It's a shame, isn't it?

These days, we have it all. We can easily access an entire console's library with a mere flick of our fingers through means that don't hurt anyone. You could play mods, fixes, hacks and all sorts of things to improve or build upon whatever it is you're interested in. We have everything we could imagine to play anything in gaming history, but despite all this, you can never stop time's continuous march forward. We grow older, we develop more as a society, and technology progresses towards it's next plateau until the next big breakthrough, but could you really know what it's like to play something from it's time period without knowledge of what we have now? To envision yourself as that five year old kid playing it for the very first time? Could you really?

The very first 3D game that I remember playing was Hard Drivin' on the Sega Genesis. It was an impressive looking racer for it's time, but even when I was that young and so full of imagination I only ever saw it as "neat". It wasn't exactly leaving a mark on me anytime soon with it's scenic barnyard aesthetic and lack of music during gameplay. It was funny to crash, that was about it. I laughed, and I went back to playing my 2D games of which many even today still enjoy. Three Dee? What of it? Star Fox you say? Super FX you say? I don't know what those are, but it sure sounds cool!

For me, it was something I couldn't believe. The immediate introduction with that cinematic shot of the giant carrier slowly approaching Corneria with the backing of that powerful and sinister orchestra hooked me immediately. I was amazed. Am I really playing this? Yes, yes I was. Soon as I knew it, I was piloting an Arwing and living that cinematic space-flying adventure with the coolest rock tune to grace my ears at the time. I was navigating through asteroid fields, taking part in chaotic assaults on Andross' space armada and destroying gigantic battleships from the inside in my own little trench run. This wasn't any old game I was used to, it was an experience, and it was amazing. I loved it, and I would never forget it.

...and now, all those... moments are lost on those who come after me, and I find myself alone and lonely on this mountaintop. Star Fox... was no longer considered that amazing, it was just..."neat", like Hard Drivin' on the Genesis. Heartbreaking. Some could be ignorant, some could be respectful, and others could even enjoy it, but I know that deep down they could never be awestruck by it. Their experience will never be the same as mine was, and it will never hit the same again. It's pathetic maybe to lament, but I've come to face the music. I will never meet someone from generations onward who will love this as much as me, and my loneliness will continue as I feel more and more like the last of my kind. Maybe it hit at just the right age as my creativity was just beginning to manifest? I dunno how else to describe my attachment. It rules, and it still has the best sound I have ever experienced off the system. Feel those enemy shots go past you as you boost through space, experience the explosions radiating off the bosses after they're defeated. God.....it's so good.

At the end of it all, Star Fox is still Star Fox and my heart never changed. If I must be alone on this mountain until I die, then so be it. I ain't moving.

I've been meaning to replay this for a good while now, having seen all kinds of differing opinions from my friends and not really remembering my own anymore. After about an hour and a half of bumbling around, I found that I still enjoyed it. Most of all, probably the weird blocky look it has. I'm not even sure they could add any more detail, but I'm glad they didn't. Makes for hell of a distinct appearance.

The framerate is definitely an issue, sometimes making it a bit hard to squeeze through tighter spots, but I think it's played up a bit by people who aren't used to that kind of thing. I, for one, will take a sluggish but relatively consistent framerate over a sloppy and wildly fluctuating one like in Thunder Force IV or Steel Empire. Neither are ideal, but hopefully that makes sense. I think the former is a lot easier to adapt to. As far as this game goes, it shouldn't really cause many problems in routes 1 or 2 anyway. 3, as I've learned tonight, is a lot more to worry about.

Pretty much everyone agrees that Star Fox 64 is a major improvement over this, with some going on to comparatively dismiss this one as a novelty or tech demo. It's hard to argue with that since 64 is in fact much better, but if this is a novelty it's a pretty damn good one. I totally understand the faults of this game, but they just don't really bother me here for some reason.

That does remind me though that I played 64 like a decade ago and desperately need to try it again. Maybe that'll come next.

