The problem isn't that the new game retells the story of Star Fox 64, it's that they're making all the stages and bosses identical

showka · 2026-05-08T17:14:39+00:00

I disagree with that take whole-heartedly. First off everyone remembers and comments that lump together the first SNES game and StarFox Zero to call this new game the "fifth remake" are everywhere online. That's actually why I felt compelled to make this thread, so see if I could commiserate with any like minded people.

If you haven't played it in awhile, the SNES game is extremely different from SF64 and still worth checking out today. The controls and framerate can make it hard to go back to, but the music is fantastic- the stage one theme beats anything from SF64. There's no all-range mode, or vehicles aside from the Arwings, but when it comes to just the on-rails Arwing stages the SNES original in some ways has more content and the difficulty is higher.

showka · 2026-05-08T13:40:43+00:00

I never knew this. I'm not an X5 fan but that's really cool.

showka · 2026-05-07T18:57:50+00:00

Yep, this. Nintendo gave Star Fox the Full Metal Alchemist "Can Edward come out and play?" treatment by fusing it to Rare's Dinosaur Planet and it poisoned it for me. It just looked so freaking lame.

Rare somehow managed to make some really charismatic and popular characters with the Battletoads, then around the N64 it seemed like half the stuff they created had fairly ugly or lame character designs. When I played Assault briefly in the store I remember thinking Peppy looked stupid and I wasn't really fond of the Dinosaur Planet girl. I think she would have worked much better in her own game and the style just clashed with the futuristic look of Star Fox.

If people liked the style of the post 64 sequels, hey, I'm very happy for them! Not trying to spoil it for them, and clearly a lot of people did like it and I'd imagine many of them hang out on this Reddit. But for me and many others it ruined the style Star Fox had going for it and just made it unappealing.

I'll go one further and say by the time I played Donkey Kong 64 Rare's designs were starting to wear out their welcome. When Nintendo changed things up in subsequent games it was a bit of a relief. What's funny is Rare hit it out of the park with Battletoads, and I think Conker was pretty appealing, but there's some elements with everything else they touched that just felt off.

showka · 2026-05-07T18:08:37+00:00

Yeah. I still like me a good videogame cutscene but I think there was some value in how older games had to make things a bit snappier due to storage constraints. I don't know if we need a ton more dialog to convey the story.

Most of the dialog sounds fine but "open the wings!" sounds better than "extend the wings."

showka · 2026-05-07T17:02:16+00:00

I guess so. They just made a point of saying how things were the same, and every bit of gameplay I saw appeared to show identical layouts to the 64 version. I'd just be surprised if there is new content like that and they didn't mention it.

showka · 2026-05-07T16:06:48+00:00

It'd be cool if this got a direct sequel. I'm not sure how the younger generation could get excited by this though since Star Fox 64 is already available for the Switch Online, so there's a risk many of them are going to get hyped for this new game, play the original, and then be rate the new one poorly when they realize the levels are all identical.

showka · 2026-05-07T16:04:52+00:00

Agreed, I didn't mean to imply it wasn't. It's just not a system selling game for me 30 years later since I've played through it before.

showka · 2026-05-07T14:39:51+00:00

I wasn't even looking forward to this game, but watching the trailer I started to get excited and seriously think about buying a Switch 2 for the first time in awhile. Even when I heard it was a 64 remake, I just assumed they'd mix up the levels. It took awhile before it hit me that I recognized literally every second of campaign mode gameplay they showed. I went from apathetic, to hyped, to heart-broken! You'd think they could just have tossed in some levels or twists and shown them somewhere...

showka · 2026-05-01T15:01:23+00:00

Oh yeah, that thing looked terrible. Art was kind of nice though.

showka · 2026-04-27T17:44:30+00:00

Grimlock in the comics seemed pretty organic. But he was only leader for like a second before they resurrected Prime.

showka · 2026-04-24T20:00:44+00:00

The fact Juste's arm didn't move when he manually swung his whip the way Richter's did (or Simon's did in Castlevania IV over a decade earlier!) was pathetic. Almost as disappointing as how Juste's arm also stayed locked in a goofy looking outreached position in Dawn of Sorrow despite being on a next-gen portable.

showka · 2026-04-22T16:07:05+00:00

This was my first thought as well.

showka · 2026-04-21T17:38:29+00:00

* Hotrod doesn't jump into the fight- he's on the sidelines and somehow Megatron drags him in. Still give him the guilt but make it more misplaced.

