Downgrade Square Enix has just released an AI-powered remaster of one of its most revered video games, “The Portopia Serial Murder Case.” But don’t get too excited. According to journalists and hundreds of angry gamers, it absolutely stinks — specifically because of the new AI. On Steam, the game client of choice for PC Gamers, “Portopia” sits at an embarrassing “Very Negative” rating, with only 13 percent of the over 350 reviews being positive. That makes it the worst-rated Square Enix game on Steam by a considerable margin. “AI =/= text adventure,” wrote one user, who gave up less than an hour into the game. All told, it unfortunately sounds like the game has turned out to be a pretty lazy AI vehicle — symptomatic of the game industry’s shaky ongoing adoption of the new technology. Old Problem, New Solution The original Portopia, which was released in Japan in 1983, is considered a heavily influential classic of text-based adventure games. Yet until the new remaster, it had never received an official English translation, so the prospect of getting one with a fresh coat of paint had some old-head gamers fidgeting with anticipation, especially if newfangled AI could help iron out some of its wrinkles. Among those text-based wrinkles that could use fixing: if you didn’t type the exact command the developers intended, the game wouldn’t understand what to do. With the remaster, Square Enix promised to fix that with a Natural Language Processing (NLP) AI model that, in theory, would allow…An AI-Powered Videogame Just Came Out and Gamers HATE It