At this point in time, the SNES was already capable of doing plenty that other consoles at the time could only dream of doing. Not only did the games look better, sound better, and playing better than ever before, but with the introduction of such elements like Mode 7, it allowed developers to create many different types of games that was never possible before on previous consoles, leading to games like F-Zero and Pilotwings showing off what this technology could do, and many other developers taking advantage of this to make their games much more exciting than ever. But, of course, this wasn’t the limit that Nintendo was willing to stop at. They were willing to go even further with their technology, making things more advanced, and even going far enough to reach the 3rd dimension, all with the help of a little tool called the Super FX Chip. While not every big game on the system would use it, this chip was capable of making games with graphical power that was never before seen on a home video game system, whether it be with subtle, yet impressive differences with games like Yoshi’s Island, or games that would make a huge difference like with Stunt Racer FX. Amongst all of these titles though, without a doubt, the biggest title to take advantage of this hardware would happen to be the beginning of a little series known as Star Fox.

I have been a fan of the Star Fox franchise for quite a while now, with me playing the series off and on again for decades now, whether it be with the fan favorite title Star Fox 64, or even with some of the lesser beloved titles like Star Fox Zero, which deserves a lot more love then it initially got (seriously, it wasn’t that bad, people), but that’s a review for another day. In terms of the original Star Fox, I have had plenty of experience with this title, being one of the first games that I ever got when I bought a SNES at a flea market, along with Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country. However, at that point, I was already very familiar with Star Fox 64, which was essentially this game but better, so I didn’t play it too much over that as a result. But, I did decide to do a full playthrough of it recently to give it the time it deserves, and while I still wouldn’t say it is as good as later titles, for being the first game in this series, it holds up pretty damn well. Obviously, there are elements that date it quite a bit, and it isn’t gonna blow you away if you try it out today, but for the time, it was really damn impressive, and it is still a fun time nowadays.

The story is pretty basic for a game like this, where the evil scientist Andross declares war against the planet Corneria, and it is up to the Star Fox team, consisting of Fox McCloud, Falco Lombardi, Peppy Hare, and Slippy Toad to take him and his army down, which works well enough as a plot for the first entry in a series like this, the graphics are….. well, let’s be real, they look like complete gutter trash nowadays, but for the time, this was pretty innovative for the SNES, some of the regular pixelated stuff does still look good, and I’m sure it looked mind blowing at the time, so I will give it credit for that, the music is pretty great, having plenty of action-packed tracks that still sound good to this day, and there were plenty of tracks that would get plenty of remixes later down the road, the control is pretty basic for the kind of game it is, but there are some actions that you could pull off that does make the game stand out from other games, such as turning your plane sideways and performing a barrel roll (or an aileron roll for all of you MatPat cucks out there), and the gameplay is pretty basic as well, being what you would expect from a game like this at the time, but in 3D, and to its credit, it is still fun to play after all these years.

The game is an on-rails 3D space shooter, where you take control of an Arwing piloted by Fox McCloud, take on many different stages while exploring plenty of different pathways of varying difficulty, shoot down many different enemy ships or other types of hostile creatures while trying to stop whatever Andross tries to do on these various planets, gather plenty of different healing items, upgrades to your ship, and bombs throughout to give you a better chance against the many threats that you will face, and take on plenty of ginormous mechanical bosses that will test your dodging and aiming skills to their limit. At its core, a lot of it is very similar to other space shooters, or even other flight simulation games, but aside from the fact that it is all in 3D, there are some things that make it stand out.

One of the biggest aspects of not just this game, but the entire series, would be your three wingmen, who will not only accompany you throughout the game, but will also assist you in dealing with several enemies and talk to you in various instances giving you advice on what to do. However, there are plenty of points throughout the game where you do have to help them out by shooting down enemies that will be gunning them down, which is essential for this game, because if any of your wingmen die, they are dead for the remainder of the game, and you don’t wanna let any of them that aren’t named Slippy die! Obviously, these guys are much more enjoyable and likable in later games, but for this first installment, they are still charming and likable enough, and I like how instead of having voice acting, they just talk in these goofy-ass mumbles, which is funny to listen back to.

Aside from that though, a lot of the charm and appeal of this game is the fact that, again, it is a 3D space shooter on the SNES. Obviously, there are things about it that don’t hold up that well, such as not just with the graphics, but also the fact that the game cannot possibly run without chugging along the entire time at like 15FPS, but again, for the time, it is still pretty impressive, and it can still be fun to play. A lot of the movement does feel very smooth, the shooting feels good, and whenever you do manage to dodge a lot of these obstacles that they aren’t afraid of throwing right in your face, it does feel pretty satisfying. In addition, like I mentioned earlier, there are several pathways you can take when you start the game, each one being at a different difficulty, all ending with you beating the game at Venom. This essentially means you have to play through the game three times in order to fully complete it, which I would usually frown out in a game, but thankfully for this title, there are different levels and things to see in each course, so it does get more interesting and fun as you keep exploring these different courses.

