Fan-made Ocarina of Time PC port gets unlocked framerate, difficulty settings, and more

Building on the work of the Zelda Reverse Engineering Team, the crew calling themselves Harbour Masters released a PC version of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time earlier this year. It improved on the original with HD graphics, widescreen support, and also being on PC, which is how God plays games when God decides to stop messing with us and just play some Zelda instead.

The Harbour Masters have continued updating the Ocarina of Time port, which they call Ship of Harkinian. Delightfully, news of those updates is shared in the form of Direct videos intercut with revoiced footage from Animation Magic's notorious Zelda games for the Philips CD-i. The latest announces that the current release, Rachael Alfa 3.0.0, lets you choose your own framerate all the way up to 250fps. It also adds a set of difficulty options including damage multipliers and variable healing and restoration effects, which you can access under the Enhancements > Gameplay menu.

Other new features in this version include the guards you sneak past at Hyrule Castle having vision cones (well, trails of vision bubbles I guess), you can customize the HUD, Link can wield a shield and a two-handed sword at the same time, and can wear the Bunny Hood even as an adult. Also, the Deku Shield is fire-proof, and there are cheats to make Epona never get fatigued and to let you use items (like bombs) in places you weren't allowed to before.

But wait, there's more. Optional tweaks include adjustable climbing speed, fast chests, no forced Navi, spammable Kaepora Gaebora, and a faster Biggoron's Sword quest, and there are bug fixes for Anubis fireballs, hover fishing, gravedigging, and the glitch that made it impossible to get the Deku Nut upgrade if you didn't do things in exactly the right sequence. There's a new graphical interface for rebinding the controls, and a randomizer.

The Ship of Harkinian also runs on MacOS and Wii U now, and in 64-bit mode. There's even more, but you'll have to watch the entire video for the rest, or just try it for yourself. You'll need to already have a copy of the ROM, and then download the Rachael Alfa build from the Ship of Harkinian Discord server.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.