NBrid

The long wait is almost over. Originally a N64 game, Dinosaur Planet, it became a StarFox game and moved to GC. After numerous delays, it's almost here. Will this giant change in genres from a shooter to a Zelda-esque adventure be worth the wait? Does anyone care seeing as how no one seems to care about any Rare game now that they have left Nintendo?

You can find demos of SFA in stores now. In the demo you have a choice of playing the entire game from the beginning or jump to one of three areas that they picked out to play. Two of the three are adventure mode levels and the third is a classic StarFox shooting/flying level. Here are a few quick impressions I had.

The graphics are very, very good. Yes it is another cartooney looking GameCube game, but this is the best yet. The character models look good and are very well detailed. When they say you can see Fox's fur fly, they are so right. Their animations were just as good with the game running at a solid, high framerate for all the demos I tried. Part of me wished the game had more 'mature' or 'realistic' looking graphics though. I mean for an adventure game that type seems to work better usually, but I won't complain since what it had did look quite good.

On this note, maybe it was just the fact it was a demo, but the 'atmosphere' of the game seemed very dry and flat even with the excellent visuals. Hopefully the full game has more "character" to it.

On this tiny in-store unit it is way too hard to tell much about the sound. All I can really say is that there are voices (and not the garbbled voices of past StarFox games), and it didn't seem too bad (like the Slippy voice of Melee). Other then that, we'll have to wait on.

The control also seemed to be dead on. The best part of StarFox 64 I always felt was its perfect control. However, I found it odd that the c-stick was used to change, well, something about your weapon. Without any in-game help to point this out in the demo, I thought I was stuck at one point before I knew how to 'use' that. But that's really a demo problem rather then a game problem. I hope.

Ah, the levels themself. The first one I played is the one I thought I was stuck in. After blowing up a wall and mashing on A to watch Fox take care of two enimies with his stick, it took me a bit to find what to do next. But then when I did, I was in a cart race trying to catch these two baddies. I must of been doing something wrong because it was very slow. I kept ramming one enemy and blew him up just before I reached the end of the tunnel I guess, and the demo ended. Really wasn't too impressed at this point. It was very generic and formulistic. Fighting the enimies was nothing great, nor was the cart race battle able to mix it up. Nothing other games hadn't already done, and better.

But then I jumped to the flying demo. Yes, this IS what StarFox is about. It seemed like a decent stage, but it felt like an early 'learn how to play' stage since the main object was to fly through a bunch of gold rings. Still, this stage got my hopes up again for the game. StarFox has always been different from other games beacuse, especially in this day and age, it was a fun corridor shooting game.

Lastly I tried the other adventure demo. This one made no sense to me. It had a bunch of dinos wandering around, but that was it. Some guy told me to use my head when I asked him why I couldn't use my blaster. I tried to figure out what I was supposed to do, but I just got bored of it and wanted to go play the flying stage again.

There is one of my concerns. I just wanted to play the shooting/flying level the whole time I was in that adventure stage. I'm afraid in a game that is only about 20% flying, I'd just go through the motions during the advture mode just to get back to another flying stage. And that would be no fun at all.

So in the end, the jump from a shooter to an adventure still has me very concered. I didn't like it when I first heard about it, but I had hoped playing it might ease that. It only made it worse. I just felt StarFox in the past was always great because it was a shooter, and good shooters are hard to come by. So why the change? Especially one that at least in the demo seemed no different from the plethora of other "adventure" games out there. At least I didn't see any "collect 20 of this and 50 of that" stuff, but that doesn't mean it isn't in there.

If I want a Zelda-esque game, I'll wait for Zelda. If I want StarFox, I'll wait for Namco's traditional shooter version.

I'll try and keep an open mind and wait for the reviews since this was only a demo afterall and it might take time to really get "into" the game, but my hopes are not very high. Which is sad. Especially since this is Rare's last effort for Nintendo.