There was a time when HD graphics were enough of a novelty to impress on their own. I remember hooking up my launch-day Xbox 360 to my new thousand-dollar 26-inch flatscreen TV, loading up the videogame of Peter Jackson's King Kong and literally spending a minute staring at a rock.
To be fair, the rock looked like it had just been rained on, and so it had this shiny reflective surface that ... OK, you probably had to be there. No one will ever see that rock the way I did during that fleeting moment, that particular technological inflection point. But while we were shelling out four figures to revel in millions more pixels than ever before, in came Nintendo to say it would stick with standard definition for a while, thanks. And topping the Wii's launch slate, leading the charge for inexpensive gaming, the standard-bearer of Good Enough, was The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
Now, nearly 10 years later, you'll be able to buy an HD version of Twilight Princess on March 4 for the Wii U. While it's not a tenth as exciting as an all-new Zelda (long in the works and expected before the year is through), maybe this extended Zelda refractory period is a good time to play through its 50-plus hours again? There are also a few gameplay tweaks, which may or may not be enough to change the experience in some fundamental ways.
Twilight Princess was, Nintendo would overtly admit later, created in response to American fans' disappointment with the cartoony style of its predecessor, The Wind Waker. In retrospect, it seems like Nintendo was trying (very hard) to prove it could do a dark, brooding Zelda, daring players to say the final product wasn't what they'd asked for. The game's plot involves shadow creatures casting a pall over the happy land of Hyrule. How much blacker can you get than a shadow? None more black.
Just seeing this old world with new high-definition textures and a visual overhaul brings back a bit of that staring-at-a-rock feeling from the first days of HD gaming. That's not because Twilight Princess's graphics are particularly special, but because it's a reminder of the fact that we're still waiting for an original HD Zelda. Running around the world---and you can tell that this is an old world, chopped into pieces so it can run on 2001 hardware and fit into 1.5 GB---you can get a little sense of what it's going to be like to play a Zelda adventure that's HD from the ground up.
