This Remaster Is What All True Warriors Strive For: Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon

[Kzinssie]

So there appears to have been some scattered discussion about this in other threads, but some madman actually went and remastered/ported the CD-i Zelda games to PC. Download for the updated version is here.

These games are honestly very important to me in that CD-i Youtube Poops were incredibly formative to my sense of humor, but my attempts to actually play them have been stymied by CD-i hardware being incredibly expensive and emulation being buggy at best, so I obviously jumped on these immediately. And it's mostly because of the remaster, but they're... not terrible? Faces of Evil is notably worse than Wand of Gamelon due to being much grindier and having notably meaner level design, but the latter is actually a fun little arcade-y platformer to boot up and beat within an hour. I've already beaten it three times, including on the remaster-exclusive Hero Mode, which unlocks

Spoiler

playable King Harkinian, as well as Link/Zelda in their opposing games.

 

[LBD_Nytetrayn]

Pity he only did half of the CDi Nintendo games.

 

[Kzinssie]

Apparently that's because those two already had all their assets ripped, while Hotel Mario and Zelda's Adventure did not. This was also apparently a project to teach himself Game Maker, so keeping it to two games on a shared engine probably made it a more workable goal (I believe it took him several years of working in private).

 

[LBD_Nytetrayn]

Aye, I heard that somewhere, but it also sounds like a venture he won't be revisiting, so even when that stuff is ripped... well, it won't matter unless someone else takes up the cause.

 

[Kzinssie]

For what it's worth, Hotel Mario seems to be a much simpler game, so it at least would be less of a time investment. (I'm also pretty sure it's easier to emulate if you want to go that route)