2283: Emergency, Emergency, Incoming Enemy Fighters

Star Fox Zero is out this week. This game has kind of snuck up on me, but I’m very excited to give it a go, because I love Star Fox.

Or, well, I love the original Star Fox/Starwing and the N64 sequel/remake/reboot/whatever it was Star Fox 64/Lylat Wars — I must confess, I never played the more recent games on the Gamecube and DS, partly because they weren’t particularly well received and partly because they didn’t quite sound like what I wanted from a Star Fox game, which is to say, a solid rail shooter in ’90s arcade style.

I vividly remember playing the original Star Fox (in Japanese) for the first time. Having been playing computer games on the Atari ST, I was already used to what was supposedly Star Fox’s biggest innovation: polygonal 3D graphics. And, in fact, in many regards, the polygonal graphics found in Atari ST games were often more complex and impressive than those found in Star Fox, though there were a few fancy tricks that Nintendo’s game used sparingly that absolutely couldn’t have been done on the ST, most notably some occasional texture mapping and the combination of hardware-scaled sprites with the polygonal ships and structures.

The fact that I wasn’t as immediately gobsmacked by Star Fox’s graphics as I felt like I was supposed to be didn’t matter, though, because everything else about that game made up for its relatively simplistic polygons. The spinning, digitised speech-accompanied launch sequence that reminded me of an arcade game; the incredible music; the G-LOC-style zooming in and out of the cockpit in the spaceflight sections — all of these things combined to give me an experience on a home console that, while I recognised wasn’t quite up to the standard of arcade games — most notably in terms of frame rate, resolution and screen size — certainly came damn close, reminding me in particular of Namco’s Starblade, particularly in the first-person spaceflight sections.

Lylat Wars was interesting because there were a lot of things it did better than its predecessor, and some things it did worse. Most notably, the graphics were considerably better, with the game being probably one of the most visually impressive games on the N64, and the music was fairly atrocious, making use of Nintendo’s dreadful MIDI synth chip that it used throughout most of the N64 era, which somehow managed to sound worse than the wonderful wavetable synthesis music of the previous generation’s SNES. Thanks to its inclusion of digitised speech throughout instead of nonsensical babbling, Lylat Wars was also the birthplace of what was arguably one of the first ever gaming memes in the form of “Do a barrel roll!” — though my friends and I always preferred “You’ve gotta use the boost to get through!” for some reason.

I’m looking forward to trying out Star Fox Zero for myself, an am unperturbed by question marks over its strange-sounding control scheme; Splatoon’s control scheme sounds strange on paper, and that certainly works extremely well, so I’m open to being convinced. I’m also reassured that Arthur Gies of Polygon hates it, because Arthur Gies of Polygon hates anything fun.

Game assures me that my copy has been shipped so if I’m lucky it might even arrive a day early tomorrow… if not, expect some first impressions on Friday.

All ships check in!!