I’m enjoying Mario Kart World on Switch 2, but to have some variety I’m dipping into the N64 emulation Nintendo offers on the platform. Before I knew it, I was knee deep into Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time again.

I got it into my head to give Link another name for a change. I’ve never done that before. I named him Zelda, just so I can get a weird conversation with princess Zelda. I though myself quite clever, but I’m probably the 10,000th person to do that.

Just to compare the experience with the original N64, I’ve taken the B&O MX4000 out of storage. That gives a much better N64 image than the Sony trinitron I got to replace it. Probably because that’s 100Hz.

I cannot say that the real thing offers a nicer experience than emulation though. The image is very blurry and has limited field of view. Worse though are the controls due to the original N64 controller. But probably most annoying is the difference in speed. The Switch 2 offers US versions that run much smoother than my PAL system. My current opinion is that I may have had a too high opinion of the original N64 experience. Maybe that’s also because the last time I seriously played Ocarina of Time was on the 3DS and I never went back to the original N64 after that.