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.

How many of the games were worth playing on the original platform?

This is a form of preservation. Let people enjoy things.

The effort it took to port a game used to guarantee that any game someone took the time and care to port would be a great game. That filter's gone now, but even bad games should be of interest to historians.

The problem isn’t the good ports, it’s the broken vibe coded ports that are a worse experience than an emulator.

They totally miss retro appeal and hobbies.

ET has a great historical value. OK, at least a funny story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T.the_Extra-Terrestrial%28video_game%29

I played AAI2 (the Capcom localization) on DS and the translation was vibecoded. Thousands of lines of Python (to do what?) just to replace some dialog. It kept crashing through different episodes but I’d reload my (last) save and play through the last half hour again, to then battle through a few crashes and then eventually proceed. I’m not sure I would bother with vibecoded stuff anymore.

ET: Exactly how Bad Was It? An Analysis.

There’s so many established emulators on PC that I don’t understand the issue. If you wanna actually play it, why not play it on the intended console it released for?

Are there not established repos for PSP gaming? I don’t really know how you’re supposed to get new psp games unless you’re burning them to those tiny discs yourself.

Is it difficult to avoid these quick demos / proof of concept ports? I have no experience (or desire) to go into the physical realm of retro gaming, emulators are good enough for me.

AI isn't the problem on its own

I can accept a plagiarism machine that is exaberatting multiple international crises, but I draw the line at too many posts on a subreddit!

like c'mon, i'm also frustrated at what's going on in retro dev communities, but that's small potatoes compared to just about everything else concerning LLMs

The incessant oversupply of vibe-coded decomps/recomps/ports comes from the same sense of entitlement as people going around emulator communities asking for free games.

Those people finally found someone who wouldn't say "no," and that someone was Claude. They're the "give me something" or "make me something" crowd, and they never had high standards or shame in the first place.