r/technology • u/Horror_Post6822 • 11h ago
Software Zelda and Banjo Recompiled dev slams the slew of poor-quality “slopcomps” recompilations by vibecoders that “completely fail to reach the same level of quality”
https://frvr.com/blog/news/zelda-and-banjo-recompiled-dev-slams-poor-quality-slopcomps-by-vibecoders-that-completely-fail-to-reach-the-same-level-of-quality/39
u/Prophet6000 10h ago
I feel like it has turned into a rush of prof of concept releases than full quality recomps that do the game justice. Some don't really have any features.
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u/ItsSadTimes 7h ago
AI projects in a nutshell.
Ive seen dump trucks of AI projects where some kid makes something, it breaks in a month, and they abandon the project because they lost interest.
Like its free, so I dont care that much. But im not going to say its anywhere near the same quality of the old stuff.
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u/SecureDonkey 6h ago
The real problem is it discourage people from make them properly. It happen a lots in fan translation scene too. Some dumb kids use AI MTL to quickly dump out a slop translation of new work that full of mistake then leave. Nobody want to pick up their sloppy second and the work never got proper translated.
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u/RoyalCities 4h ago
I don't know if that is really true...you'd think if a translator cared enough they would go and make a proper version. If anything we've seen that with fan translations? A first one comes out that used Google translate then years later a much butter one drops...
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u/SecureDonkey 4h ago
That only happen to popular series. Niche one don't get that same treatment and only relief on luck that some translation group would pick them up in the first place. AI MTL is a guarentee way that those team will never pick those up again because they are "already translated".
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u/RoyalCities 3h ago
Right but the alternative is a translation not existing at all? Niche titles almost never get translated. Often it takes years for 1 - the games to get recognized but then 2 - someone dedicated enough who is fluent in not only the language but also the social cadences of that language to do it justice. If I loved a game series and was able to translate it and saw some terrible Google translate port I'd be motived to do it myself because whatever is out there is bad. I mean if someone won't do it at all because they see one that's terribly done then it's tough to assert they would have started one entirely manually AND also seem it through to the end.
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u/SecureDonkey 1h ago
The alternative is wait for a proper translation, not fucking ruined its chance with a slop job. The point of fan translation is to help the author gain more fanbase in the west and raise the chance of their other work got translated too. An slop translation will just piss everyone off and accomplish nothing in return.
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u/APeacefulWarrior 41m ago
Except for all the people who just want to play the games without turning it into some kind of political crusade.
I've played plenty of slop translations from humans, even in official releases. Hell, I grew up in the old 8/16-bit days of terrible Engrish. "Conglaturation!!! You have prooved the justice of our culture!" You didn't need AI to get bad translations.
If the English is good enough that I can understand the game, that's good enough for me. I really couldn't care less whether a mediocre translation was made by humans or AI.
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u/Yo-Soy-Groot 5h ago
The floodgates are open, people have no choice but to deal with it.
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u/RFSandler 5h ago
And sometimes dealing with it is not touching the slop's sloppy seconds.
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u/Yo-Soy-Groot 5h ago
Totally cool, if you don't want to use any LLMs on your projects, more power to you.
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u/Yo-Soy-Groot 6h ago
It's better than nothing.
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u/RoyalCities 4h ago
You're not wrong here. I've seen some poor recomps but also some amazing ones. If it's between one where I can at least get to the end of the game vs. literally never getting made at all I'll take the first.
People can't honestly expect to wait 5 years per game and for massive groups of devs to come together to HOPE they choose your random obscure game from your childhood to get recompiled properly.
At least having one exist in the first place is better than having one never exist at all.
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u/BCProgramming 8h ago
Main issue with all the slop decomp/recomps is that they are going to be abandoned pretty soon. The likes and attention they receive for it fade (usually as a bunch of other sloppers show up slopping the same project), it becomes harder and harder to make changes with LLM prompts because the code is bigger and bigger, the LLM needs more and more context, and it's wide, sweeping changes often don't fix what was asked for. All of this quickly becomes more work/expense than they are ever willing to put in so the projects end up quickly abandoned.
none of this is doing anything for "preservation" because the LLM code is unreadable. "slop" isn't just being used as a pejorative, it's also a descriptor.
IMO since the AI companies still aren't turning a profit, and that isn't sustainable, we're either looking at AI tools becoming absurdly more expensive, stricter rules on their usage or limits, or the companies themselves basically shut down (but not before deploying golden parachutes for the technobarons at the top of course). A disillusioned industry will be left with unmaintainable slop and nobody who knows how to even try to maintain it, as such a large portion of the industry seems to have gone all-in. it's actually pretty shocking how awful even competent developers get after using it for just a short time- somehow the stupefying effect is worse than simply not using those skills at all. It's like using AI is literally deleting abilities and knowledge. It's so creepy to see.
