What Is Starfox Anymore?

One of 4cr’s good friends in the blog world (or read, we wish), the constantly entertaining craig-ign, just got around to posting a recent article on his infamous IGN blog posing an excellent question we Nintendo fans have neglected to answer all this time: what the hell is the deal with Starfox anymore?

Even when I was just a wee tyke reveling in small games, Starfox for the SNES was an incredibly underwhelming game for my little ol’ self – and this was the same little kid who sat down one weekend after school and played a Sim City city from beginning to the tragic ending at the hands of every disaster imaginable to man. But when my brother bought the game and played it throuh in front of my eyes, I simply couldn’t understand what it was all about. Even in a fantasy setting, nothing made sense.

The box art was bad enough for a little kid to handle (Hell, even in those days, I understood fairly clearly irony of the Phalanx box art) – “what did these horrible creatures have to do with a space shooter?” I asked myself, as I held both Starfox and Earth Defense Force in my hands.

In the end, I truly did end up enjoying Starfox when the 64 iteration came around (as it seemed to learn how to take itself a little more seriously), but even during the days of the 64 version, I found myself at odds trying to figure out what Starfox wanted itself to be. With a constantly changing character structure and story with more transformations than an Autobot Rubik’s Cube, I just couldn’t understand what Nintendo wanted with the series.

Sure, Mario was supposed to be the platforming and sports games – the fun stuff! Zelda was the hack and slash, and Stafox was the spaceship game, right? No! It only involved shooting things in a space ship for, maybe, a grand total of sixteen minutes. Everything else was driving around in some other thing that definately wasn’t a space ship – unless I’m gravely mistaken.

Read craig-ign’s discourse on the evolution (or rather, degeneration; if that’s at all possible by conventional science) of Fox McCloud, and give us your thoughts. What do you think about Starfox, as a whole? Do you think it’s just a confusing money grab, or do you think it’s one of Nintendo’s last franchise strongholds with enough room anymore for some solid experimentation?

Craig-IGN’s Blog Entry on Starfox