Retro Gaming Has a Port-Slop Problem

Submitted ⁨⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨PerfectDark@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩

https://gardinerbryant.com/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 see it all the time here on the PSP sub.

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.

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TORFdot0@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨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

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- joeschmoe@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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. 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. You can’t make this shit up. github.com/…/147188b143f67c27d8da396e759c19336f64…
  
  To me, this is the clearest indicator of vibecoding. 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. That is not how you start a serious project.
  
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- CosmicDebris@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  What are some other good ones?
  
  I know of these:
  
  Majora’s Mask
  
  Banjo Kazooie
  
  A Link to the past (Technically, ports to C and Zig)
  
  Twilight Princess (arguably, since that one is flooded with vibe-coded mods)
  
  Star Fox 64
  
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  - 0k_@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    The Jak and Daxter trilogy (OpenGoal).
    
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  - exu@feditown.com ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Lego Island
    
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  - CorrodedCranium@leminal.space ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    re3 and reVC were quite good for GTA 3 and Vice City.
    
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  - Tau@sopuli.xyz ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    The Blue Dragon one is also good
    
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  - elonspacex49.bsky.social@coves.social ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Hello, it’s E. Musk. I know you may be surprised to hear from me! I created this account to connect with some of my loyal fans, and I’d love to thank you for supporting my work. ❤️ Feel free to add me on Telegram for a private business conversation. I’m looking forward to connecting! Here’s my Telegram link https://t.me/spaceX_founder11 add me anytime.
    
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- steelplatedmech@piefed.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- elonspacex49.bsky.social@coves.social ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Hello, it’s E. Musk. I know you may be surprised to hear from me! I created this account to connect with some of my loyal fans, and I’d love to thank you for supporting my work. ❤️ Feel free to add me on Telegram for a private business conversation. I’m looking forward to connecting! Here’s my Telegram link https://t.me/spaceX_founder11 add me anytime.
  
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xan1242@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
There’s more questions to ask beyond “who is playing the recomps/decomps”

Regardless of AI, these questions pop up:

What is the use case?

Is it worth spending my time and energy as a developer (or from developer’s perspective) doing this?

Who is this for? (Same question as before, yes)

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 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 if thing is undeniably and truly lost.
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DarkMetatron@feddit.org ⁨19⁩ ⁨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.

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- caseofthematts@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨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 vibecose 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.
  
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  - DarkMetatron@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨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 no that we have a perfect clone of their programs” talk.
    
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  - HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Wait till they learn that code is also an art form.
    
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  - TALL421@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    It’s similarly bad in the 3DShacks sub
    
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- elonspacex49.bsky.social@coves.social ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Hello, it’s E. Musk. I know you may be surprised to hear from me! I created this account to connect with some of my loyal fans, and I’d love to thank you for supporting my work. ❤️ Feel free to add me on Telegram for a private business conversation. I’m looking forward to connecting! Here’s my Telegram link https://t.me/spaceX_founder11 add me anytime.
  
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_Lory98_@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨16⁩ ⁨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.

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- PerfectDark@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨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
  
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  - elonspacex49.bsky.social@coves.social ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Hello, it’s E. Musk. I know you may be surprised to hear from me! I created this account to connect with some of my loyal fans, and I’d love to thank you for supporting my work. ❤️ Feel free to add me on Telegram for a private business conversation. I’m looking forward to connecting! Here’s my Telegram link https://t.me/spaceX_founder11 add me anytime.
    
    source
- elonspacex49.bsky.social@coves.social ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Hello, it’s E. Musk. I know you may be surprised to hear from me! I created this account to connect with some of my loyal fans, and I’d love to thank you for supporting my work. ❤️ Feel free to add me on Telegram for a private business conversation. I’m looking forward to connecting! Here’s my Telegram link https://t.me/spaceX_founder11 add me anytime.
  
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Drag00n@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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?

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- PerfectDark@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Maybe I’m just stunned here.
  
  Are you calling me fucking stupid?
  
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