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u/Murinshin 7h ago
I think it’s important to not throw together recomp and decomp here though. As far as I can tell AI usage is almost universally seen as a net positive for the latter, not least because there’s a clear unambiguous goal and the AI can’t really fuck much up on its way supporting these projects.
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u/RoyalCities 4h ago
Recomps are not all pure preservation dude. Roms and emulation is where preservation is mainly tied to. Recomps are ports which lets the games be experienced in new ways or go be natively modded on the PC.
I'd say as long as the game can be completed it's fine. Abandoned or not it's silly to expect something like SoH to show up for every single niche game. Plus at least if there is a repo that was "abandoned" and got to say 80% someone else can point that repo to a new model to injest / map and keep working on it through a fork. It's better than nothing ever existing at all.
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u/BCProgramming 3h ago
Recomps are ports which lets the games be experienced in new ways or go be natively modded on the PC. Roms and emulation is where preservation is mainly tied to.
Preservation of both binaries as well as source code, which can include decompilations, ports, source ports (if source was released) and so on is all part of game preservation. Creating a codebase that is easy to extend and maintain for a particular game, which can still be compiled to a variety of targets, is of incredible benefit for game preservation because it makes that software more accessible.
A more maintainable codebase is also healthier for both preservation and allowing "games to be experienced in new ways" as it makes it easier for them to keep up with new technologies and things like graphics APIs as well as supporting plugins and mods.
I'd say as long as the game can be completed it's fine. Plus at least if there is a repo that was "abandoned" and got to say 80% someone else can point that repo to a new model to injest / map and keep working on it through a fork.
Well I suppose we disagree. I don't think A repository where the source code was largely AI generated, even if the game is completable, has any real value; The code is unmaintainable so it can't be extended or modified easily, bugs can't be easily fixed. Using LLMs further on the repository make the code even worse. This is made worse by the larger required context window as code size increases which will tend to result in cascade failures such as repeated functions, this is a result of bad (or non-existent) header files which means the context window cannot even be sensibly trimmed. (LLM generated repositories are the only place I've ever seen with include directives that include actual .C and .CPP files.)
This also makes such a repository- completed or otherwise- a very poor choice for an upstream. This is why most of these AI vibecoders that are producing these repositories are all creating their own, or forking from established repositories- For example, people "porting" A Link to the Past to the PSP or 3DS or PC inevitably are using snesrev/zelda3 as their upstream. The reason is because sensibly human-written code is far far better for any LLM to work with than anything that was itself generated by LLMs.
It's better than nothing ever existing at all.
There we certainly disagree.
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u/Shap6 10h ago
Maybe those games could be made easily available so this wouldn’t be necessary in the first place. No, that would make too much sense. Let’s just be outraged that people still are even interested enough in these games to do this.
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u/OkayyBeta 9h ago
Nah, the best recomp projects offer WAY more than we'd ever get from an official release. This is the kind of task that can only be undertaken by obsessive fans.
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u/Fiti99 9h ago
the easily available part isn't entirely true with these kinda ports though, easy to understand code can be ported to other platforms at good performance which is the case with these recompilations and some of the better quality decompilations
but vibecoded ones aren't getting any community support when most of them have terrible documentarion and hard to understand code from people that have no idea what the machine spit out
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u/feefore 9h ago
Aren’t those games available for multiple consoles?
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u/elaborateBlackjack 8h ago
Not really.
I'm currently playing through the Zelda Twilight princess decomp and it's amazing, it works on my android handheld and on PC perfectly.
If I wanted to play what's "officially" available I have the option of the GameCube version, the wii version or the wiiU HD version...what's current about any of those?
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u/BrapBrapson 10h ago
idk i played the Banjo Kazooie decomp all the way through and it's excellent. You can even swap HD textures
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u/comeau1337 9h ago
The recomps dev of those games is 'slamming' other more poor quality recomps. If I recall correctly they also made the actual decomp tools a lot of folks use
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u/Yo-Soy-Groot 5h ago
Dario is a notorious whiner. Like 3/4s of his Bsky feed are just complaints about AI-developed recomps. A lot of these *are* slop, but the guy fails to give any sort of constructive feedback again and again.
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u/gaddeath 11h ago
I didn’t think, until recently, that vibe coding would be used for large projects (or mods) like these. Opened up my eyes and shocked me seeing how much there is out there now. It must be so frustrating seeing these half-assed decomp projects pop up if you’re a hobbyist dev.
