Remember Malice (2004)? You roam the underworld with a giant clockwork hammer in this peak 2000s fever dream. The game went through absolute development hell, surviving a shift from the PS1 and losing its original star Gwen Stefani before finally releasing after years of delays. Unpolished cult classic chaos.
There's two things: Decomp vs. Recomp.
"Decomp" is when you look at the binary of a game executable and (painstakingly) turn it back into human-readable source code, which you then rewrite for PC. AI can make this really, really fast.
"Recomp" is when you basically run the game in an emulator, which translates every game command into a PC command, and sort of 'write down' every single PC command and when they're asked for - and you reconstruct the game from that. AI really, really helps with this.
They're both better than emulation, even though games are usually in a rough state at first, because they allow further modification and updating once the source code is ported. The SOTN Recomp project, for instance, has Randomizer built in, asset mods (new characters) and other stuff.
A young inventor and his robot set out to rescue his kidnapped father in this souls-lite action adventure!
- Swap between Kir and PIO, combining their abilities
- Travel from retrofuturistic Moscow to the North Pacific
It's called PIO: A Robot's Story. Interested?