Part of the charm of the graphics for games of this time was that they were pre-rendered from 3d models. A simple upscale doesn't really do it justice. I'd try re-generating the actual models, then pre-rendering them again in higher res. That might look better.
Also the character portraits are pure nightmare fuel. You went from anime style illustrations to this weird semi-illustrated but with skin textures look. Gross. Those could probably be fixed with better prompting. But yeah, maybe work on the art direction part.
Edit: I guess the graphics are from 3d models? Maybe the textures just need updating then, or like, less upscaling since the original models were basically just flat colors for the most part.
At first, I was feeling kind of shocked that AI would do a useful and good reverse engineering and produce code that can be extended later, because that totally not matches my experience working with frontier AI models. And, indeed, they started with a working cross-platform GL-accelerated, multiplayer-capable and moddable codebase. And then used AI to remaster it. So the AI contribution seems to be mostly upscaling the old pixel art.
"OpenOMF (MIT): the open-source reimplementation whose reverse engineering this port follows."
I got a demo of this game on a CD from a cousin in the mid-90s when I was a small child. It had tons of demos on it but One Must Fall 2097 was my favorite. I really liked the music as well, especially the theme.
Many years later after I had long forgotten about it, I was alone traveling across Germany by myself. This game suddenly popped into my head in some Berlin hostel but I couldn't remember the title. I posted on a couple of random forums across the internet and someone identified it from my admittedly terrible description. I remember celebrating in the hostel common kitchen area.
OMF2097 is a classic, but OpenOMF has existed for a while[0] so I'm not sure what this brings to the table beyond being a vibe-reverse-engineered port with really awful looking AI upscaled sprites.
I'm not sure I've ever seen an "upscale" of any kind of heavily pixelized art to something much higher resolution that doesn't seem similar in quality. There seems to be something fundamental to the pixelized aesthetic that once you try to upscale it just can't be the same and human brains will never read the very upscaled art as "yeah, the same, just depixelized". I've seen plenty of 100% human attempts at this and they all seem to have the same subjective effect to me.
Where did we get these games as kids? I was around 6-7 when I played this on our PC. I don't think my dad was installing them, and we didn't have internet obviously.
The only game I actually remember us buying prior to around the windows 98 era was "Cool World" which my dad let me choose at Woolworths (UK)*
But aside from that I remember sooo many DOS games. Some random ones: Wacky wheels, Paperboy, OMF, Pushover, Doom, Heretic, Contraption Zack, Warcraft, Might and Magic, D generation. One called abyss.exe? What was that?
How did I get all these games (and so many more??) some of them were demos, but not all I don't think.
*Probably not suitable for a ~5 year old in hindsight
Ahh, the childhood trauma of downloading Doom 2, getting about halfway after 7 hours, only to have the whole download screwed up because one of my parents picked up the phone.
I know we got a lot of demo discs that were the start of games. Brother and I played episode one of doom so many times know it by heart don’t remember the rest of the game. Same for duke 3d
This has to be one of my most favourite MS-DOS games growing up. Too bad I can't seem to figure out how to play this Web version, the controls seem a bit off?
Fun game to vibe-verse. The r/decomps and r/recomps on Reddit are exploding with major projects like this daily. It's a breathtaking pace. It seems that everybody is trying to do it before AI companies stop subsidizing their products for good.
That game was terrible but still better than Tongue Of The Fatman from a couople of years before https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLq5eDsiPOs which was truly horrible. I had a friend who had a 3DO with Samurai Shodown at the same time as One Must Fall 2097 and I was so envious.
Also the character portraits are pure nightmare fuel. You went from anime style illustrations to this weird semi-illustrated but with skin textures look. Gross. Those could probably be fixed with better prompting. But yeah, maybe work on the art direction part.
Edit: I guess the graphics are from 3d models? Maybe the textures just need updating then, or like, less upscaling since the original models were basically just flat colors for the most part.
"OpenOMF (MIT): the open-source reimplementation whose reverse engineering this port follows."
https://openomf.org/
Many years later after I had long forgotten about it, I was alone traveling across Germany by myself. This game suddenly popped into my head in some Berlin hostel but I couldn't remember the title. I posted on a couple of random forums across the internet and someone identified it from my admittedly terrible description. I remember celebrating in the hostel common kitchen area.
[0] https://github.com/omf2097/openomf
I took a glance through and everything looks perfectly fine to me.
The only game I actually remember us buying prior to around the windows 98 era was "Cool World" which my dad let me choose at Woolworths (UK)*
But aside from that I remember sooo many DOS games. Some random ones: Wacky wheels, Paperboy, OMF, Pushover, Doom, Heretic, Contraption Zack, Warcraft, Might and Magic, D generation. One called abyss.exe? What was that?
How did I get all these games (and so many more??) some of them were demos, but not all I don't think.
*Probably not suitable for a ~5 year old in hindsight
Ahh, the childhood trauma of downloading Doom 2, getting about halfway after 7 hours, only to have the whole download screwed up because one of my parents picked up the phone.
Pretty much like audio tapes and VHS... floppies :) That was indeed the time of boot viruses!
Later, in the 90s, there were also warez CDs and DVDs - see Twilight CDs :)
That being said, the one player campaign seems way faster and higher damage than I remember. But heck I love this blast from the past.