survey of the recent rash of vibecoded mods / ports / decomps:
- undisclosed repackage of an existing, mature emulator (Ridge Racer 5 "PC port" actually just PCSX2)
- easter egg for a 20+ year old game passed off as something new (MGS2 skateboarding)
- extremely silly not-at-all-a-game demo ("Spider-Man web swinging in Gotham" just a render overlay, player can't even go behind buildings)
- unmaintainable pile of shit abandoned in 2 months (most of the rest)
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@jplebreton AI has been a boon for those who just really, really want clout without the effort
and speaking as someone who's made several "wacky" mods - it took me all of a day to add fishing to ZDoom (in any liquid surface, catching fish with randomized names and appearances). the claim to have done anything special by slopping something out is depending on newcomers' ignorance of what's long been possible with good tools in the existing vast domain of fan creativity; it's appropriating the prior coolness of those in a very real and disingenuous way.
also a lot of these projects don't even disclose they're using LLMs (probably because they know gamers hate it!) so they're sowing distrust and cynicism in what were previously communities that people participated in because they were passionate about it. some communities (eg the Doomworld forums) have understandably already banned posts of such projects.
the entire point of doing an open source port / reverse engineer of a game is to make a previously locked off proprietary thing more of a public good, that can be studied and modified and preserved into the indefinite future. a codebase that's just an inscrutable alien artifact that no one understands or wants to touch does not advance any of those goals. it's a novelty for grabbing momentary attention and a waste of everyone's time. pathetic.