Shhh! Don’t tell Nintendo, but a lovely new PC port of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX has just popped up on itch.io. Boasting a slew of new features, like widescreen support, unlocked framerates, custom button mapping for items and weapons, and, most impressively, the ability to play the entire thing zoomed out with a full bird’s eye view of Koholint Island, complete with unlimited draw distance. It’s a dazzling new way to play one of Game Boy’s most enduring classics, so snap it up before Nintendo wakes up, nukes the whole thing, then salts the earth to remind you these things apparently don’t exist.
Download Link’s Awakening DX HD here.
Fan made decompilations and PC ports of classic Nintendo games are nothing new, with the GitHub repositories for Mario 64, A Link to the Past, Paper Mario and Super Metroid still alive and well, years after the reverse-engineering work is complete. But what paints a special target on the back of Link’s Awakening DX HD is the the baffling fact that it doesn’t require a an original rom of the game to extract all of Nintendo’s copyrighted assets. In other words, this release is not long for this world. Why they’ve chosen to take this route and jeopardize the longevity of their release is beyond me. But then again, I certainly admire the cojones to pull a stunt like this.
