On the eve of the release of Star Fox 64 3D for the Nintendo 3DS, I thought it would be fun to look back at the original game.
[embed:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLYUKslEZrQ ]
I have a soft spot for this game and the way it looks as it was my first exposure to polygonal 3D graphics. Sure, there were better looking games on the PC and arcades around that time, but I wasn't into either scene back then and was completely ignorant of games like Virtua Fighter. Star Fox's geometric environment was different compared to the video games I was used to, and its simple shapes and sharp edges helped piece together a sleek, futuristic sci-fi universe. Additionally, my first and only attempt at creating fan art involved drawing triangles and squares to construct each of the ships. Why develop any real drawing skills when all I needed was a ruler?
Today, it's hard to be impressed by a collection of flat shaded polygons, but Star Fox still holds a kitschy appeal for me. It's like a paper airplane: simple, bare, and ready to collapse into the 2nd dimension. But it still manages to fly, with its core rail shooting providing enough challenge and variety to keep me interested. And though I've played Star Fox 64 on a friend's Nintendo 64 and found it to be technically impressive, I still lament over some of the changes that were made to the planet designs. Macbeth didn't have a train in my game, but I did fly my Arwing between the upper and lower crust of the planet. And in my mind, Fortuna was the dinosaur world where I shoved plasma bolts down the throats of a two-headed dragon.
I won't deny that nostalgia is coloring my fond recollection of this game, but flat shaded polygons were a hit with me for a while. A couple other games that became favorites of mine were TIE Fighter and MechWarrior 2, and those games featured flat shaded polygon engines as well. The action in all of these games is what made me stay, and my imagination filled out the blanks.