Ocarina of Time is one of those games that gets talked about so much that I’ve sort of always felt like a fake gamer for never finishing it, even nearly 30 years after release. That changed last weekend and I would now like everyone to acknowledge that I am, in fact, a real gamer.

I played it on Steam Deck with the PC port Ship of Harkinian which is hands down the best way to play it these days. It’s extremely customizable (almost dauntingly so) so you can really tune the game to your liking and modernize it a bit.

Some of my favorite features:

• Unlocked framerate and resolution
• Modern camera controls
• Use of the d-pad for extra item slots

My thoughts on the game

Not that I was at all old enough to play it when it came out, but you can clearly tell even today that Ocarina of Time was a very ambitious game. Overall, I think it delivered and it’s easy to see why it was incredibly influential.

There are some enemy and quest designs that show their age a bit, but that’s pretty standard for the era. The worst example I can think of is (spoilers for a 28 year old game incoming) when first entering the Spirit Temple, the game strongly hints that you need to time travel to come back as a child. So I warped straight to the Temple of Time to do that, thinking that I could use the Gerudo membership card I just earned to have the guards let me through. Nope. I had to look up a walkthrough to learn that what I should have done is exit the Spirit Temple normally to trigger the cutscene where the Spirit Temple’s warp song is learned.

But like I was saying, needing an occasional walkthrough is something that more or less comes with the territory of playing 30 year old games. I don’t hold that against Ocarina of Time too much, especially since some elements have aged incredibly well all things considered.

The combat, while a bit simple by today’s standards, is one of the parts of Ocarina of Time that I think has aged the best. Modern enhancements like high framerates and manual camera controls definitely help here, but you can tell there’s a solid underlying system even without them. Most of the bosses and stronger enemies were genuinely fun to fight, and it’s easy to see where Ocarina of Time’s combat has influenced so many of today’s titles.

I’ll just say that it’s easy to see why this game still gets talked about even today. It’s definitely deserving of its status as a classic.

Next on my radar

When I think of The Legend of Zelda, Twilight Princess is the game that always comes to my mind. I put a ton of time into it growing up and there’s just something I love about its mechanics, world design, and characters.

So I’m super excited that there’s not one, but two ongoing projects porting it to modern platforms! The one that I’m most closely watching is Dusk. It appears to have a larger team behind it and be slightly farther along in development, though I could be wrong on both fronts since there’s not a ton of public information on either of these projects yet. The other project is Courage Reborn which also looks promising.

Based on posts in the Dusk Discord, videos from testers with access, and my own speculation, I won’t be surprised if Dusk gets an initial release sometime in the next few months. You can bet I’ll be setting it up as soon as it’s available. For all the time I spent playing Twilight Princess I never did quite roll credits on it. Looking forward to correcting that.

— JP