How did they get away with selling a 1 hour game?
Story.
Nintendo is known for a lot of things - story telling is not one of them. Star Fox 64 is pretty light on story. Essentially, you are part of a group of animal fighter pilots who are trying to save the universe from a gigantic monkey head named Andross.
Your furry and feathered team is about as annoying and shallow as video game characters get, and their laughable scripting and voice acting only make your distaste for them stronger. This gives you absolutely no motivation to see it through to the end. For the time, the amount of voice work in the game was something to marvel, but by today's standards it just comes off as annoying. Luckily, it only takes an hour to beat the game so you won't need much motivation anyway.
Gameplay.
Building off the smooth-as-butter flying and shooting mechanics from the original Star Fox, the game controls like a dream. Controlling your ship is simple and intuitive, shooting is fun, and using upgrades and deftly pulling off special maneuvers will convince you that you could probably be in the air force if you wanted.
The overall level progression design is where I start to feel a little gipped. There are somewhere around 20 different levels in the game, but you'll only see seven on a single play through. The levels you get access to depend on whether or not you meet certain conditions in previous levels. I messed around with a few of these, but ultimately didn't see the value in going back and guessing what to do to open another level. No matter which path you take, the same boss awaits you at the end anyway. And once you beat the final boss of a game and see the credits, the motivation to go back and play through it again greatly diminishes.
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| The map |
Presentation.
Star Fox 64 is an incredible looking game. Even by today's standards - the ships are well designed, the frame rate is silky smooth, and the music is top notch. It's just a shame I couldn't enjoy it for more than an hour.
In the end, the gameplay and controls are spot on fantastic, its the strange design that really kills this one. The strange thing is how well this game was received. It generally got scores in the 8s and 9s upon release and sold 300,000 copies in its first week on the market. I mean it's not a bad game, just an incomplete one.
Stuff I Loved:
- Smooth as silk space combat
- Varied levels
- Thoroughly decent graphics
- Slippy Toad - worse than Vanille
- The length!
- Shallow story
Perhaps it's just nostalgia, but StarFox64 was one of the most beloved games of my childhood. You cannot approach it like one of today's story-driven games, however. It is more reminiscent of of the arcade shoot'em ups of yore. If you only played through the game once, I suggest you go back and attempt to take the "hard" path through the game, resulting in a different experience altogether, even if that means looking up what needs to be done to access a certain branch.
ReplyDeleteAnd for the record, the boss fight at the end does change, quite significantly if you take the hard path.
Plus, if what you're looking for is more of a challenge, there is a harder difficulty setting unlocked be obtaining medals on all planets, if I recall correctly.
the map isn't correct. you can't go to Macbeth from Titania. That yellow line should be from Sector X to Macbeth
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