It’s not emulation; it’s a native PC port. This offers a wealth of possibilities for those who own the original game.
If you follow retro console games, you know now is an excellent time to play old classics on PC – and we’re not talking about emulation. There are unofficial remakes of games like Banjo-Kazooie, Super Mario 64, and the Jak & Daxter trilogy, to name a few, and now a popular Legend of Zelda game has also received a native port: Twilight Princess. The project is called Dusk, and if you’ve played any of these ports before, the basics will be familiar: You need to import your own game files from the NTSC or PAL version of the GameCube release. Once you’ve imported them, everything will work right away.
Dusk boasts impressive features, especially considering it supports iOS, Android, macOS, and Linux, so you can play on the Steam Deck. Dusk supports higher frame rates, aiming with a mouse or gyroscope, and custom models and texture packs. It also has features introduced with the Wii U version, such as Mirror Mode, also known as the original Wii port. The trailer showcases a massive list of gameplay settings ranging from quality-of-life options, such as instant text and auto-save, to damage multipliers in case you want to make the game absurdly difficult. At the end of the trailer, there’s a teaser hinting at a randomizer mode.
“When we started the Twilight Princess decompilation project in August 2020, it was hard to imagine it would ever be finished, much less used for a project like this. Years and years of effort have been poured into the decompilation by contributors all over the world, resulting in the largest decompilation project ever completed,” reads a blog post from the Dusk team announcing the release.
It’s easy to imagine a future where many retro classics have native PC ports, complete with dedicated modding communities and teams of volunteers actively adding new features. It’s no surprise that The Legend of Zelda was an early adopter of this trend and remains at its heart.
Source: PCGamer, Twilitrealm
