A miserable little pile of secrets!

…

I’ve just played through Star Fox 2, the unreleased/unfinished SNES game. That IGN editorial, while it wasn’t really that critical, spawned that 4CR post by Mitch that was far too critical. Hey, the point was that the series lacked constant character design and Craig didn’t like Assault. I didn’t either, at first. And SF was Nintendo’s first 3-D title, right? Or at least it was one of them. It’s hard to start from that and continue on into the current generation without some inconsistency. You’re going from when 3-D was butt-ugly to it being the crispy standard of today. It’s hawrrrd.

But anyway, I’m not going to get my feelings hurt because someone dosen’t like the same things I do.

SF2 is the unseen narrator that bridges the gap from the original game to Star Fox 64. It shows that the series was ready to be expanded upon after the first one. It’s got so many things that made it into later Star Foxes, like Star Wolf, ground missions, the tunnel sequence before the last fight, and Slippy’s androgynous voice. And many things that never made it past SF2: partially RTS-ish gameplay, 2 extra characters (Miyu is way cooler than Krystal btw), walking arwings (the Landmaster is cooler than this though).

I’ve probed a newfound interest in 3-D flying shooters over the past year, thanks to SkyGunner [ps- thanks vox, i think you suggested it. it’s awesome.], and Star Fox 64 and Assault and… ah. I wish there were more. There was a time in my life when I wouldn’t play anything with an inverted-y-axis control scheme, because it all seemed hopeless. It’s easy to get used to though. SF64 taught me good.

When I played through again on my blogaversary, it was after giving up on it the previous day in disgust. I had been used to uninverting the controls, thanks to SG and SFA. I couldn’t handle the uncustomizable controls or the unrelenting jibes from my girlfriend.

“Hey, stop flying into the ground!”

I did better the next day. Then I went for SG, struggled with uninverted controls, set them inverted, and everything was fine. The opposite became the norm.

So why did it take me so many years to grapple with inverse controls, which are apparently so natural that they’re the only option in so earlier-gen many games? They never made sense to me. Neither has the numbering scheme for guitar strings, but whatever. C’est la vie, psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est, fafa fa fa fafa fafa fa fa.

The fact that I can handle the controls now prompted me to finally check out Star Fox 2, which has sat on my hard drive for a few months now.

It’s way too easy on ‘normal,’ but higher difficulties are actually very rewarding. The graphics are ambitious for the kind of 3-D that the SNES could put out, so they come out looking low-res, blocky, ugly and choppy. Controls are intuitive, and onscreen narration usually tells you what to do. Not in the “Do a barrel roll!” sense but the “Hey, you can go faster by pushing Y” sense.

If they had put this out back in the day, it would have been a massive success. Or at least it should have been. It dosen’t really steal too much of SF64’s thunder; the two are vastly different.

By the way, get SF2 here.

I was pretty skeptical of trying out an unfinished/hacked/fixed rom, but it turned out well. If it weren’t for this page, I might have never tried it. I’m glad I did, it really ties the series together. That lack of cohesiveness that Craig-IGN and Mitch talked about is less jarring now that I’ve played this.

I think I’m going to try out Star Fox Adventures. I’m not expecting much, and I’m not paying more than $5 for it. It deserves a chance, right? Well, even if it dosen’t. Star Fox Command better be good.

On an ending note, why does Peppy get older in every game?

I couldn’t find any shots of him from Command, but I remember that he looked ancient.