Part of the brilliance of Nintendo is how subtle the quality they put out can be. If you'd asked me back in say 2001, near the end of the N64's life, what the best titles on the system were, Star Fox 64 probably wouldn't of come up for a while. Looking back now, few titles hold up better.That most N64 games don't hold up that well owes mostly to being the first 3D titles - naturally game design is going to learn from the mistakes of the predecessors in the same genre. No one will opt for Cruis'n USA over a Burnout Paradise, no one will opt for a GoldenEye 007 - as good as it is - over a Call of Duty 4 (although there is no accounting for rose-tinted glasses). So it is then pretty incredible that - despite two attempts (three if we count Star Fox Adventures) - no subsequent Star Fox title has come anywhere near close to matching Star Fox 64.
What's shocking is that it isn't even a remotely complicated formula. Provide some rail/corridor style shooting levels, provide different paths - this is simple stuff. [I'd say include some all-range areas, but these are easily the weakest parts here - putting the pacing in the control of the player ruins things. Too much time is wasted scanning the horizon for enemies to follow. Going all-range for boss fights works somewhat better, since the opponent is so much easier to find.]
The devil is in the details, however. Star Fox 64's success lies primarily in the nigh-flawless control (provided you aren't in a tank or sub, where the control is merely good) and in the excellent level design, where the stages show a remarkably eye for the pacing needed to pull this sort of game off. Star Fox Assault, the GameCube entry, actually did a pretty good job at this, but then it decided to also do some remarkably terrible on-foot (and in-tank) levels sporting shockingly bad controls (from a layout perspective - it's not like the 3rd-person shooter genre was not well established by that time). Star Fox Command featured no real level design to speak of. Star Fox Adventures wasn't actually a Star Fox game, though its Star Fox levels were actually the closest of all of these to really replicating Star Fox 64's precise control (what else would one expect from Rare - they are masters at mimicking what Nintendo has done before) - they just left out the the branching and bosses and such.
Presentation often cripples N64 titles when they are seen today - people complain when framerates dip below 30 today, they should see nearly any latter-generation 64 title. Star Fox overcomes this by not trying to push the limits of the hardware - much as Mario 64 did before it, and much like F-Zero X would do after it. This isn't to say things look bad here, but rather that later games would look, from a technical perspective, better at the sacrifice of performance. Looking at them now, as they all look pretty terrible, performance becomes significant. That Star Fox uses a fixed camera by default, when so many other titles of the day sported poor cameras also helps (and yes, a platformer then couldn't just do a fixed camera to fix this, but that still doesn't change that the camera is an issue).
Shocking also is that the voice acting manages to not be terrible - it's cheesy, but in a compelling way (as opposed to a distracting way). Yes, Slippy and Falco are annoying, but I'm pretty sure they're supposed to be, my point is that it doesn't have the sort of stilted feel other voice acting of the time had (probably owing to the avoidance of proper conversations, save for the mission briefings - which no one listens to anyway - and a rare exchange or two).
So what makes Star Fox 64 so easily forgotten, yet simultaneously so fondly remembered? Probably a variety of factors - it didn't actually reinvent anything from Star Fox for the SNES, it was then - as it is now - a pretty low tier Nintendo franchise (although Smash Bros. Brawl would have you believe otherwise). It is even enough of a low-tier franchise that Nintendo hasn't even seen fit to do a followup themselves, passing it out like some cheap whore to whoever wants to try their hands at it. But, hey, why bother trying to recreate something they perfected already?
A quick tangent - I had forgotten that Star Fox even came with the N64 Rumble Pak until I saw it featured prominently on the box-art above. Now, I enjoyed the rumblin' well enough at first, but it really becomes distracting to the point where I just left it off and forgot about it. That it was heavy and sucked batteries didn't help either. By the time the WaveBird came out, I was glad that I wouldn't even need to bother turning it off in the future. In the present generation, I've been pleased to discover that rumble is used much more subtly than in the past - unless there's an explosion in a cutscene, at which point developers find it important to encourage me to watch my controller dance across a table (because damned if I'm holding the fucking thing as it rumbles for 20 uninterruped seconds, Halo 3 or Gears or whoever it was).
8.5/10
No comments:
Post a Comment