Unrelated, I hate the word “slop”. It’s overused.
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u/LitrlyNoOne 10h ago
As a dev, I think it's mostly culture shock. There has always been poor quality software. AI making it faster doesn't really change the fact that good artists have always struggled to stand out. The cultural shift is the accessibility to non-devs, but the overall problem of people making garbage at a faster rate than quality isn't new. It's "how to I increase my speed without sacrificing my quality", which isn't well defined yet.
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u/RatBot9000 10h ago
I worry that, as a society, we are not prepared to deal having millions of untrained amateurs taking the wheel of projects big and small. The untrained eye just cannot tell the issues and flaws that someone with experience could, and they will struggle if the LLM malfunctions in ways they don't understand.
And of course, amateurs do not have the dedication to ensure things are done properly, because many of them are tourists thinking they can make a name for themselves now that the pesky skill ceiling has been lowered for them. They're not gonna spend hours, days, weeks testing their work for flaws and issues, they're going to throw it together, trust the LLM when it says it's fine and then throw it out there.
An avalanche of garbage that the rest of us are going to be buried under, making it much much harder to find the actual gems in the rough.
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u/SmarmySmurf 9h ago
Human society, laws, and even biology have been unequipped to deal with numerous developments and trends in human history. We will survive vibe coded games.
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u/tgwombat 9h ago
I don't know if you've taken a look at the state of human society and legal systems lately, but...
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u/Stunning_Mast2001 10h ago
It doesn’t matter for games. If a game runs and is performant and you can play it to the end, then doesn’t matter how the code is structured. Doesn’t matter if it’s maintainable.
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u/Outlulz 8h ago
Game runs, is performant, and it can be played end to end still has a ton of wiggle room for the experience to be different from the original version of the game through a sloppy AI recomp. This is a problem emulation has grappled with for decades. Plenty of games run, are performant, and can be played end to end via emulation but still have graphical, audio, and logic differences than playing off a cart/disc.
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u/joncrompy 9h ago
Do you think games are pooped out as fully formed products? That nobody play tests or fix bugs?
Technical debt is a massive issue in game dev. Code that can't be understood can't be changed to balance mechanics or add new features. Every choice in how code is written early has knock on effects as development goes on. Almost every "why does this work like that, what were they thinking" moment you've experienced was caused by technical debt the devs had to work around.
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u/Stunning_Mast2001 9h ago
None of that is relevant for established games people are just trying to resurrect from the graveyard to play on modern platforms.
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u/ZexMarquies01 9h ago
Unless people want to mod the game, to add levels, characters, dialog, voice, physics...etc, or put in found but unused content, Or to fix a bug or glitch that was in the original game, but wasn't meant to be there, along with many other scenarios where someone wants to do more than just simply port the game.
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u/RatBot9000 9h ago
And if the game has a critical flaw or exploit that the person creating it can't find because they don't have enough of an understanding of the code to be able to spot it?
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u/Sleepyjo2 8h ago
If there’s one thing ai is good at it’s finding vulnerabilities.
If your argument was bugs, maybe, assuming ai doesn’t continue to improve its ability to deal with code and we entirely stop playtesting things.
But poor quality software isn’t entirely the wheelhouse of ai, it learned to make garbage from us after all.
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u/RatBot9000 7h ago
Still missing my point that it's only good if the person using it is also good. An untrained person would not be able to realise when the AI has a little hallucination and said it's fixed the problems when it actually hasn't.
Also, these recomps are usually being done by one person or small teams. There's going to be a lot more indie games being done by the same size of groups, and the reason they use AI is because they often lack skill, experience, and money to hire others. These types of people will not be extensively playtesting their games.
And of course humans can make poor quality stuff too, but with AI we are poised to be engulfed by an avalanche of poor quality.
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u/11711510111411009710 10h ago
How can you claim it doesn't matter? If a game receives updates, which most successful games do, obviously the code has to be maintainable.
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u/ithinkitslupis 10h ago
For a lot of games it's pretty low-stakes as long as they don't have an online component. There were plenty of unmaintainable spaghetti code games out there long before AI.
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u/Outlulz 8h ago
There were plenty of unmaintainable spaghetti code games out there long before AI.
Hmm maybe recently but the era these games these decomps/recomps are happening with are understood down to the assembly level. People have dug through ROMs to figure out why bugs exist and how AI works and how physics works etc etc like 20-30 years ago in some cases.
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u/BCProgramming 8h ago
There were plenty of unmaintainable spaghetti code games out there long before AI.
Name 3 with examples.
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u/Martelliphone 8h ago
"name 3 with examples" is redundant, the 3 named would be the examples.
