xdaniel

Right, especially once the whole "Zeth as a super endboss" stuff came up, I did get rather skeptical about the story -- not sure if I publicly said as much, but it's what many people thought at the time, from what I recall. On the flip side, I'm also pretty sure I remember the Ura team being pretty upfront about the project having developed away from the 64DD Ura Zelda, and that, by that point, its only relation to that game was the name. This, on the other hand, is being "advertised" as a Link's Awakening remake, despite already showing the same signs that Ura did (dark, edgy, etc.) Of course it's not the first example of a mod not working on hardware, but it's most likely gonna be next in that line, a line that's only getting longer if no one steps up to change things in this rather decrepit scene, by writing tools that are tested against real hardware -- which requires access to a flash cart, which requires programming knowledge, knowledge about the N64's graphics hardware, etc. as well as patience and persistence. I am lacking the flash cart, patience and persistence, as well as (these days) the interest in OoT hacking. Plus, emulators are slowly getting more accurate, too -- I remember trying the Project 3rd Quest demo using an LLE emulator and/or graphics plugin of some sort (forgot which exactly) and it looked about the same in that as it did in DeathBasket's hardware test video, i.e. with horrible depth-related rendering glitches. And yeah, I've seen a video of Mario 64 Last Impact's behavior on hardware very recently too, and that's not a pretty sight, either, with extreme graphical glitches, flickering, slowdown, etc... I'm not sure how I feel about Patreon when it comes to, as you mentioned, fan games and hacks, especially the latter. Sure, if you're making pretty models, cool sprite art, etc., etc. then I don't see a reason why you shouldn't be rewarded for it. The next step -- turning these models and sprites into a game -- is where things split. If you're making a game from scratch using a regular PC game engine (think Unity, Unreal, whatever), then it's fine. But if you're making a hack, and you're using someone else's tools or documentation or whatever, at least acknowledge them in your campaign, on your website, whatever. Even better, try to track them down and ask them if they'd appreciate a donation for the work they've done. Then it's on them to accept or deny it, and hell, for the longest time I would've denied it; I think someone did offer me compensation for writing or improving some OoT tool once, but I denied because I was just doing it for fun and was using others' documentation. Now tho, with all these Patreons of that kind running, and with me not being in the best position financially (as in, I'll live, but wouldn't mind something extra once in a while), I'd probably accept such an offer. Anyway, I'm ranting again and I really shouldn't do that all the time, but yeah, agreed on the wait and see, as well as that we need more bigger OoT hacks -- preferably by people who also won't shy away from doing their own research, programming and documentation, to improve things for everyone in the long run.

I have been quite critical of this project on Twitter when I first heard about it a couple of days ago, when it hit mainstream news, for multiple reasons. For one, the "deeper, original, more inspired storyline" part, which I fear could turn into overly dark and edgy nonsense for the sake of it -- especially with me being a big fan of the original LA (my favorite Zelda, even above OoT) and its, in my opinion, already wonderful balance between a more serious, thought-provoking story and lighthearted moments. Then, on the hacking side of things, there's the unlikeliness of the hack working on real hardware, ex. with him most likely using one of my converters, or something related to them, to import the maps (the rather messy lighting/vertex normals being a telltale sign of them); and in turn, I'm also skeptical about the "many new methods" for modding he's discovered according to the interview. Also, there's the -- admittedly comparatively small -- Patreon he's running, i.e. making money off of the work of others (spinout, cooliscool, myself and countless others who've worked on research, model importing, etc.) without which his content would never find its way into the game. That said, I still wish him luck because the basic idea is nice, because his map models look pretty good, and because there's been very few big OoT hacks that got anywhere. I don't like the project, as outlined above, but I do respect the work he is putting in it.

gets water hose, starts extinguishing the fires Eh, I liked Crush Gear Turbo more. But I guess Beyblade is okay? (CRUSH ALL RIGHT! CRUSH ON HIPPY! CRUSH GEAR RIDE! )