“This is what happens when you rely on AI Slop” – Fans Unimpressed With Vibe-Coded Knuckles’ Chaotix Recomp

We’ve seen a flood of AI-assisted retro gaming projects recently, ranging from translations to decompilation and recompilation efforts.

Opinions are very divided on the merit of such projects; AI tools certainly help speed things up, but they often come with unwanted side effects – as Knuckles’ recent redesign of the 1995 Sega 32X title Chaotix proves.

As almost everyone who has tried Claude’s coded recomp has pointed out, it suffers from multiple problems, from poor sound to a widescreen mode that keeps reverting to 4:3, as well as terrible performance in special stages – and more.

“The sound is an absolute disaster, worse than emulated, and the widescreen has tons of moments where it reverts to 4:3,” says @hikaru9420 (translated from Spanish). “I’m tired of all these “ports” made with AI which offer no real advantage compared to their simple emulation.”

“So the recomp is a bit broken,” says @WiiUOffical2012. “Some sound channels are broken. The widescreen is a mess. There are a lot more bugs than the OG game. For the love of God, don’t use AI for your gaming projects. Instead, put more human effort into decomps/recomps.”

Meanwhile, @danielhenribuss visually demonstrates the type of problems this ambience-coded decomposition suffers from.

“Thanks to projects like these, more and more people’s first introduction to recomps and retro development/homebrew is ‘PoS that barely works and has no attention to detail’,” adds @sokzajelo.

While some will argue that without the help of AI, these types of projects will take much longer or might not get done at all, the counterpoint is that because they are coded by AI and not a human, debugging issues is often more difficult because the code is not as easy to fix.

Have you tried this latest vibe-coded effort, or do you tend to avoid them? Leave a comment below.