amount of ‘port-slop’, with new projects appearing seemingly every few hours, many of them feeling more like quick experiments than anything particularly worthwhile.

I’m not against the experimentation at all, but I do wonder if we’re reaching a point where quantity is starting to overshadow quality. Anyway, I put together a short opinion piece about it, just my own thoughts on something I’ve been noticing lately, especially here with my favorite old system: the PSP.

  • caseofthematts@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    24 hours ago

    You don’t understand, now we can get new mods and new modern features in these old games because of this!

    /s

    I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before malware hits people’s computers from all of these vibecode projects.

    I’ve just left the Golden Sun reddit community because the user base there is foaming at the mouths for all of the decomp/recomp projects happening. The mods did a vote and just over half of the votes agreed to allow AI coded projects. They still don’t want gen AI art, there, though. I suppose an artist can use AI to code a game, but coders can’t use AI to make art.

    • Magiilaro@feddit.orgEnglish
      2·
      8 hours ago

      It was especially bad, and the first time where I had people outside of some nerdy bubbles talk about it, was it when the slop coded Photoshop clone went through the media. All the dumb “Adobe will be dead soon now that we have a perfect clone of their programs” talk.