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Last week brought the announcement of the "first static recompilation of a Wii game" — Mario Kart Wiicompiled — generating a lot of buzz and excitement across social media, as well as enthusiastic headlines across a ton of different gaming and tech websites.
However, something worth noting is that the reaction online hasn't been universally positive, with the announcement tweet since turning into yet another lightning rod for a fiery debate about AI usage in games, after it became clear that the project was using AI agents for coding.
This has inevitably split opinion pretty widely between those against AI and those in favour, with one group dismissing the project as "AI slop" and stating that "this sucks ass" and has "poisoned" the work. Meanwhile, others online are ranting about "anti-AI extremists," and arguing this is "the BEST use case for AI because it is repetitive and can be automated."
Putting aside some of the more obvious issues with AI (such as its potential impact on the environment and the fact it is often trained on data without the permission of its original owners), personally speaking, we've been increasingly inundated with news tips about freshly AI-coded recomps that are broken and barely functional.
This has happened enough now that seeing AI used on a project immediately raises alarm bells, leading us to constantly wonder what the catch is whenever we see a project like this and whether the original creators will actually have the know-how to fix the issues at hand. It seems we're not alone, either, with both developers and journalists recently coming out to highlight some of the drawbacks of using AI shortcuts.
In an article called "PC ports of old console games are the new AI vibe coding battleground," PC Gamer's senior editor, Wes Fenlon, summed up the problem with these AI-powered decomps as follows: "The paradox of current tools making it easier than ever to start projects means anyone can vibe code their way to a partially working port, but shaping it into an accurate, crash-free, feature-rich version of a game is a different story."
In this piece, Fenlon spoke to 2dos and Ballaam, the developers of the upcoming human-coded recomp of Donkey Kong 64, who warned about the issue of "technical debt." That is, the hidden cost of taking shortcuts, which will come back to haunt a project later on. This is something that will be invisible to most reading some of the exciting announcements for these projects, but will likely come to limit the project over time, causing problems that will likely have to be papered over, rather than fixed outright.
"The knock-on effect is that other humans are less likely to want (or even be able) to contribute," Fenlon wrote. "If a developer doesn't thoroughly understand the code the AI writes, that will also require them to spend more tokens to fix bugs. Those costs can add up fast, and the AI's 'fixes' won't necessarily be good, either."
In the case of Mario Kart Wiicompiled, Patchzyy doesn't seem to be an amateur programmer, having previously built Wheel Wizard, a mod manager and auto updater for the Mario Kart Wii mod Retro Rewind, but the decision to use AI once again has us questioning what this final project will look like.
Right now, it promises "online play and optional Retro Rewind support" to bring "over 200 tracks" to the classic Nintendo Wii game, with a beta expected to land in August. But even Patchzyy themselves suggests it will take more time before it's worth swapping over from emulators, stating on the Retro Rewind Discord, "I 100% recommend everyone to just stay on wheelwizard/dolphin" for now."