Take a look at this quote from Flying Omelet about Starfox 64:
Star Fox used a new technology to create a new type of graphic environment, but it wasn’t just an eye-candy FX demo. It was a gamer’s game with a hardcore challenge at its heart. Star Fox 64 marks a turn where all games would now try to appeal to everybody, except those who had been playing for years, and they’d be made with the assumption that they were the first game the player had ever touched. There was also a backwards shift in focus on the “real” challenge being in the score instead of in the boss battles and level design. Score high enough, unlock a ton of bonuses. Who cares about anything else? There was scoring in Star Fox, but it was secondary to the main goal of just beating the game.
Although Star Fox 64’s graphics are technically superior, they are also dull, not very colorful, and there is too much fog. I actually prefer the surreal, and much more colorful look of the original Star Fox. The music of SF64 is very much inferior to Star Fox’s score, and it’s not even a good soundtrack on its own without comparison.
Finally, I have problems with the representations of some of the characters. In Star Fox, Peppy was not an old man, and Slippy was not an annoying little kid. WTF happened to General Pepper’s voice? And ROB64 is pointless. Worst of all, the story is not exactly clear on how it fits in with Star Fox’s story. It seems to be more of a retelling than a sequel, which is a huge no-no! You do NOT retcon a game with an inferior product. Yes, it gave us such hilarious dialogue as “Do a barrel roll!” and “You want a piece of me?”, but that’s another problem: These characters never shut up, which is not only annoying, but detracts from the ability to enjoy the mood and atmosphere of the environments.
So yes, by now it should be clear why I have this game ranked so high on this (overrated games) list and why I don’t hold it in the same regard as I do the original. It’s not that it’s an entirely bad game on its own, but it’s a bad sequel, and it makes my heart sink to hear that Star Fox Adventures and Star Fox Assault are possibly even worse.
I have tried so hard to like Starfox 64, and I can’t do it. I am realizing just how much I despise the game, yet I can play the original Starfox all day. In fact, I despise most of the N64 games such as Mario 64, Yoshi’s Story, and I have mixed feelings about Ocarina of Time (Zelda games after Ocarina of Time went down the shitter with Aonuma hostility against gamers’ games).
Above: Back when Nintendo games had good soundtracks. *Sigh.*
Flying Omelet puts forth an intriguing idea that the so-called ‘casualization’ people bemoan Nintendo about where a game had to be all things to all people started with the N64. I would have to agree. The Starfox franchise wasn’t destroyed with Starfox Adventures, it was with Starfox 64 in a similar way that the Mario Mania was ended with the unpopular Mario 64 (it was unpopular in comparison to the Marios that preceded it). Ocarina of Time wasn’t even played as a Zelda game but as a 3d sandbox, as a type of pre-Grand Theft Auto 3 game (Miyamoto was surprised that most people who bought Ocarina of Time didn’t bother to finish it. Perhaps they just played it more as a sandbox?). Mario Kart 64’s tracks were so long and boring, people didn’t bother and just stuck to the battle modes with four people. So Mario Kart became more like a sandbox.
I don’t mind sandboxes as games. But that is what PC gaming is for. I hear people talk highly about Goldeneye, but I always found the game to be garbage because I played true First Person Shooters on the PC with Internet access and all. Today, people replay Goldeneye and say, “Wow, this game is garbage.” Derp.
Out of all the reading I have seen on Nintendo, I have never seen one Nintendo developer speak of the development experience of the pre-NES, NES, or SNES areas as ‘fun’. When they talk about Link to the Past’s development, they speak of it as if it was a horrible experience. You never see Miyamoto talk fondly about the making of the original 2d Mario games. You don’t see Sakamoto talk about how much fun it was to make Metroid, Metroid II, or Super Metroid. I get the impression that Yamauchi worked his engineers very hard.
But when it comes to the N64, suddenly everything changes. Nintendo developers start talking glowingly about the experience. Not everyone, of course, has a good experience (the Mario 64 programmers quit the company once the game was done). It is a marked change from the earlier games.
I’m a business guy. I look at the N64, and I see disaster not because of ‘cartridges’ or anything else. It is a disaster because of the first party games. These games didn’t excite people like they used to. The N64 sequels, which were Gamecube games, continued this downward trend.
The NES and SNES original games were designed around the arcade skill formula. The N64 games played more like 3d sandboxes. In Mario 64, it was a 3d sandbox where you hunted for the star. How boring! Who even liked such games?
The complaints I had about the N64 are similar to the complaints the ‘hardcore’ gamers have about the Wii. This is fascinating. The N64 games do mark the time when Nintendo stopped making ‘gamers’ games’.
Why Nintendo keeps returning the N64 formula for the games even though they are demonstrating no growth or health for the franchise is another story altogether.
I believe Nintendo irrevocably changed sometime in the late SNES era especially with the release of the Virtual Boy. The N64 disaster was seen as ‘success’ inside Nintendo only because it wasn’t a Virtual Boy. And I suspect Nintendo’s attitude has been “How do we get people to play the games we want to make?” ever since. Nintendo even expected the Wii games to get people interested in Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 or Zelda Twilight Princess/Skyward Sword. The 3DS blatantly reveals Nintendo expecting everyone to become excited about 3d gaming.
Take the NSMB games for example. What is wrong with them goes beyond the music or graphics. The NSMB games aren’t designed as gamers’ games as the original 2d Mario games had. The NSMB games are 3d Mario formula sandbox games turned into 2d… that is the problem. You shouldn’t be able to leap off walls or never face a game over screen. The game is a joke in difficulty so they have ‘collect-a-thons’ as a ‘challenge’ (which isn’t a challenge but more N64 formula crap).
I would like an actual gamers’ game from Nintendo. Wii Sports comes across to me more as a gamers’ game because you actually got a game over screen.
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