Good call out! The touch screen is generally pretty unpleasant to me now as well.

Wii and some Wii U stuff too, there’s a whole era of games on Nintendo platforms where devs felt it was necessary to use input or display gimmicks. Once in a while it was essential to a game, but frequently it was shoehorned into an otherwise pretty traditional game.

Some of that could be fixed by smaller scale mods or cheat codes, but you’re right that some might take big changes that need a decomp.

On the flip side, there are still projects out there that don’t (or at least claim not to) use AI approaches. Here’s a list I saw the other day: https://backloggd.com/u/WumpaGem/list/game-decompsrecomps-that-arent-vibe-coded/

For sure, I get that. I started off very much in the “it’s just a tool” and “AI as normal technology” camps, and over time I’ve become more and more jaded.

Ultimately what I appreciated about decomps was moreso the effort that went into it, rather than the result. But it totally makes sense if sometimes people care more about the result.

I used to think the decomp projects were really cool, even tho I didn’t really play them. But lately, the influx of AI-driven decomp projects, the whole concept has lost its luster to me.