Retro Gaming Has a Port-Slop Problem
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.
https://gardinerbryant.com/retro-gaming-has-a-port-slop-problem/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
32 replies
There's more questions to ask beyond "who is playing the recomps/decomps"
Regardless of AI, these questions pop up:
Even before the AI boom, I asked these questions. Some games are indeed an enigma (Sonic Unleashed is a perfect example), but a lot of others are just... there I guess.
Don't get me wrong, it's nice to get a better version on PC with keyboard and mouse support and better graphics and undefined aspect ratios, that's all fine. But you have to understand one thing and one really big thing - not all games need or even deserve this treatment. A lot of people are just fine with what an emulator offers already.
If you think that "oh all of those features are impossible or really hard to do without a recomp" - think again. I can tell you from first hand experience as a reverse engineer and developer that you can do a lot of those things without doing a decomp (and especially a recomp). All on the original hardware's limitations sometimes, too. It's provably quicker and easier to do (some of) those hacks on top of existing games rather than recompile it.
As for the "broken games in emulators but are fine in recomps" - those fixes and hacks should've been presented to the emulator project first because it can not only fix this one game, but sometimes fix others too.
Ports onto platforms like PSP or iOS sure are nice to have, but be honest - it's not the best way to play these games. It's not even a good way to play it portably a lot of the times either. A lot of the times, those same people have other means to play them too. I don't think most gamers even care about an hour or two of extra battery life playing the game because it's more power efficient than running the emulator.
The more and more you think about this, the more irrational it becomes to spend time and energy on doing these things.
And to a certain degree - it always was. It was always a "just because you can" type of deal. Some were doing it for clout (even before AI, yes, there are talented people who also are obnoxious doing it), some for the love of the game, etc.
Now - you just have a lot of people doing it for clout and opening up dono pages in ko-fi and patreon. To them, this isn't a hobby. It's a business venture. It's a job. And that is where the spirit of doing this kind of thing is undeniably and truly lost.
Just like the good old days where you had to wade through tens of thousands of shovelware to find a high quality game
I wish I could again, because there are a lot of PC scrolling SHMUP demos I played on the old Windows XP that I cannot find back anymore.
SHMUP databases tend to only have the popular arcade/console ones. Not the ones you'd find on PC Mag demo discs between 2000 and 2010.
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.
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
It's more accurate to say that the American video game market collapsed. Video games were still going strong in Japan, as they were (on computers) in Europe.
We absolutely are drowning in that level of garbage, if not moreso. There are some differences though:
I mean, your own mentioning of looking for "mostly positive" reviews suggests that you intuitively know how much crap is out there. Start sifting through games without looking at review scores, and you'll see how much crap is out there.
Also, there were all kinds of ET-level crappy games on the NES with Nintendo's supposed "Seal of Approval".
Also just to add to the point that it was more of an American console market problem. I've met a couple grey and white beards who were part of the PC gaming side of things during the crash and according to them they were small but thriving since they were able to filter trash and share things around as needed thanks to the community aspect of things. Who knows maybe in an alternate world where the NES flopped it was the Commodore 64 that reigned as king for early home gaming, hell maybe we could've gotten a proper port of Metal Gear years earlier.
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
Absolutely. I am also thankful for it. I've been shitting on these projects, and at least people here seem to be more against them, but holy shit, on Reddit, the mainstream subs at least (PCMR cough), they absolutely love these slop projects. Any slop project really, but especially the recomps and PS5 emus / translators.
Some projects try to hide their vibecoding, then you dig through their commit history and see first commits with like 20k to 50k lines, and the project being quite new as well. People really love this KytyPS5 emu / translation layer (not retro, I know, just mentioning it). Guess what, it has the highest line count of any first commit I have ever seen, 200k lines. Project has only been a thing since Jul 16 of this year. You can't make this shit up. https://github.com/KytyPS5/KytyPS5/commit/147188b143f67c27d8da396e759c19336f64c105
To me, is the clearest indicator of vibecoding, if they are trying to hide it at least. If you are undertaking a serious project and not immediately creating at least a local git repo from the very first couple lines, this shit is straight outta Claude. Keep in mind Github is just a place to host git repos. Any history before adding a remote obviously stays and will be visible. These guys are legit creating their repos only when have tens of thousands of lines already. How about managing history from the start? Vibecoded.
What are some other good ones?
I know of these:
The Jak and Daxter trilogy (OpenGoal).
https://opengoal.dev/docs/contributing/ai_policy
Based
I appreciate that they're not expressly against AI usage as a rule (at least based on that snippet you shared)
Lego Island
Lego Island is on Vita??
It's available on several platforms through isle-portable
https://github.com/isledecomp/isle-portable
It's even available in web browsers.
https://isle.pizza/
re3 and reVC were quite good for GTA 3 and Vice City.
The Blue Dragon one is also good
Yeah, and when it comes to brand new accounts churning these out quickly you don't know if they are safe, and don't have something malicious sunk into compared to projects with more people involved.
Decompilations are still exciting, but I'm not rushing out to try out every new PC port of a console game either that came out from someone with no history to have gained some trust.
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.
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.
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.
Wait till they learn that code is also an art form.
It's similarly bad in the 3DShacks sub
Seems to be way worse there. Every post is "AI-assisted".
I'm so over this.
My interest and excitement for recomps etc has almost disappeared now :(
Same here but for open source projects in general :(. Its just always slop now
I hope there will be a few good ones still :)
Truly amazing how something that was amazing news is now just a bowl of sour grapes any time I see it.
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.
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
Calling any member "fucking stupid" is ridiculous, we're here to foster a community. if you disagree with someone's opinion, there are far more mature ways to express your discontent than this.
Moreover calling a moderator "fucking stupid" then fabricating a quote is just a sure-fire way to end up with a ban. Which is what you have here.
I'd recommend reflecting on the way you approach a conversation on Lemmy. I see you're a new user, so keep this in mind on other communities here.
Ban issued.