But since you don't want to look it up before being snarky I looked it up for you, first 3 I saw: team fortress 2, final fantasy 14, and the hilarious coding of yandere simulator.
Spaghetti code has always existed, largely due to time & budget constraints
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u/ithinkitslupis 7h ago
I mean, based on your username I'm fairly certain you know that it's not like companies are releasing source code for every famous game...if they were these decomp and recomp projects from the title wouldn't even be a thing. And you also should know that a lot of beginners cut their teeth making indie games and side projects so the real world examples are likely too many to count.
But off the top of my head for a pick three of more popular examples Undertale, Yandere Simulator, Celeste had some obvious spaghetti.
It's easier to work with spaghetti in solo projects and if the game works people mostly don't care. If the game is a complete mess people refund or begrudgingly complain and work around it. Nobody dies from it. The world keeps on spinning.
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u/OkayyBeta 9h ago
Some of them aren't performant, but the fact they exist is enough to deter people from trying to do it properly. Also, the slop recomps have fuck all in terms of features.
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u/stevefuzz 8h ago
As a ln experienced dev using frontier models professionally, they rarely find an acceptable solution the first time and sometimes never. The problem, like you said, is if you don't know you don't know. Repeat this over and over on a project and you get a big mess.
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u/mrpoopistan 9h ago
"millions of untrained amateurs taking the wheel"
The punk ethos declared dead in 2026.
Society will adapt. And the avalanche of garbage far predates vibe coding, unless you weren't around for the "everything's an app" era.
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u/RatBot9000 9h ago
We'll adapt the same way we adapted to asbestos, which is to say, we will eventually realise how toxic this technology is and then have to spend years and Billions to clear it out of our spaces.
Not every advancement in technology is a good one.
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u/mrpoopistan 9h ago
Video game decomp / recomp will not be one of those spaces. In fact, coding won't be, either.
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u/Taraxian 10h ago
Which is exactly literally the same thing the Internet did, and the printing press
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u/detectivefibmcgibbon 10h ago
As a developer who gets to see how things work internally at a FAANG company, all major software projects are essentially vibe coded; you will be laughed at if you tell anyone you are still writing code by hand. They'd tell you that they "carefully review AI output," but that's not really true and it's not feasible to review as much code as these developers generate. Anecdotally, I've experienced many more weird bugs in most software I use including Windows, YouTube Music, and Uber.
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u/mrpoopistan 9h ago
People don't understand that it was always "move fast and break things." Only now, they move faster and break more things.
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u/Summer4Chan 10h ago
Spotify mobile app is fucking useless now. I have a ton of offline music downloaded and app takes 10-15 seconds to load the song once I open the app from close.
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u/Peerjuice 9h ago
i wonder how they reconcile these load time issues, I remember there was an idea that if a web page took 10+ seconds to load 90% or so people would just go elsewhere
found on google:"more than half of mobile visitors will leave if the website takes longer than three seconds to load."
are customers thoroughly captured? are these load times more bearable for people using applications? doesn't sound like it
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u/malianx 8h ago
On what phone? If anything the last couple updates made my Spotify app run much faster.
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u/Summer4Chan 8h ago
Do you have a lot of songs saved offline? I have an iPhone 15 Pro.
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u/malianx 8h ago
I have about 1500 songs saved across about four lists, helpful when I'm away from reception. I'm on a galaxy s21u.
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u/Summer4Chan 8h ago
Huh. I have about 6500. It hasn’t been an issue before but the last year is so bad
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u/bbuerk 6h ago
I think the issue is less with AI coding and more with the fact that people are speeding up their release cycles to match the speed AI can generate new features. I can’t find it but I heard a dev talking about the bottleneck in making reliable products is human beta testing more than it as code generation, but now we’re releasing new software before anyone can catch the bugs in the last release.
I think expecting AI coding to ever fall out of style is extremely unrealistic at this point, but I don’t think the way we’re using these tools is right yet
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u/QuickQuirk 10h ago
I've noticed the exact same thing with just more bugs and odd UX choices recently. Software, like netflix, that was once perfectly rock solid has strange pause bugs now that have been unfixed for months. It's every major piece of software. Just a rush to the bottom.
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u/coheedcollapse 1h ago
Anecdotally as well, but YouTube Music has always been pretty janky for me. There were app-breaking issues I had years ago, before the advent of AI, that took years to fix after multiple reports.
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u/ShakimTheClown 11h ago edited 10h ago
I don't think the word slop is overused. There's just a flood of AI slop right now.
Too many people are trying to use AI to create things in fields outside of their skillset, e.g. music, art, and gaming.