In terms of actual problems that I could have with this game, I think really the only one I could have, which goes without saying, is, again, how dated it is. Not only have there been plenty of sequels to this game that manage to do what this one does significantly better, but there have been plenty of other on-rails shooters in general that are much more appealing and fun to play, so it does make going back to this title much harder. That’s not to say that it isn’t fun, as you can still have a good time with it, but really, there isn’t much reason to go back to it other than if you wanna see where the series began. Aside from that though, the only other real minor complaint I have is, while I did mention that there are new things to discover down every route that you do take in this game, there are some repeated bosses and stages that you will have to take on again based on whatever path you do take. Once again though, that is only a minor complaint, as this thing doesn’t happen too often.

Overall, despite how dated it is and how repetitive it can be at times, the original Star Fox is still a pretty great title from the SNES era, one that is not only super impressive, but also manages to hold up extremely well even to this day. I would definitely recommend it for those who are big fans of the Star Fox franchise, or even those who wanna get into the series, because it is a pretty good place to start. However, for those who are just casual fans of the series, I would say just to stick with Star Fox 64 or some of the later games, as they do provide a similar experience, but obviously with higher quality. But hey, to this game’s credit, there isn’t any other Star Fox game that I know of where you are able to shoot up a slot machine in space to win a bunch of space money. And you also don’t have Slippy screaming your ear off, so that is a plus.

Game #418

Finished the middle route and got through about half of the top route before deciding to move on.

The framerate is definitely something to adjust to, but it didn't end up hindering me in most cases. I often found the screen pretty readable in terms of where enemies are and where their projectiles are heading. The main killer for me here is the lack of a reticle and how tilting/rolling feels. Aiming just feels unsure in this game, I eventually got a bit of a feel for it, but I did infinitely better in levels where you go in first person and actually get to have an aiming reticle. There are also these levels where you have to carefully maneuver, tilt, and adjust the speed of your Arwing to make it through tight corridors, and while they accomplish their main goal of making you go "oh shit star wars", they're not very good. As someone whose reference point for Arwing gameplays is Star Fox Assault, the lack of an instant roll is deeply felt, and pulling off a barrel roll in this game never felt right.

Now, all that being said, I did come out of this game fairly positive on a lot of stuff. Obviously, the music rules, nearly every iconic Star Fox song comes from this game, and it all goes in so hard. I honestly do think the look of this game holds up, it creates this surreal world of abstract shapes and strange alien forces, I mean just look at Andross and tell me that doesn't rule. And like I said, with some adjustment, I did acclimate to the game's quirks and enjoyed a decent amount of it. Getting good at this game feels pretty fun. Finding out the way to avoid a lot of the missiles from the second-to-last boss of Venom is to boost forward made me feel like a genius (please don't tell me you knew this immediately).

The thing is that knowing 64 exists and is so much more advanced and developed than this makes revisiting it a bit of a hard sell, but I think it's worth seeking out at least once. I ended up bailing on the second route because the levels went on a lot longer than I liked, so I doubt I'll come back to finish this, but maybe someday.

Whenever I play this I always forget how bad, just remarkably awful, your wingmen are at their jobs. For a crack team of plucky space pilots banding together to save the known universe from the iron grip of a tyrant, they sure are as lazy, spoiled, and childish as they come. And say what you will about Slippy, but truth be told Peppy and Falco are just as bad here. All are guilty before the lord.

"Hey, watch this!," they shout to Fox like a toddler who has learned to smear paint on the walls for the first time. Look at me, they say as they shoot down a single enemy in glee. Meanwhile you are on your fifty-eighth kill, under constant pressure to annihilate every bogey ship careening toward you to rack up enough points to get those all-important continues for the upcoming assault on planet Venom, extra chances to fight and die, but in the meantime yes, by all means, let the baby shoot one down.

