The port of Zelda 64 onto the GC

Having just got to the end of Master Quest, I felt it worth writing a few comments on it. I'm not going to do a review of Ocarina of Time or anything, merely of the add-ons and emulation.

Let's start with Master Quest. As you may have heard, it is basically just Ocarina of Time with the dungeons reworked. It adds no more plot or new areas, and what's more the cut scenes and puzzles outside of the dungeons are the same as before... and there's no way to skip through them. This may not sound like an issue at first, but think about it. Do you really want to sit and wait for text that you've read at least once before to slowly be displayed? If not, then Master Quest will no doubt completely put you off. If so, then Master Quest is probably for you.
The only real point to Master Quest is the new dungeons. Well, I say "new", the level designs are the same as before, however the layout for the puzzles has completely changed. Apart from a couple of key puzzles (like burning through the web in the first dungeon, knocking the pillar down at the top of the fire temple, and any puzzle built into the level design) they have changed completely. Some resemble the old puzzles but with an added difficulty or some sort of twist, while others are completely different, and just take place in the same rooms. And just to clarify things... it's every dungeon that is different, including every mini-dungeon. Once nice touch is that if you are putting off playing Zelda because you don't want to do puzzle X again, that's no reason not to play Master Quest because most likely that puzzle won't be there.
Another point to make about Master Quest is that it really makes you learn things about how the items work that were more or less optional knowledge in OOT. For example, the bomb flowers that hang on the walls - you didn't need to use them in OOT so I never learnt how to, however I had to in Master Quest because there was a puzzle that demanded their use. Another example is lighting your arrows (there are places where you can't use din's fire to do the job) and some of the finer rules for moving blocks around with the song of time (some puzzles hinge on a couple of technicalities that in OOT you never thought of).
One last thing that should be said - if you've never played OOT before, then Master Quest is not for you. It assumes knowledge of techniques learnt in OOT, some of the puzzles are a lot nastier, (it one of it's favourites is to hide switches in hard to see places,) and the enemies are quite a lot nastier. Some of the nastier ones that in OOT you usually only see once or twice are now quite common. To be honest, this makes things more fun ^_^ But knowing how to handle them first helps.
Considering that Master Quest is very similar to OOT, it's hard to give it a meaningful score, but if you ignore all of the stuff from OOT and just concentrate on the dungeons, then I'd give it 8/10. It's rare that you get a puzzle game as good as Zelda, however some puzzles do cross the line between challenging and unnecessarily frustrating - and especially the ones in Ganondorf's Castle. There are large rooms where you have to collect every white gem without dying, otherwise you must start again. The problem is they are full of opportunities for cheap deaths. Miss-time a jump, miss slightly with the hockshot, or just get confused because the camera angles play up, (I'll talk more about those later,) and you are sent hurling into the lava and must start form the beginning. It's just that once place, but that room took me 20 bloody tries so I felt it worth bringing up.

Now I want to talk about the emulation/porting to the GC separately. This is partly because I want to break up the review, and partly because I don't want the fact that it is not very good to reflect badly on Master Quest. Yes, that's right, there's a long rant coming up ahead...
All they have done is upped the resolution. And that is pretty much it. Some of the text and menus are now at a higher resolution, and some of the textures are also at a higher resolution, however that is it. Other textures have been stretched to a higher resolution and then blurred slightly so to not look too out of place, however the end result doesn't look quite right. Where this has been applied to transparent bits of textures this completely hasn't worked, and has just made a mess of things - resulting in flowers and plants with a blocky black outline.
In places there are lots of white tears where things aren't aligned properly.
All in all, apart from the upped resolution, this is a bit disappointing. It basically looks the same as the N64 game running on a PC emulator, without the lens of truth bug. OOT deserved so much more than this. You get the feeling that Nintendo just did the bare bones needed, in order to make the bonus disk for promotional purposes. There's no love poured into it.
The controls suffer from a similar lack of thought. Because that's the only way to press up-c, the ocarina has to be played with the c-stick now. This makes it much harder to play than using the buttons, and also makes getting one of the heart pieces practically impossible because you can't play fast or accurately enough.
Z-targeting has been renamed L targeting, because it used the left trigger. Because it's analogue, Z targeting is now slightly more clunky and slower to get a hold on. Anyone who has tried to do some of the fancier block-moves in Smash Bros Melee will know what I'm talking about.
Lastly, the camera angles. I can't tell if some sort of strange and mysterious monkey has altered them and mucked them up, if they had always got a couple of problems and I was just more forgiving back then, if a couple of the new layouts on Master Quest are bringing them on, or a combination. However there are a couple of flaws.
There are times when the camera likes looking down on link from just above his head, or staring him in the back from right up close, meaning that you can't see anything. This usually happens on platforming sections and usually manages to throw you off and into a conveniently placed bottomless pit. Other times, when using Z-targeting in some of the more crowded areas, the camera can position itself behind a block in the middle of a fight, meaning that you are unable to see anything that you or your opponent is doing.
Still present is the bug where you can manoeuvre the camera behind the walls. You can still see what you're doing so it is not a problem, however it does lead to some very odd views.
It supports progressive scan, which is good. It looks quite nice using the VGA mod ^_^
However, for some reason it switches back at one point during the ending sequence, which left me looking at a blank screen until I could switch cables round and get my TV card working. That was very odd... I've never seen a game do that before.
I'd give the port 5/10. It is just competent enough not to ruin the game. However it would have been nice to see more attempts to improve things slightly. Some small graphical improvements would have been welcome, and a proper skip-text feature would not have been that much to ask.