The N64 library is slowly being ported to PC one title at a time. Heck, I say 'slowly' - we seem to be getting a couple of titles a week at this point... with a little help, however.
Pokémon Stadium has always been one of my favourite N64 games, and when the likes of Majora's Mask and Holy Magic Century were getting native PC ports with quality of life features, I kept wondering when Pika and his pals would get their turn.
Well, as shown by Video Game Esoterica in the video below, the Recomp, named SS Anne, has finally arrived, though with a little bit of controversy surrounding it. The man behind the hack, Matt Stanley, aka mstan, has used Claude to help with some of the process. I don't know how much of the process AI has been used for, but mstan has also listed Claude as a contributor to the process. I'm glad he's not hidden it, but I would like to know the extent to which AI was used here.
The Recomp makes Pokémon Stadium run as a native PC game instead of something that you would need to load up inside Afterplay or RetroArch. It has support for a Transfer Pak and takes your existing team from your original Game Boy cartridge, which also means you can play your original Kanto adventure through the Game Boy Tower, all of which is selectable from a setup screen before the app starts.
Another part that I'm appreciating is the sharper look to the game, smoother models, and fixing of glitches, all of which are listed in the information on the project's GitHub page.
I've toyed with covering this or not, because recomps heading to the PC are a good thing, but I've held off talking about decomps that have used AI in the process. I'm not going to lie, I don't feel great about it, and it's put me off writing about. I've been doing some digging, and this is the third decomp in the last couple of weeks that's released with the help of AI. I think it makes for jankier, messier games that are a little unpredictable, and it needs a human touch to make sure that the games we know and love (that were made by human devs in the first place) still work and feel like they did back in the day.
What are your thoughts on using Claude to help with decomps? I'm a little biased, I know, so I would like to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