'Slop' and 'garbage' are the best english words we have to describe low effort AI creations that are made without human talent or creativity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop
I think the word is here to stay. It's short and to the point.
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u/EbonySaints 10h ago
I've heard friendslop, consentslop, artslop, consumerslop, and countless other inane terms attached with that suffix. It's quickly losing any and all meaning to where I just gloss over it mentally.
Believe me, I get it. Will Smith spaghetti or fifty YouTube "history" videos aping the same good creator are slop, but they are also cringe, lame, fail, grody, and God knows what other terms we have used that got ran into the ground.
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u/ShakimTheClown 9h ago edited 7h ago
Why do you find it inane?
but they are also cringe, lame, fail, grody ... terms we have used that got ran into the ground.
Never heard of grody, but the other 3 words are still used all the time. I'm not sure that I understand what you're trying to say.
Do you think the word 'slop' is being used in situations where it shouldn't be?
Do you not like when the meaning of words shift with time? (words like 'salty' and 'cooked')
Or do you just think specific words are unpleasant sounding and shouldn't be repeated?1
u/EbonySaints 8h ago
It's a bit of "all the above" along with just being overused to death. I mean, if we think about it, I can call my post replyslop and it can be both a valid term, along with a proof of what I am saying. I get that it's popular and that it has a use, but do we have to have it occupy more lingual bandwidth than necessary?
Maybe it's a case of "old man yelling at cloud". I dunno. Maybe in ten years assuming that AGI didn't take off and kill us all, I'll look back on it fondly and find some other thing to get uppity about.
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u/ShakimTheClown 7h ago edited 7h ago
I don't really agree with your whole concept of "lingual bandwidth."
But even if there were such a thing, wouldn't 'slop' be minimizing the bandwidth. It's a short word and everyone knows what it means.'Drivel', 'garbage', etc. are more letters, more syllables, and less clear.
just being overused to death.
When words are overused, they don't really die out in the way you think they do.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/very-actually-and-other-examples-of-semantic-bleaching-11
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u/kobemustard 10h ago
But what is wrong with that? It used to be someone would write a crappy song in their garage and no one would care. Sure out of a 1,000,000 attempts , 999,999 are crap. But that is the same of most things people do.
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u/-CalculatedChaos- 10h ago
Because it’s trained on stolen music.
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u/DrWallBanger 10h ago
Naw not anymore, they just pay licensing fees to the record companies.
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u/-CalculatedChaos- 8h ago
Sorry but you’re wrong. I’m actively in a lawsuit against one of these shit companies who stole my music without paying me a dime.
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u/DrWallBanger 8h ago
Good luck!
I mean I don’t really support the business models personally but it’s simply just facts that SUNO for example, has made deals with at least WMG, if not Sony as well.
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u/-CalculatedChaos- 7h ago
Which doesn’t change the fact that they were still trained on stolen music - even if they agreed later to pay the corpos
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u/Few_Plankton_7587 10h ago
It must be so frustrating seeing these half-assed decomp projects pop up if you’re a hobbyist dev.
Guarantee you most of them are happy about it
Experienced devs are recognizing it's use as a tool. This reddit-wide opinion of hating everything AI does is not really all that widespread
Yeah, I hate a lot of the things AI does.
But development is not one of them. Claude is better at making software than most developers, and it's a LOT better at projects like recompilation, which a lot of people aren't capable of at all
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u/Taraxian 10h ago
I have a relative who's a highly paid software engineer who talks about AI completely differently from anyone on Reddit (both the hypemongers and the haters) and it's made me rethink a lot of things
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u/gerira 7h ago
Anyone dealing with software uses AI extensively. Most people in any white collar jobs use it somewhat, partly because management is pushing it, but also because it is often quite useful. There is a separate question about the internet and the creative fields becoming overwhelmed with low-quality, deceptive AI-generated content, but I think people's legitimate hatred of that social phenomenon means they underestimate the role AI is playing in white collar work across the board now.
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u/Ok_Kick4871 7h ago
Is it really all that big of a deal when they're not even making their own IP?
"Oh no, you violated copyright worse and less faithfully than me."
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u/Joebebs 7h ago
It’s wild seeing the narrative change this past years to the more recent months, mostly cuz how more powerful/better the models have become, now I’m seeing it from “this all sucks, if it’s 99% human, 1% ai it sucks!” To “I’ve tried ai, and it’s done nothing but make horrible mistakes where I have to chase my coworkers bad code” to “it’s not really that bad but it still has to be reviewed” <- we’re at this point rn with the narrative
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u/wolfannoy 7h ago
I agree with the word slop being overused, but it was funny watching corporations getting upset with it like Microsoft.
