You know, I recall playing this at a friend's house decades ago and being totally, utterly, stuck on the first level for like... many hours.

So yeah, you may be right about that.

Was there like, a maze in that level? I think I remember a maze that ultimately led to a smaller area of open water, where you were just like "well fuckin' now what?"

Unfortunately they won't. They are earning tons of money.

I disagree with your statement, unfortunately.

I could see a refusal to use codegen as a potential liability, but that's not "skills". The biggest thing about codegen is you have to review it and just lower your expectations that the code comes from a technique dumber than the dumbest human intern you have ever seen and approach it with supremely thorough skepticism. It's exhausting how dumb it can be and how you have to be paranoid for every single piece of output. But it's not a "skill"

While we don't do game development, my company has investigated using gen ai for code and we found that it doesn't reliably assist us in anything other than boilerplate code. I personally found that it hallucinates APIs on the regular which made it a massive waste for me as I basically had to go back and rewrite most of the code myself. Using gen ai for code reminded me of every time I've worked at a company that outsourced code; we rarely ever got what we asked for and by the time we got something usable it still wouldn't be up to our standards, which generally resulted in scrapping what was delivered and having to rewrite the whole thing internally.

Undercaves song goes so hard

YESS. I'm super eager to hear the sounds they come up with here.

The Yamaha chip (YM2612) really gave it a super grunge sound, perfect for games like Comix Zone. That said, it still felt at home with new age music like Ecco's.

The fact that we had a synthesizer playing live music is still mesmerizing me.

It really, really does.

This song (All Good Times, by MelonadeM) isn't from a game, rather it's one of the demo songs included with Furnace, a chiptune tracker. And it goes so fucking hard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQfSCvvqmXg

I need 800fps. One of my Steam games was 800+ fps on its HUD even though it was on a 60fps monitor. My GPU was going at 100%.

DLAA then

Yep. It will create something that at a glance looks like pixel art, then you zoom in and find anti-aliased rectangular pixels made out of three different shades of the main color, a weird line, and no clear grid.

The person above you is wrong, while a generalist model will struggle to make valid pixel art, either a specially trained model or one with elements to force a specific structure could make generative pixel art.

This seems like a valid example - https://pixel-art.ai/