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.

  • Drag00n@lemmy.zipEnglish
    2·
    56 minutes ago

    “most of the ports that just released aren’t as good as the retail native versions so they shouldn’t exist and this is bad”

    Are you fucking stupid?

  • Zarobi@aussie.zoneEnglish
    21·
    3 hours ago

    Just like the good old days where you had to wade through tens of thousands of shovelware to find a high quality game

    • otp@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      31·
      1 hour ago

      I agree with the sentiment that there used to be a ton of crappy old games, but I think each year, there are more releases in Steam and other virtual stores (e.g., the Nintendo eShop) than there were in e.g., the Atari 2600’s entire life.

      The junk to gem ratio is much worse now.

      • Zarobi@aussie.zoneEnglish
        0·
        30 minutes ago

        There was so many shit games back then, video games almost ended as a concept. Nintendo pretty much rescued the industry with their “Nintendo seal of approval” system, which built back trust that you were buying something playable.

        I don’t think we’re anywhere near that level of drowning in garbage lol in fact I have so many amazing indie games to play on Steam that it’s impossible to actually play them all. We’re drowning in quality and FOMO, if anything. Sure there’s asset flips and trash games but if you read the reviews and it’s “mostly positive” then it’s probably a good game

  • _Lory98_@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    91·
    6 hours ago

    I had noticed it a lot on the PSVita subreddit, and it bothered me. Sure the first time you see it, it might be interesting from a technical perspective, but aside from that what’s the point? You learn nothing as a developer and you leave nothing meaningful to the community.

    • PerfectDark@lemmy.worldOPMEnglish
      7·
      4 hours ago

      It just depresses me. I really enjoyed visiting the PSP sub-reddit, if only to see hardware collections, see the odd interesting story. Now it is filled with slop. The last week or two I just stopped even looking

      Being so tightly woven in with the retro handheld scene, I know for a fact that 99% of the devs (apps, emulators, front-ends and the like) all make use of it in some way or another. The difference is that they’re using it as a tool. These port-slop games are just so pointless

      It all makes me sad

  • TORFdot0@lemmy.worldEnglish
    532·
    10 hours ago

    Thank you for calling out the port slop. Decompilations and reverse engineering projects used to be worthwhile and exciting and now it’s become an ocean of half baked Claude code projects with no contributors and no base to stand on.

    I’m glad we got big ones like SM64 and OOT before the vibe coding craze, now I see a recompilation or port and it doesn’t even register now

  • Magiilaro@feddit.orgEnglish
    231·
    9 hours ago

    What I hate with all this is that people see such slop and think that a perfect replica was created, with zero effort, by a single person in his bedroom. Had so many discussion with people about it, they don’t want to hear that such vibe coded things often only look good at a first glance but always have major flaws, issues and bugs.

    • caseofthematts@lemmy.worldEnglish
      18·
      8 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.