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Looking back to 1993 and the Polygonal Planes of Star Fox

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1993, eh? What a year that was. I was a mere boy of 20 years, attending the University of Derby, living in a student house that resembled something out of the Young Ones, and all in all, life was good. 

My Super Nintendo was the highlight of many drunken student nights, with Super Mario Kart being a particular favourite of the reprobates I lived with. But I was playing a different game. Yes, I was trying to get my head around the way that Star Fox looked and played, and now I’d like to share some of my memories of not only the time, but also some thoughts about the game. 

Come with me to some thirty years into the past and let’s see what I can dredge up from the old long term memory. 

star fox box

Starting off with things that I am sure about and that is the stats and facts about the game. The big thing about Star Fox is that the cartridge it came on included an extra chip, called the Super FX chip, allowing the relatively humble SNES to throw around what was, for the time, a huge amount of polygons. The way the game looked, I remember, was completely different to anything else back then, as, for instance, all the Nintendo and Rare games used sprites to show the action. Moving to a polygonal model was a whole new world. 

Since then, Star Fox has almost constantly been on the list of the greatest video games of all time, and went on to sell over four million copies, enough to establish it as one of Nintendo’s flagship franchises. Except in the European market where the PAL systems held sway of course; the game had to be renamed to Starwing due to a German company having a similar sounding name. StarVox, Star Fox, it must have been a real worry!

Star Fox itself was an on-rails shooter, and one of the interesting things about it was the way that the difficulty was worked out. You see, most games in that period made you select a difficulty level before starting, but Star Fox went about things differently. At the start of the game, you selected which path through the Lylat system you wanted to take, and each different path represented a different level of difficulty. This was a good way of doing it, as each path had unique levels, and so as you got better at the game, it gave you new challenges to try. 

star fox screen

The action on screen was pretty good as well, with Fox McCloud, our hero, having a nifty range of offensive and defensive options in his Arwing spaceship. He had his usual weedy cannon, which was fine for the smaller enemies in the game, but then he also had some big bombs for the inevitable bosses at the end of the levels. He also had a thruster and a retro rocket arrangement, allowing him to speed up and slow down to try and avoid the enemies. If it all got a bit hairy, you could do a barrel roll which usually got you out of trouble. The way that the ship and the enemies moved was very good to watch in motion, and playing it was a silky smooth experience as far as I remember. 

The look was challenging initially, I have to admit. See, whilst the ships seemed okay, suitably pointy and angular to fit the whole aesthetic, the bosses did sometimes look a bit strange. The last boss, Andross, was a huge polygonal face, and I did find the look of it a bit off putting at first. However, as you got used to the polygons, the style of Star Fox receded into the background, all as the fun of flying and shooting came to the fore. If there is one thing that Nintendo have always been great at, it is making their games lots of fun to play, all the way from Mario Bros to the latest Smash Bros. Star Fox is no exception. 

It was Star Fox that was also a spring pad for Fox McCloud and his motley crew, spawning a number of sequels and spin offs. Although there was going to a sequel, directly numbered, it never came, but apparently parts of the game surfaced in 1997 in Lylat Wars for the Nintendo 64. There was a game on the Gamecube called Star Fox Adventures, and other releases on the DS, again incorporating elements from the cancelled Star Fox 2. But that’s not all! With a variety of cameos in other games, from the Smash Bros series to Starlink: Battle for Atlus, the ill fated “buy little ships and put them in the game” title, Fox has been getting about. 

star fox screen 2

It is odd to think now that this is almost Genesis for the way that a lot of games are put together now. Obviously as consoles have got more and more powerful, the amount of polygons has increased, and now they look as smooth as silk. Think about how games have moved on – the original Tomb Raider on PlayStation, and then think of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and the difference is astounding. What games will be like in another thirty years blows my tiny mind!

So, these are my memories of Star Fox, from back in the day. Are you too old enough to have played this at launch? Have you played the other ones? Let us know in the comments. 

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