Let’s Play Starfox 64!
Starfox 64 was released in June of 1997, shortly a year after the Nintendo 64 itself came out. I still remember securing my presale reserve ticket from Toys R Us.
Let’s Play Starfox 64:
Of course I was still a kid at the time when it came out that June, which made it easily the most expensive game I’ve probably ever bought in my life at probably $80 (I’m not sure I remember how I strung together that amount of cash at that age), but it came packaged with a “rumble pack”, which was Nintendo’s groundbreaking controller peripheral which caused the controller to shake in shake-worthy situations in many Nintendo 64 games moving forward.
It was pretty crude and weighed the controller down quite a bit, and today’s controllers with the built in rumble technology are much better. In fact it’s so commonplace now that you sort of don’t even notice that the controller shakes.
Anyway, what a revolutionary this game was when I was a kid. I was a big fan of the first Starfox, and this one improved upon the lackluster grainy graphics and loose controls of the original many times over.
Plus this was the first game I can remember which had full voice acting (remember I wasn’t a Sony guy back in the day so I may have been behind the curve), and decent voice acting at that. I remember reading in Nintendo Power at the time that Nintendo wanted the player to feel like they were part of an interactive movie experience, and the voice acting played a huge role in that.
The couple of nonlinear 3D levels were my favorite like the Independence Day knockoff one or the StarWolf penultimate level; it was pretty cool being able to fly around in a complete circle and the dogfighting is still a lot of fun today.
The multiplayer version was okay, I did have some fun times playing that game with some friends, mixing up the air, land, and sea vehicles. The combinations of different crafts made this mode pretty versatile even though it was limited to just battling your friends on relatively small and plain maps.
The multiplayer was quickly overshadowed for me, however, as one of the greatest couch co-op games of all time came out a couple of months later in Goldeneye.
Everything about this game felt pretty damn polished at the time. Keeping in mind where I had come from with Nintendo, the game felt like a fine achievement and it was fun to revisit this game for the channel, and a because of that release date and that summer I’ll always equate it with the summer time, being fresh out of school and having a great time with some friends.