Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon were the first two of three Zelda games Nintendo published on the ill-fated Philips CD-i system in the early 90s. They are very bad—so bad Nintendo doesn’t recognise them as series canon—but they’ve still got a certain charm to them, and so this fan effort to rebuild them from the ground up on PC is pretty neat.
UPDATE 8:40am: Dopply has now removed the files from download, and set YouTube videos to ‘private’, presumably in an effort not to receive one of Nintendo’s notoriously terrifying legal letters.
ORIGINAL STORY: Rather than remaster them, Dopply has fired up GameMaker and completely remade them, in the process saying he has “definitely [improved] them, in my humble opinion,” (with stuff like new controls and a smoother framerate) over the course of four years of part-time development.
The games are of course famous for their cutscenes, which are still there, along with the fact that The Wand Of Gamelon has you playing as Zelda, but these remakes have also done a really good job of making the game’s “early 90s Sierra-point-and-click ass” background art pop.
You can download the games (and read up a little on their creation) here.
UPDATE: The game’s creator has since taken to Twitter to say:
Hi everyone, the attention I’ve received has been pretty overwhelming - I’m floored by the positive impressions.
However, I’d like to stress this is a free, not-for-profit endeavor, and mostly a learning exercise for me. As such, I’ll be removing the game from download shortly.
While the torrents should live for a while, if you wanted to download the game from the other links you should get in fast.