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STARFOX Company: Argonaut/Nintendo Released: March 1993 Genre: Shooter Graphics: 8.5 Control: 8.0 Sound/Music: 8.0 Storyline: 7.5 Review by: Corbie Dillard ©2008 SUPER-NES.COM

Back in 1992 a small company named Argonuat decided to take the standard side-scrolling shoot em' up and somehow built a 3-D vector-based shooter out of it. Trouble was the Super NES, with it's slow CPU, had enough trouble even handling a simple sprite-based shooter as it was, so they knew they were gonna need some help. That's when they developed a new processing chip that could handle the intense calculations this game would require as well as sport a much faster processor speed. Thus the Super FX chip was born. This chip, based on the RISC architecture, allowed for some serious calculations to be done at incredibly fast speeds, speeds that completely eclipsed what the Super NES system could do by itself. Argonaut developed this vector-based shooter, called Starfox, around the power of this chip and Nintendo in turn had these Super FX chips installed into the actual Starfox cartridges themselves. This added a little to the cost of the game, but in the long run produced some quite impressive graphical feats given the time of this game's release. But don't get the idea that Starfox is just visually impressive. It's also a pretty good game as well. It's easy to look at the screenshots and think to yourself that this game looks like utter garbage. And in truth, by today's high-tech 3-D standards, it's fairly plain looking. It reminds me of about a year ago when I went into a local Pizza Hut and happened to see an old Sega Virtua Fighter arcade game. Not being able to resist I went over and stuck a quarter in it for old time's sake. That's when I realized how terrible it really looked all these years later. But at the same time I remembered the first time I walked into an arcade years ago when it was first released and I couldn't take my eyes off of it. I don't know that I've ever been that impressed with a video game visually in my life. Funny how far we've come. That's sort of the attitude you have to take with this game. When Starfox was first released, there was no 3-D gaming really to speak of. So as dull and plain as this game looks now, at the time of its' release it was extremely impressive visually. Now you didn't have to be confined to either a horizontal or vertical-scrolling shooter, now you could actually fly into the screen. The downside to all of this was that in order to be able to manipulate these graphics in a 3-D style, the objects onscreen had to be drawn as polygons. This made for very "blocky" shapes, but it was a small price to pay to be able to pilot a ship in a realistic simulator-style method, not to mention it gave the game a very unique look to it that was very rarely seen at the time. If it was 1993 I would have given this game a score of 9.5, but given the fact that it hasn't aged as well as some of the other SNES games, I had to knock it down at least a point. Musically I wasn't expecting a whole lot when I first bought this game but it honestly shocked me. The music is very well orchestrated and has a high-end rpg sound to it. I would have thought Argonaut would have been content to let the flashy graphics carry the weight in this game but they did an outstanding job with the soundtrack in this game and everytime I hear it, it always brings back fond memories from when I first bought this game years ago. There's also some really well done speech in the game, although not nearly as much as I would have liked since you conversate with your fellow pilots quite a bit throughout each level. All in all, though, a great soundtrack and definately worthy of the cutting edge graphics of the game. For anyone that's ever played a shooter, you're gonna know the basics of what Star Fox is about gameplay-wise. You pilot a spaceship pretty much blowing up anything in sight. You will be able to upgrade your cannon fire as you go, as well as use the traditional "smart bombs" when needed. Just as in horizontal and vertical shooters, you'll spend most of your time trying to split your time between navigating the increasingly more difficult levels themselves and shooting objects and enemies that are trying to stop you from making it through each of these levels. You'll have to get your flying skills down pat if you want to have any chance of getting through all of the levels in this game. While there is a lot of shooting action, the flying requirements in each level are what make the game such a challenge. At the end of the areas you'll have to face a boss. Some of the bosses are easy to beat and some are downright difficult, but one thing that can be said about most of them is that they're unique in both look and movement. Somehow Star Fox manages to combine the flying challenges of a flight simulator with the intense shooting action of a shooter and mold together a fun and challenging game. While many will tell you that Star Fox is too difficult to truly enjoy, I honestly think it offers a good mixture of challenge and playability that will keep any shooter fan content for at least a few hours. Star Fox was a game that, when released, impressed a lot of gamers around the globe. It was original, unique, and moreover a very playable game. It's got a decent storyline, some nice tunes, and a 3-D look that wowed many a gamer at the time of its' release. Although Star Fox hasn't aged as well as many of the other Super NES games, it's still fun to pick up every now and again and play through just for old time's sake. For those who weren't around or into gaming back when Star Fox was first released, you're most likely not going to be impressed in the least with this game, but those of us who remember how stunning this game looked years ago, can still pop this game in from time to time and feel the nostalgia that comes along with remembering what a turning point this game was for shooters to come and what an accomplishment it was for the 16-bit Super NES.