Square Enix AI Tech Preview: The Portopia Serial Murder Case
A remake of The Portopia Serial Murder Case
This software is an educational demonstration of Natural Language Processing (NLP), an AI technology, as applied to the adventure game “The Portopia Serial Murder Case” (created by Yuji Horii and first published in Japan in 1983). At the time of the game’s original release, most adventure games were played using a “command input” system, where the player was asked to type in text to decide the actions of their character. Free text input systems like these allowed players to feel a great deal of freedom. However, they did come with one common source of frustration: players knowing what action they wanted to perform but being unable to do so because they could not find the right wording. This problem was caused by the limitations of PC performance and NLP technology of the time.
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Adding on top of that the badly AI smoothed character animations... It's a showcase of some of the worst uses of AI, and a showcase that is years too late to impress anyone.
Behind all these flaws is Portopia, a (still, surprisingly) decent visual novel/detective game that made waves in the Japanese games industry of the 80s (and beyond). But it's a crappy excuse for a remake that never should have happened. I played it to observe its use of AI, but I discourage playing it otherwise.
The game is very weird with its word selection to the point it took me out of the story, so I think I'll just put the game down.
Lame plot twist aside I still found it to be a pretty interesting murder mystery.