If you read my article last month about James Pond, and you have eyes in your head, you'll have seen that the marketing for the new game is riddled with Generative AI artwork. It featured James Pond and other characters made with a clear use of AI, especially Creepy Keith, who has four fingers on one hand and three on the other. Despite System 3 Software saying that they hadn't used AI, I don't think anyone believed a word of it, and it really tarnished my view of the release.

Now, System 3 have released a gameplay trailer for the new collection, and there's still the same sloppy approach to the new advert. I've highlighted it in the featured image above, but there's a segment of the advert that says 'Brazilin' instead of ' Brazilian'. And it's not just a one-off- it happens twice.

Look, we all make mistakes, but when you're advertising a game this prestigious to the world, you've gotta get it right the first time. I'm going to assume that the voice-over for the advert is also AI, after its use in making the images too - it's all just very disappointing.

Annoyingly, the gameplay looks great, but that hasn't been changed from the original titles. The fact that you can play in widescreen and with rumble is a nice touch, and there are new screen settings the likes of which you'll see on the M64 and Analogue 3D, as well as remakes like Croc, where you can choose to have pixel-perfect gameplay or scanlines/CRT effects to make the games feel more as they did on your TV back in the day.

The premise of this collection is great - preserving James Pond for new generations and having an interactive museum where you can learn about the characters and the games themselves, as well as looking at the different artwork for the games, is great. The execution of the project, however, is poor, and it's made me not want to buy it. I'll stick to playing the original games on my CRT, and that's a shame because this collection could have been great.

I know there will be some of you out there who are thinking, 'so what, I love AI', and hey, I'm not here to stop you. I can just give you my thoughts and opinions on the collection.