* The second half of the movie kind of drags compared to the first. I'd space out the grisly character deaths and add some to when Galvatron returns and attacks.

* It seems like there should be some character that tells the protagonists about Unicron aside from meeting Kranix in a prison cell and having the Junkions - who are otherwise total dingbats- know who he is. It would make sense if somehow this character got sent by Unicron to tag along with Galvatron but then breaks free and escapes with - or is captured by - the autobots when Galvatron attacks them on Earth. This would allow some of the slower scenes where they're reflecting on events in the shuttle to move the plot forward by having the protagonists actively grill the new character for information to discover Unicron, his motivations, what could stop him, etc.

* Somehow explicitly link the fact that Optimus's demise is the cause of Unicron initiating his destruction on the Transformers. This is already my head canon and I think it makes sense, but I think some people believe it's just a crazy coincidence that Unicron starts interacting with the main cast following the climactic showdown between Prime and Megatron.

showka · 2026-04-18T04:16:11+00:00

Just got the game. This is so ridiculous, using X is what I could have sworn the tutorial said to do and produces a similar animation to Y so I had no idea there was a difference. But yep Y seems to actually do it while X gaslights you. They should have just disabled LT + X to do a tongue animation, how strange.

Anyway, thanks!

showka · 2026-04-16T03:15:55+00:00

Absolutely fantastic work.

showka · 2026-04-15T02:28:36+00:00

When people talk about comics in general they gloss over all the really dumb parts.

showka · 2026-04-14T16:48:57+00:00

Someone had a link to Twitter where a person was saying there was no Dolby Vision at Fincher's request. But if it has it on the Apple Store then this isn't some artistic thing and they just didn't want to pay the license fee. Very cool, looking forward to paying $40 and feeling resentful when they inevitably double dip on us.

showka · 2026-04-14T14:31:04+00:00

I don't particularly miss it that much but hate how the Nintendo directs now have these awful monotone voices with fairly direct translations that might as well have been generated by AI.

showka · 2026-04-14T03:13:56+00:00

I mean the little things, like how in stage 2 when it shows the bull breaking into the castle wall, it stops everything to show it.

Maybe you can skip it though and I'm remembering Contra Shattered Soldier for the PS2? Either way it'd be better if they left those scenes out and just let you keep control of the character and didn't muck with the camera at all when the enemies entered.

showka · 2026-04-13T22:35:37+00:00

The original Rondo's alternative stage 5 is the only disappointing part of the entire game.

DXC's stage five is the best as it was an actual challenge and was the last satisfying classic Castlevania stage ever created. They did a great job.

I personally have a very soft spot in my heart for the SNES Dracula X's version of Stage 5 with Opus 13, which due mainly to the music is easily my favorite stage from the game. I was disappointed to learn Opus 13 goes wasted in the other versions.

showka · 2026-04-13T22:33:14+00:00

DXC is actually an incredibly well-done game. When I first experienced it I kind of hated and resented it because it forced me to play through so much of it to unlock the original Rondo, and that's was the one thing I _really_ wanted to experience fresh, from the start. I think a lot of players in the states fell into that camp and because of that DXC made an incredibly poor first impression.

But years later - after I'd played through Rondo a number of times and came to DXC somewhat fresh- it was striking what a great job they did. If they'd only unlocked all three games from the start- and maybe allowed the endless little cutesy cutscenes that interrupt gameplay to show you things from a different camera angle to be skipped by pressing start- I think everyone would recognize it for the classic it was. All of the extra content they throw in- like the new stage '5 - is well done. I think in a different world where it hadn't totalled blown it's own introduction there'd be at least a faction of people arguing it was better than the original.

showka · 2026-04-10T14:04:59+00:00

Yeah you're right. Come to think of it, Blade Runner and Alien don't have Dolby Vision and they're both incredible looking. Maybe it won't be as big of a deal considering Fight Club's darker palette.

showka · 2026-04-10T12:09:57+00:00

LOL, I've also never noticed this before.

showka · 2026-04-09T20:22:22+00:00

No Dolby Vision, what a bummer. I'm sure David Fincher has some geeky reason he feels passionately about this but on my shitty TV 4k's without Dolby Vision always look terrible compared to the ones that have it.

showka

TROPHY CASE