dog

Only here to post about CD-ROMs

I want!!
⬅️ this mark
🍷white
and Taste 🦆11
require

 

 

(Avatar by @texture, CD-ROM Journal button by @candiedreptile)


CD-ROM Journal
cdrom.ca/

Square Enix AI Tech Preview: The Portopia Serial Murder Case Review

0-star port of a really interesting piece of gaming history.

It takes a lot of skill to port an old text parser game and have it be worse than the original. The fuzzy matching means that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and it's incredibly hard to figure out how or why. A less intelligent parser like in the original would have been easier to work with because at least it's predictable, and you can develop an internal model of how to talk to the game. Here, you're constantly guessing.

As a game, Portopia has the loose style of storytelling that a lot of early computer mystery games did. Modern players might find it offputting, but it works well and it's easy to see why it was such a big deal in 1983. The ludicrous ending twist is hard for players to guess, in a bad way, but overall it still lands.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @dog's post:

honestly "loose open-ended murder mystery VN" seems like it would actually be a genuinely cool kinda practical use for language models if corraled properly! sucks to hear Square flubbed on the execution of gluing that onto Portopia so absolutely hard though

That's the thing! They messed it up really badly. I feel like if you had a parser that was more aware of the semantic relationships between words in a way where it could fuzzy match on that, it would work really well. Doing the most naive possible fuzzy matching on wording just seems like a bad idea right from the start

If only Douglas Adams was still alive to see someone invent a parser this shitty. He'd have written an entire adventure game around the concept of a misanthropic, fickle game system that would only listen to the player half of the time

the best irony is that the famicom port, which took out the text parser stuff for a menu-based command system, is what made the game famous. it revolutionized how people approach UIs in games and made menu options a viable way for players to interact with the game.