Star Fox Brings Polygons to Super Nintendo - March 23rd, 1993 - Today in Retro Gaming
The Super Nintendo was lacking the CPU speed area and was simply not capable of large polygon based graphics. Nintendo solved this problem with expansion chips, much like they solved dissimilar problems on the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). One of the more popular expansion chips was the Super FX chip developed in conjunction with Argonaut. With the added power of the Super FX chip, Star Fox was able to be completed. This resulted in a good foundation for a new franchise that Nintendo revives on a whim.
Star Fox briefing
You are playing as Fox McCloud who is a four legged animal that commands a squadron of fighters. One of your wing men is a toad while the others are a bird and rabbit. The enemies are made up of robotic giants, dogs and monkeys. Think a slightly more "mature" Disney lineup an you would not be far off here.
Familiar gameplay
Game play is best described as a 3D scrolling shooter on rails, something like Space Harrier with a little more freedom. As you can see from the screens, this is a "primitive" 3D game by today's standards but let me tell you, back in the day, this was one of the titles to own.
Star Fox has a unique challenge level, rather than selecting a difficulty on a menu, you select one of three paths through the game universe. Each path represents a different challenge level and each brings its own set of levels for you to play through resulting in a good bit of replay value as your skills improve.
What could have been took decades to occur
There was a sequel that was never released, though various versions are available at different levels of completion. Of those there is an English fan translation available. This unreleased sequel is also available on the Super Nintendo/Super Famicom. The reason the sequel was canceled was probably the Nintendo 64 launching around this time. How cool would it have been had they simply upgraded the sequel for the N64?). Star Fox 2 is on the Super Nintendo Classic Mini and in English.
The beginnings of the Star Fox franchise
This was the first in a series that became a franchise of mistaken identities. There is an action role playing game style game (Star Fox Adventures on GameCube), Star Fox 64 (similar to the first and on Nintendo 64), a similar shooter by Namco (Star Fox: Assault on Gamecube
) and an on-line game on Nintendo DS.
There is a tech demo of Star Fox running on a stock Genesis (no add-on chips) available that is quite interesting.
No digital re-releases of Star Fox is available at this time. That means you will have to track down the original cartridge version to enjoy this classic. Grab a copy of on eBay or check out Amazon for a deal and enjoy it because they simply don't make games like this anymore.
Star Fox is one of those classic games I haven't played yet, someday I'll have to, I like games like this
It still holds up well today, just that it is very much a game from that generation is very obvious.