Genre: Rail Shooter
Developer: Argonaut Games
Year: 1993

Rating: 8

Review: One of the first SNES games I played. My brother worked at a video store and was able to bring home a system and games every once in a while (before he bought me the system in 1994). Star Fox and Super Mario Kart were frequent rentals. Star Fox quickly became my favorite shooter to date as I was blown away by the Super FX chip (though admittedly it wouldn’t blow any one away now or even twenty years ago).

There were several innovations that I enjoyed. Having three difficulty levels that involved different actual paths through the game was a nice treat. Being able to switch between first and third person view was nice, though I almost always use third-person as I feel I can better sense my hit detection. And there’s your three wingmen, who are mostly useless and aren’t required to win the game, but they provide comic relief and they can be fun to save (during prescripted sequences where they get attacked).

That said, the difficulty is partly due to the restrictive nature of it being a rail shooter. Sometimes you think you can avoid an enemy by going a certain direction when it turns out, nope, you’ve hit the edge of the rail. Sometimes the hit detection is hard to predict. I was able to beat the game on the first difficulty level, but I’ve never managed to get too far on the other two.

Despite these frustrations, I enjoy the music, the sound effects, and the goofiness of the animal fighters enough to get past them. Even though I haven’t played the game in years, I can still remember each set of garbled sounds the character make.

Emergency, emergency…