And in the thick of battle, you dancing on a hairpin between sweet victory and swift fiery death, what do you hear over and over again? "Hey! Watch it!" Again and again, after you in your good graces allowed them their one moment of glory, they refuse to leave, they insist on flying directly in front of you, yet another obstacle between you and yet again slaughtering every enemy ship before you for the almighty points tally. Hey, watch it, they shout at you through the communicator as if your weapons can actually harm another Arwing fighter (they can't, by the way). Hey, watch it! Fox, when he sleeps at night, IF he survives and gets a chance to sleep ever again, that is, hears that phrase again and again in his nightmares. Never behind him, how it should be as a leader to his team of followers, never behind taking helpful potshots, never working together to get that score that in the end, benefits them as much as Fox himself! No, always in front, in the way, wearing out their welcome, because mom says it's their turn to try now.

And then, inevitably, always at the same scripted point, as if crossing Rubicon after Rubicon of ineptitude, a litany of "help! Save me!" You neither receive a boon from the game if you are prompt in rescuing your friend, nor suffer any real penalty if you let the bogey shoot their six a little before you get around to it. Apparently, the worst that happens is your friend falls under the relentless fire of one pawn in Emperor Andross's collection of black pieces, and for the rest of the course, until you overthrow the emperor and you're watching the ending screen, you are stuck with a staticky image of your expired friend. For the whole duration of the course their sad dead staticky eyes stare out from the grainy image and into your eyes, silently asking why? Why, Fox? Why didn't you save me? Wasn't I a good friend to you, Fox? Didn't you hear me asking for help? To be spared all that, then, the incessant maudlin weeping from their ntsc-rendered ghost, is your sole motivation to bail them out, to cut short, yet again, the all-encompassing slaughter for points.

If you have a hardened heart and can handle the guilt, however, you might as well get them good and killed by enemy fire as early as you can in the course. Dare you, Fox? Do you dare drown out the pleading voices of your closest friends? Do you dare set out to discover if it is indeed easier to go it alone? Because if one thing is quite clear, it is that you are, wholly, utterly alone, when the boss comes in. You are alone in the face of Andross's armada entire, and in the end you and you alone will face off agains that dread leader of the invasion. One whiff of the ominous operatic music and without even so much as a "be careful out there, Fox!" your so-called friends will ditch you to do all the work yourself faster than you can say little red hen. Sometimes, even in a galaxy far far away, nothing changes. Everyone wants to help eat the bread, but no one wants to help destroy the attack carrier.

Argonaut Software brings the low-poly aesthetic from their PC games into console and makes it look pretty charming because of the inventive machine designs. The enemies seriously look to me like how aliens with an understanding of mechanics uncannily different from us would model their weapons, simple and elegant.

However, despite the gameplay variety (and since I'm using Backloggd and not My Game Database to review the games like works of art beyond the fact that they are fun), it works as a standard on rails shooter...

...With the added substance of the protagonists displaying personalities in radio communications in the middle of the battles, with the noble intent of building a believable comraderie. However, the instances of characterization are extremely limited. Apart from Slippy showing himself to be playful during a moment in the Route 1 Intro Stage, the characthers just repeat the same stock phrases over and over again as they get chased by an enemy, want an opportunity to attack, and get frustrated with the main protagonist. Peppy in particular ends up having no personality traits whatsoever, while Falco is just the jerkass of the group all the while trough. It wouldn't have been so difficult to make him warm up to Fox or vary his opinions as the stages progress.

So in the end, the game may look quite polished in its presentation but I don't think it quite makes the cut, it should have had more attention to detail put into the conversations. The most interesting characther is probably Fox's dad because they keep talking about his backstory, but he doesn't show up in the game. I played the secret levels and beat all three routes.

If you are interested in these style over substance cinematic kind of shoot em ups to make way for an estimulating adventure while you organically feel the backup of your crew, I recommend the Sega CD version of Silpheed. While it sacrifices the inventive art style in its use of low-poly aesthetic for a more chaotic (and sometimes epileptic-inducing) direction, and for gameplay fanatics it's a much simpler experience than Star Fox, it instead focuses on grand backgrounds for the conflict depicted and the conversations with your comrades are more genuine and inmersing.

Star Fox released on February 21, 1993 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and is a rail shooter that you play in both first-person and third-person perspectives. The special part about it is that this is a 3D game during a time where this was uncommon, and from the get-go you can tell that what Star Fox does is pretty unique, especially for the platform it released on.

