Words On Wednesday

I recently discovered a project that allows Nintendo 64 games to be recompiled and personally got The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask running on my Steam Deck natively. It is absolutely insane, and I think it could breathe new life into playing N64 games on modern hardware. Back in May, I came across a reddit post in the r/SteamDeck subreddit about Majora's Mask Recomp. The post mentioned mod support (for an N64 game???), so I was both puzzled and intrigued. I decided to do a little research. It turns out, there has been a project running over the past year or so that allows  the user to "recompile N64 binaries into C code that can be compiled for any platform." To flex the Computer Science degree a bit here, a binary (file) is a program that has been converted into the necessary 0s and 1s to run on a particular computer architecture. Computer architectures vary wildly between different processors and platforms, so a binary for one chipset is unlikely or even impossi...

“ The Legend of Zelda - The Wind Waker HD ”  is 2013 Wii U remaster of a 2002 GameCube game. It cleaned up the visuals, introduced a few quality of life changes, and tweaked the game to make use of the console's two screen system. In 2025, it might be a struggle to decide which version to play, or whether to play a 20+ year old game at all, but I can tell you that Wind Waker HD is still a fantastic game and a great representation of the Zelda series as a whole. Wind Waker is tough to analyze from the perspective of someone who didn't live through it. It came out in North America in 2003, at which point I already had a GameCube (I'm pretty sure). I played through once, started a second play through, and put it down for a good 15+ years. On that first run, Wind Waker was... fine. The visuals were bright and cheery, a stark contrast from Ocarina of Time and Majora's mask before, as well as Twilight Princess after. Plus, the cel shaded graphics were just strange to me. Not ...

“The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom” is the most recently released Zelda game and the very first game in the nearly four decade old series to feature Princess Zelda herself as the main playable protagonist. With 38 years of releases to build on, does this latest game refine a nearly perfect formula or do the unexpected changes ruin the experience? I’ve been watching Echoes of Wisdom since it was first announced. Any new Zelda game is worth paying attention to, and 2D (ish) Zelda games tend to be my favorite. Couple that with the revolutionary decision to make Zelda the main protagonist instead of Link, and you have a very large number of gamers on the edge of their seats. This could be huge. I expressed concern with the first gameplay trailer that it looked gimmicky. Zelda games have traditionally focused very heavily on Link’s swordplay. Removing that as the main method of engaging with enemies was a very bold decision, and one that would force this game to be notably different fr...