I loved Super Mario Strikers so much when it came out on the GameCube. I've always been rubbish at games like FIFA, but Super Mario Strikers was my game. Had there been a Zelda version back on the N64, however, then I don't think any other game would have gotten a look-in from me and my friends during the summer holidays! Enter Soccerina of Time, a MOD that I can't believe hasn't actually been made yet in the almost three decades since Ocarina of Time released!
Honestly, what you're about to witness is madness. Who would have thought there would be a character creation setting where you could have a player with the head of a cucco and the legs of Ganondorf playing for the Gerudo Fortress team? The video of shonj352's ROM hack posted by n2existance shows a character called Eggsy leading up striking capabilities in multiple different teams, with Kokiri FC going up against Goron FC in the first match.
Seeing Link, Malon, the Lake Hylia Professor, Sheik, Ganondorf, Castle Town Guards, Gorons, and more going up against each other in a football match is fantastic, all something that came from the 'ocar' in Ocarina sounding like the American word for what we call football, aka Soccer. I especially love when characters like Deku Scrubs and Kokiris come on to take off players - that's such a neat feture!
I know what we're all thinking - AI? Well, I've done some digging, and it appears that shonj352 has used Claude to 'write the base' of the game, with him manually reviewing and editing the lines of code by hand. On Discord, he goes on to say that he's 'used AI for [the] majority [of the] coding, rigorously tested and bug-fixed everything myself, made all the music, made all the logos, made models'. So, a little more than what I would call being 'assisted' by AI here, with AI having quite a significant role, but not entirely a case of vibe-coding.
I love the idea; I think it's great. As always, I want to know how much AI has been used to make sure it runs smoothly before I download and start playing. I'm hoping there's going to be some more transparency around this as the ROM hack develops and the source material gets shared. The dev does say that the project is going to be 'bigger than Zelda', which I'm not too sure about, but I do think this has the potential to be one of the most fun football hacks on the N64 once it's complete!