It was developed by Nintendo and Argonaut Software and has turned into a pretty popular series, warranting multiple sequels from Star Fox 64 in 1997 all the way to Star Fox Zero and, I suppose it is worth counting, a sequel to this original Star Fox game called Star Fox 2 released alongside the SNES Classic Edition. Star Fox 2 never ended up releasing back in the day, but it did exist, so it got its debut all these years later, which is pretty fascinating stuff.

In this original Star Fox, you control the character 'Fox' and his spacecraft, the "Arwing" in scrolling 3D environments. You dodge obstacles in the environment, shoot enemy spaceships and take on boss battles in each stage. Before you begin, you can select one of three routes to take to the final boss on a planet called 'Venom'. I took the Level 1 route thinking it was just the first level. Turns out, no, the Level 1 route is simple one of three routes that all lead to the same ending. The difference is that each route has a distinct difficulty, which is a system that allowed the devs to forgo any difficulty options. Personally, I like this a lot because it adds a lot of replayability to the game. Each route takes you through different planets and missions and therefore not only plays more difficult, but simply different in terms of the design of the levels. In turn though, the routes individually are not very long. The main reason why you might take more than a few hours per route is the difficulty, which even on Level 1 is no cakewalk.

That's in large part to how the game plays. The game is undeniably impressive and ahead of its time, but one negative that comes with that is that you will have to compromise. Compromise in Star Fox rears its head through low FPS (10-15) and below-average controls. Low FPS for a flight sim was very common in 1993 and the years before it, and those games usually had even less, so it's not the worst thing here. But just like many of those flight sims, this makes the original Star Fox slightly harder to play today and means it didn't age quite as well as some other games of its time. That said, I didn't have a lot of trouble with the low FPS apart from the parts where many effects on the screen would lead to slowdown.

The poor controls on the other hand I didn't quite get used to until the end of my playthrough. I dislike inverse control schemes in general, so that wasn't great when I had to decide to move up or down within a second, but often I felt the controls not be very responsive, I felt that it was hard to judge whether I was far enough away to evade certain projectiles and figuring out where to aim to actually hit something always took me a second of shooting somewhere (and missing badly) and then adjusting from there, which wasn't quite intuitive.

Issues like these were exacerbated by the fact that sometimes so much action would be on the screen, that projectiles would not be visible until they were very close, leading to a hit that would take quite a lot of health, so expect to die quite a lot of times early on due to things like that. Otherwise though, the polygonal graphics looked good enough here and were generally quite a big deal at the time. Having played dozens of games from its time before this, I can attest to not playing many games that were graphically impressive like this from a technological standpoint.

You also do get used to the controls, so there is that, but it's never feeling great, so I'm not sure if that's something one would necessarily deem a lot of fun at this day and age. I think it's fair to say that it's easy to appreciate Star Fox even today, but don't be surprised if you turn it off after the novelty wears off. If you really get into the boss fights however, which for the most part are well done and fun to tackle, you might get hooked enough to want to see one route through like I did, for which I recommend the first one. Whichever route you take though, you start on the planet Corneria, which has a great soundtrack, so look forward to that, while I myself look forward to playing Star Fox 64 one day, which I hope brings a lot more to the table at a time when 3D graphics were much more common and for the fact that it is the best selling Star Fox game to date.

(This is the 83rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Perhaps the biggest example of being spoiled by a game’s sequel. Star Fox 64 really is just this game but better in every conceivable way. I still appreciate this a lot though, if technology never advanced past 1993 and this was still the latest technology, I’m sure I’d be throughly impressed! However, being born 10 years after this game released makes it a little hard to get used to, simply because I’m so used to the standard of every other game I’ve played that’s released after Star Fox. This feels very slow by comparison. It’s still a good time though, the levels are good and flying the Arwing is still fun. I was disappointed by how many levels force you into a first person view and have you shooting that way, though. While you still control the ship, you don’t move it around in quite the same way, which destroys a lot of what I love about the gameplay of these games.

All in all, it’s still worth a shot, especially with how short it is. At the very least, I appreciate this game a lot for its impact on the industry as a whole. I can’t imagine how crazy this must have been at the time!

Y'know, I could complain about the extremely choppy framerate, but who needs a stable FPS when you have thE APE CUBE?

There once was a war even greater that the Lylat Wars, known only as the terrible and cruel Bit Wars; even if as a child I did succumb to the tempting and stupid brutality of the console wars, the bit wars are a time I didn't got to live, much less to see. But I do know some things about it, how its players were locked in a race against each others clocks, always raging to be the first to arrive at the stop of progress, or to put it in other words, to see who had the machine that could produce prettier shapes.

