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.

  • papalonian@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    12 hours ago

    Thank you for writing and posting this. I’m not huge in the scene but have noticed a large amount of posts in this community claiming XYZ game from 30+ years ago has been emulated. Recently there was the post here from the guy that recreated “Z” (a game I admittedly had not heard of), and he responded to every comment in the thread, accept the one asking if AI was used to port it. Like, if you used AI, just say you did! I’m not vehemently against it in the right application and recreating an old game seems like a decent use case for it. But the fact that they shied away from the question says that not only was it made using AI, it was probably entirely made with AI and barely tested.

    I used to see a headline saying that a game had been recreated, and immediately think “hell yeah” and move on. I don’t think that I have ever installed one of these games and actually played them before. With the rise of AI development, I don’t even get the blip of excitement anymore, I just say “neat”, assume some people are really happy to play a childhood favorite, and that’s it.

    • PerfectDark@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      10 hours ago

      It has turned from a drip to a flood of these. I’ve seen so many niche-niche communities get inundated with these half-baked ‘ports’ or projects. It is the same thing each and every time. Someone puts in the tiniest amount of ‘work’ (they prompt Claude), show off the title screen or a minute of gameplay, release it and then immediately move on to the next one.

      I’d be stunned if a single person on the PSP side specifically has even finished a single of of these ports. I’m just sad. Maybe this is the future, but I loved the admittedly quiet spaces which just had die-hard fans, not this port-slop