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.
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.