Star Fox 64

I was never sure if Star Fox 64 was a sequel or a reimagining of the original game. They both feature you, as the titular Star Fox, along with your flight-buddies of a frog, a rabbit, and a blue falcon (no, not that Blue Falcon) have to save the solar system from an exiled (and criminally insane) evil-genius-monkey-scientist. I remember at the end of the original game blowing up a giant cube with Andross’s (the monkey) face all over it. I assumed that meant he was dead. But I’ve assumed lots of things in the past, mostly incorrectly.

The game goes along a lot like the original Super NES offering. You and your three buddies fly along a landscape. You end up doing all of the fighting enemies, finding hidden routes, and that kind thing. Your buddies are apparently way smarter than you and they don’t actually do much of anything. They very very rarely ever shoot anything, probably so they don’t raise the ire of the enemy pilots. Though sometimes an enemy will tail one of your buddies anyway and you have to rescue him before he gets shot down.

If you can manage to keep your friends alive, they don’t really help that much, but they do talk to you. Your guys are constantly chattering with each other and with the enemies. I thought that was pretty awesome, since I was led to believe by Sony’s hype engine that Nintendo cartridges wouldn’t have the room to have such things on them. Even though every review of the game bemoaned the fact that although there was a ton of voice-work in the game, that it didn’t sound crystal-clear (a.k.a. CD quality). To me it sounded more like staticy radio communications, you know, since they were talking over radios. So it was fine.

Also introduced in this game was a tank and a submarine to pilot. The tank being far less lame than the sub. In fact, I liked driving the tank around almost as much as driving the plane around. But the sub? I like to pretend that the lone submarine level doesn’t exist anymore.

What really gets this game going, though, is the multiplayer. You and three friends can get together and play with whatever combination of tanks and flying machines you choose and fight it out until only one is left standing. This makes for some pretty intense battles, if your friends are any good at the game at all. You also have the option of playing the mode while on foot and carrying bazookas, but that’s just dumb. You’re a smaller target, yeah, but kind of vulnerable without wearing an armored vehicle of some sort.

I would end up playing this game a whole lot. Which is kind of weird, since I normally don’t really like flying games. I suppose I was just entertained by the… ’snappy’ banter between the characters. That and the fact that they were actually talking instead of making generic animal noises.

Oh! And that it came with the new-fangled Rumble Pak that vibrated my controller whenever I took damage in game. That was pretty amazing at the time, though it’s pretty ‘meh’ these days.

Good thing that Rumble Pak had other uses later on.

One Response to “Star Fox 64”

  1. [...] cool thing about this game is that it came with a Rumble Pak, kind of like the one that came with Starfox 64, which you cram into the bottom of your DS. It reacts any time you make Samus crash into something, [...]

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