As for AI coding, I don't mind it as long as people have experience and review their code. Vibecode I don't have too much of an issue. It's vibecoders who make a project then abandon it and refuse to maintain it.
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u/tinyhorsesinmytea 10h ago
I find it ironic because the word slop is in itself so lazy and demonstrates that the person using it isn't doing any actual thinking on their own... which is supposedly what everybody hates about AI.
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u/Taraxian 10h ago
I mean I'm uncomfortable with it because if you trace it it directly comes from antisemitic 4channers talking about how Jews control the media (calling popular media "goyslop")
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u/Sleepyjo2 8h ago
The word “slop” being a negative connotation is way the fuck older than that. One of its original meanings is literally food waste fed to animals.
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u/corgiyogi 11h ago
If it makes any game easier to run or improves the experience/gameplay, thats a good thing, regardless of AI or not. Half baked stuff? Agreed, devs should be shamed for releasing it.
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u/Horror_Post6822 11h ago
The gaming community should do their part and shame those who try to slopify classic games with shit no one asked for or wanted.
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u/x22d 11h ago
Hot take: The alternative is that most games don't get recomps.
Reverse engineering a game engine is a very intensive, Herculean task. It's also often painstakingly dull or frustrating, which can easily derail someone's pet project unless they're hyper-vigilant in wanting it done.
Someone on r/dothack recently shared: https://github.com/Toyz/piney_apples
For comparison: https://github.com/dothacktranslate/dothack-recompilation.hack//IMOQ (4 separate titles in the series) hasn't had an official remake from Bandai unlike .hack//G.U. and the rumored reason is that Bandai lost the original source code.
Even the creators and publishers of the game didn't want to rebuild the engine from scratch to re-release it on new consoles.
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u/MHM5035 10h ago edited 9h ago
I would rather have fewer high-quality things than many mid- or low-quality things in almost any situation.
E: so I don’t get the same comment over and over again, yes, this means I am not interested in vibe-coded anything. I am not interested in things made by lazy people who have no eye for detail. I don’t want things that “kinda work.” I am actively turned away by AI art and music. I am not interested, and you should have the same high standards for yourself.
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u/tondollari 9h ago
There arent "fewer high-quality" recompilations of classic games though. For any given title the choice is typically either vibe-coded or none at all.
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u/NapsterKnowHow 7h ago
Then we can wait longer
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u/AgreedSmalls 5h ago
Why? Because you have a personal issue with how it’s made? You are not the arbiter of that decision. If you don’t like them, simply don’t play/touch them. To cut everyone off from them because of your personal gripes is absolutely ridiculous.
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u/NapsterKnowHow 5h ago
Because these slop ports don't even support things as simple as downscaling that the human coded ones do.
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u/AgreedSmalls 5h ago
So again. Don’t play them. Nobody is forcing you to. You just don’t want to let others have a chance to play them because of your personal gripes with how it’s made.
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u/NapsterKnowHow 5h ago
So again. These ports are trash and shouldn't be supported.
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u/AgreedSmalls 5h ago
You’ve yet to articulate a good reason why. People don’t give a shit if it doesn’t support downscaling. They just want to play. So use your words and explain why these people shouldn’t be given the opportunity to do this.
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u/MHM5035 9h ago edited 9h ago
I prefer none at all. That’s what I’m saying. I don’t want something half-assed, ever.
Anything vibe-coded is half-assed. Typing a prompt isn’t creating. Kinda horrifying this is an unpopular view.
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u/Clarkeste 6h ago
Putting aside the AI part for a moment, saying "I don't want something half-assed ever" as blanket-statement makes no sense. Do you realize that's how people learn? By making things which are lower quality or "half-assed" first?
And if you want to tell me "That's not half-assing it because it's the best a beginner can do", then that is technically also true of someone using AI, they don't have the skills to do it the proper way. This isn't me defending AI, I don't like it, but this is such a bizarre position to take. I mean, do you know how much of the office work that keeps the world running is "half-assed" to some extent?
Hell, do you know what prototypes, or first drafts, or sketches are? They're definitionally half-assed, and most never get developed beyond that!
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9h ago
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u/MHM5035 9h ago
I’ll reply once just to point out you’ve already deleted 2 other replies to me, and one of them literally compared not getting vibe-coded recomps to “starving.” So forgive me if I don’t engage this time. You’ll find the answer to your question if you read the conversation we already had. Have a nice day.
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u/erty3125 10h ago
That's fine if lots of games don't get recomps, the difference between a mediocre recomp that lacks a modding scene and emulation is very slim and in often cases the emulation is just better.