It was, by all accounts, a contest to see who had the largest wang, but it was a very good marketing strategy; being able to say in the magazines that you next game would look better than any prior product was going to catch eyes, hell, it still does today in some ways. And that's precisely where Star Fox enters, a showing of how with even 16 bits, you could have the 3D everyone so desires (kinda), an to be honest, to say that Star Fox shines only because of its graphics is both in part true and a disservice to the game.

Star Fox is impressive beyond believe, partially even to this day, to think that THIS was running (or rather walking) on a SNES is something that could only be attributes to some kind of black magic and really fancy chips. It's incredible how, even if its crude in some respects, the presentation holds up so amazingly even to this day; the never fails to communicate where the action is taking place, in big part thanks to the amazing pixelated background, but at the same time it has this kind of surreal and abstract feeling that makes it so incredibly original. The starships of Andross feel like they defy every kind of conventional design or even physic law, they all share this kind of clean and simple color palette that clashes with their complex and confusing nature, but not in a way that feels jarring, but adds to just give designs that truly feel alien to any world, all culminating in Andross' himself, there may be an ape cube under there, but man does is he weird yet imposing and I love it. Also, special mention to the BANGER soundtrack, they managed to capture such a special feeling with it and I understand why so many people like it so much.

The price to pay for the looks is, of course, the extremely choppy framerate; look, personally I don't find it as bothering as others tho, maybe because its consistently bad, but it's true that sometimes it makes it incredibly hard and confusing to distinguish anything, especially when the screen gets filled with enemies.

When this game throws you at ton of stuff at you, it can be HELL to manage it all and extremely confusing when the frames decide to be specially clunky, which is an huge shame because the gameplay and game feeling as a whole is outstanding! The way the ship controls, combined with the set pieces and possibility to change view, it's all so surprisingly fluid and works extremely well, and when you add the fact that you have multiple initial routes and you can even deviate of it... how? How did this come out in 1993?

I think that is where the true value of Star Fox lies, not in the fact that it may be a tool of war or a marketing strategy, but that the impression it causes is genuine, there was a ton of passion put into it and it shows, and despite its many unfortunate flaws, it still has very fun moments and I really enjoyed it!

Even if you end up disliking it, I really think it’s worth giving it a shot before jumping into other games of the series; it's an incredibly unique game that surprised me even 30 years later- WAIT, 30?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!... That somehow feels wrong for so many reasons.

Anyway yeah, game pretty good... but I really hope that the companions are more useful in next installments, it feels like they don't do shit, THAT GOES SPECIALLY FOR YOU, FALCO... but you are pretty good in Smash so its forgiven.

Star Fox is peak science fiction.

I'm not referring to the simple narrative, or the space setting, or the admittedly cool and original ship and boss designs; I'm referring to the game itself. This 1993 console cartridge - with a graphics chip so powerful that the dev team joked that the SNES was just a box to hold it - had absolutely no right to exist. But exist it did, and much like the clunky-looking tablets and touchscreens in classic Star Trek, Star Fox was visionary: a pretty-good facsimile of Star Fox 64.

It has plenty of merits: slick minimalistic designs, very cool boss fights with multiple phases and moving parts that must have been quite the spectacle at the time, and animation that isn't the smoothest but good enough to parse what's going on most of the time. The soundtrack is extremely strong and deserves unequivocal praise with zero "for its time" qualifiers.

It's also considerably less refined that Star Fox 64, in ways beyond the obvious technical things like animation and draw distance and game feel. The three fixed routes through the game feel rather rigid compared to its reboot's more dynamic pathing. Your wingmen are considerably less useful (which makes the permadeath mechanic hit less hard). And neither of the two camera angles feel great: the cockpit view makes it hard to get a good sense of where you are and what will/won't hit you, but the third-person view lacks an aiming reticle, further exacerbated by the fact that there is no charged homing shot in this game.

And obviously I can't negatively judge an older game for not being as refined as a reboot! But it does mean that as someone who didn't play this when I was younger I'm less inclined to be patient with it. If I were a kid in 1993 with a SNES, there was literally nothing out there like this! So I would likely keep playing the game in spite of its rough edges, eventually get good enough to beat the third route, and it would become one of my favorite games. Now, every time I struggle... I can just play Star Fox 64 instead. So I'm content to have completed the first two routes and leave the last one unfinished.

