Putting together this article made me realize what a big ol’ load of B.S. Star Fox was. Look at the black borders on those screenshots! I swear it wasn’t drawing half the Super NES’s pixels. And it still only managed like five frames per second. It’s almost like Argonaut pushed the console to its ragged, bleeding edge or something.
You have to give star fox a lot of credit for cramming so much charm into a bunch of objects that were generally created with less than a dozen polygons each. The Arwing is still a great fighter design, even though it was almost entirely defined by its constraints at the time.
Something Nintendo’s always been good at. Mario’s look — mustache, hat, overalls — is entirely a result of having to work with a 3-color 8×8-pixel sprite with 2 frames of animation. (Well, a few more once you add jump, hammer, and death.)
Absolutely. The original is honestly the only game in the series I can stand to play. When the vague polygonal abstraction was lost, so too was an essential part of the series’ charm.
See, I can’t even get behind the original. Probably my least favorite in Nintendo’s big franchises.
The real reason for me was the charge shot being granted homing ability in 64. Did to the series what the Mega Buster did to the original Mega Man franchise.
Wish I didn’t miss FFV yesterday. Concur with that one 100%. Also partly responsible for motivating John Ricciardi to learning Japanese and now localizing games!
Star Fox was a perfect case of a game where the technology simply wasn’t ready. Star Fox 64 is a masterpiece that has yet to be matched. This one was so mediocre that they didn’t even bother to release the second one, heh.
Love the artwork, though.
http://i.imgur.com/dQLkL.jpg
I disagree. Starfox 64 was IMO soured by the homing charge shot.
Fun Fact: Your teammates’ voices in the game are various distortions of the “Wing Damaged” sample.
Those black borders are actually a pretty smart idea–they probably barely showed up on most TVs at the time due to overscan, which is something even modern games have to account for. Given how nuts it was to make a polygon game on the SNES in the first place, that’s not a bad place to recover some performance.