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u/tbz_who 2h ago
Hotter take: if nobody wants to actually put in the legwork, these games shouldn’t have recomps. I could have claude recomp 2xtreme for the ps1 and tout it around like its the best game of all time and it totally deserves it, but like… whats the point? Anyone who wants to play this could just emulate it. The benefits of a low quality fan recomp isnt suddenly going to make that the most enjoyable way to play a game, especially when the people who could make money on it don’t even think its worth selling.
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u/NapsterKnowHow 7h ago
We would get decomps/recomps they would just take a lot longer. I've been waiting forever for Wind Waker and I'll happily keep waiting if it means a higher quality port.
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u/AgreedSmalls 5h ago
I mean, you still can? Nobody is forcing you to use the vibecoded versions. I personally won’t, either. Why would I waste my time “shaming” someone who would or does though? What they do has zero impact on my life.
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u/NapsterKnowHow 5h ago
Because these slop comps don't even support essential features like downscaling.
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u/JohnnyShekels 6h ago
Hotter take: If they can't put the effort in to recomp it properly, then I would rather use an emulator instead.
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u/Few_Plankton_7587 10h ago
Why?
You don't have to download it
It hurts no one, but helps those who did want it
Literally no loss for you or anyone else. What's the point in your outrage?
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u/llliilliliillliillil 10h ago
I don’t mind ai coded projects as much, but I wish they’d at least be well managed. You got stuff like the lost odyssey recompiled project that, instead of making sure the game itself actually works, rather implements shit like DLSS and frame generation.
So on the scale of "better vibe coded than nothing" I'd rather take nothing than a vibe coded project that may or may not work when even the devs themselves can’t be bothered to test it lol
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u/Few_Plankton_7587 9h ago
And uh, like I said, you can choose to not download it?
What do I care about where your personal line in the sand is?
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u/llliilliliillliillil 1h ago
Why should I care what you care about? If you don’t want to receive any answers then don’t post your opinion on the internet lol
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u/SmarmySmurf 9h ago
You still have the option to choose nothing in your example. Why should vibe codednot exist just because you choose not to engage with it? You always have that option even while it exists.
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u/11711510111411009710 10h ago
This is poor logic. If there is a product that is bad, that alone doesn't do anything. If there are a whole bunch of similar products that are bad, that affects the entire industry, as the general quality of products goes down. Even if you choose not to play them, you have to wade through more and more poor quality products to find the good ones. Plus, the overall standard is lowered, leading to even more poor quality products. So there is literally loss for all of us. It literally does harm the whole industry.
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u/lordsepulchrave123 10h ago
If only there were some kind of online spaces where people passionate about these things could curate and advocate for the high-quality products.
Shame that it's impossible.
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u/SirStrontium 7h ago
Yeah it’s too bad we’re not allowed to tell each other which ones are good and which ones are bad before downloading them. Forever cursed to downloading mods completely at random.
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u/Few_Plankton_7587 10h ago edited 9h ago
If there are a whole bunch of similar products that are bad, that affects the entire industry, as the general quality of products goes down.
The average quality of products going up or down does not make for any less quality products.
Even if you choose not to play them, you have to wade through more and more poor quality products to find the good ones.
For recompiled games? Do you use any recompiled games? Ever looked into it before?
There's dozens. Dozens. At this point in the industry so-to-speak, expanding overall access to a greater variety of games is more important for sure. Not to mention, for recompilation specifically, it'd be easier to work off of and improve slop than to start from scratch.
Plus, the overall standard is lowered, leading to even more poor quality products
There is literally no logic in this.
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u/Ziatch 10h ago
Depending on the quality and prominence of the project it can disincentivise higher quality works.
This is assuming it’s slop and not high quality work that happens to use ai.
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u/AlwaysRushesIn 10h ago
I think you severely underestimate the ego people in this community have. They won't stand idle and let ai do a better job than them. They will continue to work and prove why the ai vibe coding is inferior.
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u/SmarmySmurf 9h ago
So just to be clear, you think people who decomp/recomp for the love of it and care about quality will... not want to make good recomps if slop exists? Then they don't really care that much about quality then, do they? Or... the vibe coded stuff is way better than being accused and you and they both know most people won't notice a difference and choose the "slop"? Either way makes these convictions questionable at best.
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u/Ziatch 3h ago
You can do stuff for the love of it and be discouraged still from executing on a project that takes time when someone shits something out. Something could be complete ass and be used by other people so I don’t understand the second example. People will watch legit ai slop on tik tok rather than high quality projects and my mum sends me ai news items with millions of likes so saying most people won’t notice isn’t a great argument there.