Star Fox suffers a little bit of "you had to be there" syndrome... and unfortunately as a Genesis kid, I wasn't there. But I do feel that it does enough things right to fly on its own merits, nostalgia goggles or no. I wouldn't class it as a 'must-play' for everyone, but it's a still-very-playable revolutionary piece of gaming history.

Until a couple years ago, my first and only experience with Star Fox was Star Fox 64. It immediately endeared me to on-rails shooters, but I knew at some point I'd need to go back and play the first game. I suppose it's also a little serendipitous that I caught up to this one on my bucket list less than a week after praising Ex-Zodiac, which takes heavy, heavy inspiration from Star Fox.

I think Star Fox is pretty good, and I can certainly understand why kids who played it back in 93 would have a lot of continued fondness for it, but without that nostalgia in place, I think Star Fox is more interesting as a technical showpiece than a game. That opinion is probably borne from the fact that I've already played so many other on-rails shooters that have taken directly from Star Fox, so there's a huge chunk of this game that feels all too familiar, too known to be impressive. At the same time, I think it's incredible they got something like this running on the SNES at all, even if it may come with some compromises (like game speed, which is overall pretty sluggish.)

The character designs are all cute, though. As a kid, I would've killed for plushes of the Star Fox crew. Actually, as an adult I still kind of want that. I'm not a 'plush' guy, I swear! I have like, four, so I don't think a few more would be excessive...

switch owners be like "it's portable though"

Nah for real this game's still pretty rad. I can't even pretend to represent an era in gaming where 3D graphics were impressive, but this game definitely nails the flying through space vibe. The illusion of a physical 3D space worked way better for me than I thought it would. And then besides the graphics it's a fun arcadey shooter. There's almost certainly better but my interaction with 99% of video game genres is filtered by Nintendo stuff, please understand.

i dont have a better transition so uh the music is cool, like the Corneria and Meteor themes. Really makes you think oh shit it's star fox let's go!! On the subject of smaller details, I appreciate the feeling of adventuring with your crew. I guess it makes sense the early gamer Internet would insult their poor dogfighting skills or whatever but nothing feels better than reassuring the homies that badabada ba daba at the end of every level. Especially because I heard they die in this one if their shield reaches 0??

Overall though, Star Fox is certifiably pretty cool. There's definitely parts where the bosses become a Powerpoint presentation and every input is more of a prayer you get out of the way, or a triagonal prism sucker punches you from off the camera, but it wasn't consistent enough to detract from the game too much for me. I dunno I don't feel like going "oh the 1993 3D tech demo has aged considerably and must be understood as a product of its time 🤓🤓🤓" because I really did have fun with it. Normalizing just liking an old video game cuz you're simply too epic for the haters to stop you 😎

I think this is where any normal person would just play the N64 one instead, but I don't really have a way to do that right now. Nuts.

I've been on a Starfox streak these days, just feeling the urge to replay all of the main games in the franchise for seemingly no apparent reason, something I haven't done since I was in 10th grade.

One cannot talk about Starwing without mentioning the elephant in the room, the Super FX chip for the SNES. What was at the time among the strongest feats in 16-bit console GSUs, we're talking about complex sprite processing and hundreds of polygons being rendered at the same time, in 1993 !!!

It undoubtedly was a technological milestone, was marketed as such and therefore is mostly remembered as a strong tech demo and a fairly decent game. It sure is clunky at times, with low (but surprisingly consistent) framerate making some of the trickiest obstacles even trickier and questionable boss design that usually doesn't go further than "shooting the big orange thingy".

But now, take a closer look.
See how charming the art style is ? While tech demos do age much faster than anything else due to all of them being the definition of "products of their time", Starwing maintains something in its low poly-ness and bright few colors.

Hey, talking about bright colors, while some concessions had to be made given the resources being used for all of the 3D rendering (you did not expect detailed textures did you ?), it also was quite a genius game design compromise, making the game somehow extremely readable for the most part !

Maybe you could glance at those particle effects when destroying anything, or that glorious sound design, or anything you could find.
Starwing is a product of its time, sure, but if anything, that makes it even better. Could we ever burst through 16-bit space again ?