Nintendo’s usually pretty good to their protagonists. Just a glance in Mario’s direction shows that he can pretty much do whatever he feels like and get a game made to boot. Link is pretty prolific too, but doesn’t get much time to relax and screw off the way Mario does, even though they’re both in the princess rescuing business. Then again he’s less suspiciously buddy-buddy with his nemesis during his off hours. (It’s probably pretty easy for Bowser to nab the Princess on his way out of the castle when they invite him over to play board games or race go karts.) Samus has made a respectable showing too, even if it lead to her making the transition from an asexual killing machine to slinking around in blue latex tights. With a whip. I think that’s what they call ‘crossover appeal’ in the business.
Considering (because, maybe?) the first game was designed to show off a big-deal new technological gimmick they were trying to shove at us, the Star Fox team seems to receive a lot less love than Nintendo’s big three. If Metroid was Nintendo’s take on Alien, then Star Fox pretty clearly set out to be a similar treatment of Star Wars, minus the mystic parts and with more overpowered fighter craft taking on armadas of giant ships and robots. Fox McCloud and his team of well, furry wingmen, take to the skies to battle the forces of an evil empire, and as if to further drive home that absent human race is evil, simian characters invariably are, or turn evil. Okay, I guess on paper the idea of a rag-tag band of ‘funny animals’ fighting against FURSECUTION kind of makes the whole affair sound like a bad idea, but it’s the games that matter. The games. And not any parallels to certain internet subcultures. So, let’s take a minute and think way too hard about the Star Fox series, shall we?
That was a rhetorical question, you should know by now you’re a puppet with no free will. READ ON.
CHAPTER I: HOLY SHIT, POLYGONS
Star Fox was a big deal when it came out, thanks to the SUPER FX CHIP, a short lived and mostly unloved processor built into cartridges to let them create and handle polygons on the SNES. It might be hard to believe, but at one point in the primeval past, video game graphics were composed of ‘sprites,’ carefully drawn pixel based representations of things like spaceships, items, enemies, and ninja breasts. As versatile as these… so called ‘sprites’ were, there were some things that could only be achieved by slapping together flat, unshaded planes in the rough approximation of a starship or ninja bosom. Polygon graphics made the greatest achievements of the modern console age possible, like awkward 3D jumping puzzles, painful looking clipping errors, and eventually, dynamically-shaded, bump mapped, and painstakingly authentic ninja breasts.
Of course, you can’t really say Nintendo was responsible for the polygonal revolution, as the Super FX chip was more of an attempt to catch onto the tailgate of the speeding advances of the PC gaming industry and the unconvincing 3D on other systems of the time. At any rate, Super FX games were pretty bare bones 3D, and if not for the cut scenes and manual, Star Fox could be convincingly passed off as the struggle of four clusters of triangles in their desperate struggle to overcome an army of butterflies and shoeboxes. And Nintendo could have probably shoved it out the door that way, stamping a name on it like “SUPER SPACEFIGHTER FX” and dooming it to only be remembered as a future Smash Bros trophy. So, around this space shooter, a story of four fuzzy wuzzy mercenaries striking back against Emperor Andross and his armada of… butterflies and shoeboxes.
Star Fox filled an important niche for Nintendo as well- up to then, their games had been mostly whimsical romps where you jump on colorful enemies heads, tempered by the more slow paced and thoughtful, exploration based Metroids and Zeldas. In Star Fox, you hop into a fighter and blast the holy hell out of wave after wave of enemies with reckless abandon, while barrel-rolling, boosting, and braking (uh, okay, air brakes aren’t all that exciting). Even though it was in 3D, Star Fox works more like a casual arcade shooter than a flight sim, which makes for a pretty damn satisfying experience even with a low poly count and less detailed enemies to pick apart limb by limb.
Essentially, the game pretty much stays on the rails and sticks you on a set course. There are three routes of different difficulty, which is pretty admirable when they could have made the same set of levels and thrown more enemies out on each. All roads lead to the baddies HQ on PlanetVenom, though (assuming you don’t drop into the Black Hole or ‘Another Dimension’ along the way.) Bosses are large, multi-stage spectacles you have to gradually whittle away to nothing, the only one that really fails to be any fun whatsoever is the ‘dragon’ of Fortuna because 1) it looks like a multi headed, squarish chicken, and 2) comes off to me as a really cheap fight.
So in the end, Star Fox isn’t really a game that aged well, even though if you were there when it was new, the graphics have a certain… je nais se quois that most other Super FX games lacked (Vortex came later and looks cruder, and Stunt Race FX’s bug eyed cars are just made of floating parts like something Rayman might drive.) And to boot, the backstory was ripe for fleshing out- we had a band of rag tag mercenaries led by a young hero with a missing dad, an evil empire, and several inhabited worlds to explore. WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO STAR FOX NEXT!?
His sequel would get canceled.
In a dick move that really deserves a name at this point, considering how often it happened, Nintendo Power Magazine actually previewed Star Fox 2 in an issue, including transforming fucking Arwings! After being teased by all the enemy mechs in Star Fox, I was pretty worked up to get my hands on that game but- whoops! It never came out! Actually, it was pretty much a hodgepodge of ideas that would be broken up and distributed among the rest of the series- the overall framework was a semi-RTS like Star Fox Command, Star Wolf’s team technically debuted in it but appeared in SF64 anyway, and even though the transformers were ditched, Command also kept the element of each character getting a variant Arwing. It basically looked like a crude version of Command, while having more interesting missions at the same time, which is another way that it manages to make Star Fox Command into a roundabout depressing experience.
ROM dumps of 2 exist, or you can just watch this video if you’re too lazy and afraid of the ROM POLICE.