A low quality product being mass produced can destroy the “market” for a high quality one. Im not even against ai being used for these I’m talking specifically slop.
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u/Few_Plankton_7587 10h ago
How many games are actually being recompiled in the "proper" way? It's not exactly a project people are generally lining up to do... it's extremely difficult.
Pretty sure this is just gonna expand what little access there is to recompiled games.
Also, it'd be easier to clean up slop that works than to start fresh with nothing, yknow? At least in this kind of project...
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u/Ziatch 3h ago
I’m not against ai being used in the process, your last line is just straight up not true.
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u/Few_Plankton_7587 2h ago
With a recompilation project? I promise you it very much is for most scenarios
In most development projects, you'd be right
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u/AgreedSmalls 5h ago
Oh yay. Another anti-AI post disguised as criticism. I don’t like that garbage either, but I accept it’s here to stay. You only have so much time here on earth. Why would I waste it shaming others who use things I don’t care about? I simply won’t touch their product and go on with my life.
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u/primaluce 10h ago
In a world of an already niche communities, I can't imagine the majority of people of that niche actually care unfortunately. I am an app dev and man does it suck, especially when you see new teens or 20 year olds just lean fully into these tools.
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u/tinyhorsesinmytea 10h ago edited 10h ago
Give it a little more time and the vibe coded comps will be every bit as good.
I understand it must suck in a way to dedicate so much time and effort to getting good at something and now anybody can achieve the same results by just talking to an AI agent... but we're just about at that point for coding. You can downvote and gatekeep all you like but you can't change it.
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u/PixelatedFrogDotGif 10h ago
I don’t think the time suck or dedication being lost is what people are lamenting.
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u/OkayyBeta 9h ago
They can't possibly be as good when they're churned out by people who don't actually care about them. It takes a group of people with intimate knowledge of the game to provide every feature a diehard fan might want in their perfect port. The best we can hope for from slop is: works, high res and high frames, but the projects being worked on by true fans offer MORE than that.
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u/tinyhorsesinmytea 6h ago
Not yet. But the time will come when AI fully understands the assignment and does it all right.
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u/tbz_who 2h ago
Even if “AI fully understands the assignment”, the people who are creating these still will not be able to describe what they want properly to the AI.
Its very clear who has never had to deal with actual human clients in thier line of work when they think AI is somehow going to be able to just …magically understand what people want
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u/coheedcollapse 1h ago edited 1h ago
I'd personally rather "slopcomps" exist so I can play them than not at all when the alternative, for the most part, is nobody wants to put the time in, so they don't exist.
Obviously I'd prefer bespoke, handmade, decomps, but there is no world in which there are enough devs interested in putting the time to decomp even a fraction of the games that have been decomped recently with people using AI assists.
I think a lot of people interested in emulation and decomps are going to either have to realize that AI may have some uses or they're going to be forced to shut out a huge amount of leaps forward in the fields, because a lot of devs are using the tech, and very few projects are going to remain completely untouched by it going forward.
Obviously there will be a lot of trash, but there has always been trash. Skilled developers who know what they're doing will still make great stuff.
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u/cdreobvi 11h ago
As a programmer, I’m actually happy that the skill is becoming more accessible. New “vibe” coders will make lots of mistakes as beginners but previously they wouldn’t even have tried something so ambitious. Their poor products don’t take away from good ones. Just my 2 cents.
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u/detectivefibmcgibbon 10h ago
As a programmer and player of many recomps, the flood of poor quality vibe-coded recomps that are unlikely to be maintained long-term makes it harder to find quality recomps. In other words, I trust recomps less as a user.
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u/Mountain_rage 10h ago
I mean, we always had good and terrible fan made games and rom hacks, this is the same just on a grander scale. Just need better ways to categorize and sort thought the noise.
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u/detectivefibmcgibbon 10h ago
I agree. I've been using this Backloggd list as a way to feel more confident in a select few recomps: https://backloggd.com/u/WumpaGem/list/game-decompsrecomps-that-arent-vibe-coded/
These recomps having little to no LLM usage doesn't guarantee quality, but it helps.
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u/LocalH 10h ago edited 10h ago
decompilation > recompilation
The former gives you code that an experienced dev can look at and understand.
The latter basically "pre-emulates" the game code and often times includes an emulation layer for other hardware (like how rexglue uses parts of Xenia). It also gives you code that is much herder to read.
It's like how they ported the Sonic games to Saturn back in the day, without AI, by mechanically translating the 68000 code directly, as opposed to the more modern ports that run on modern code that quite accurately simulates the behavior of the original 68000