Piracy isn’t relevant here. This is a fan-created work of art, and free for anyone who wants to play it. Nothing was “stolen”, and Nintendo is, as always, being a bunch of corpo fucktards.
Something was stolen - they were giving out copies of Link’s Awakening, not just the enhancements they made but the game and art content of the original game, which is Nintendo’s IP so it is piracy (not to dispute the rest of what you’re saying necessarily though). Projects normally get around this by releasing the fan enhancements as a patch that can be applied to a ROM, shifting the piracy from the project to the end user.
Unless it was updated from yesterday, it’s really cool and also kind of a let down. I like it and will finish it.
There’s no way to exit the game. That’s baffling.
The textures are nintendos. They are Not HD whatsoever. Each pallet is like 240 across.
That’s basically the only bad things. There are soft shadows and some very faint light effects. Being able to zoom the camera is very very cool.
What I really like about it is everything still functions as rooms/screens. Enemies won’t leave their screen, but it works great. You would think it would janky. Somehow it keeps the charm of the game intact.
Also, full 360 movement with dpad and joystick.
Definitely worth it if you like the good Zelda games.
If windows, just alt f4 to exit, if linux, run it from a terminal, alt tab back to terminal and kill it to close the game?
Also it wouldnt be too hard these days to run the textures through an ai upscaler, just have to find someone with a powerful enough rig and enough spare time to do it.
Checked out some threads about it and it seems to have a fair number of bugs. It’s still a ridiculous effort for, what I assume to have been, one person.
I don’t know much about Link’s Awakening DX HD. But I’m curious about three things:
Did Link’s Awakening DX HD have a price on itch.io or was it a free or pay-what-you-want thing?
Did they distribute assets from Link’s Awakening along with the engine, or was it just the engine with a tool to extract the assets from a Link’s Awakening ROM?
The author released 1.0 so I think he pretty much finished it up before releasing the timebomb, which was smart. And yeah I know the 1.0 naming convention doesn’t really mean anything but I think he is implying that this was his full more polished release. He must of known this was coming everyone did.
Too bad it was never open sourced. Seems like someone could have stripped out the assets, made a tool to extract assets from the ROM, and the result wouldn’t infringe.
Maybe the author would be willing to open source the engine with no assets now. We can hope, I guess.
Just seems like it wouldn’t have taken that much more work to make it less likely to be taken down by threats from Nintendo.
Edit: I wrote this response before I saw @nanoUFO’s response about it having been open source.
Edit2: I just realized the GitHub repo doesn’t indicate what license that code is under. So, not FOSS and it’s unclear what’s legal to do with that code.
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