Fri, Jun 26 · 6:00 PM PDT
The next meeting will take place on Friday June 26th at Vocari Hub. It starts at 6 PM and ends at 10 PM. The featured game is the remake of Star Fox 64 for the Nintendo Switch 2. Club meetings are usually on Saturdays and start much earlier. However I also setup events at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View twice a month and I thought the Fourth of July would be a bad time to have an event. So it was either have a short party on a Friday or wait until August and I think a small event on a Friday is the preferable option. If you absolutely can’t make the event because it’s later in the day or a Friday remember that I’ll still have Star Fox on the Switch 2s for any future parties that will return to a typical Saturday routine. If I had reserved the room a few months earlier then maybe I could have gotten Saturday.
Star Fox 64 if I recall correctly was originally released in July of 1997 for the Nintendo 64 which was about a year after the system first came out. The game was bundled with a Rumble Pak that plugged into the back of the controller and would shake any time the player took a hit. Star Fox is a rail shooter similar to Panzer Dragoon, Afterburner, Space Harrier or Rez. Most of the time Fox’s ship the Arwing moves through a predetermined route through the level, but unlike a shooting gallery you can see the ship you are flying and can move around the screen to dodge attacks or switch targets. Occasionally you’ll enter all range mode which lets you fly around in any direction and engage in more dynamic aerial dog fights.
The Switch 2 version of Star Fox is perhaps too faithful to the original Nintendo 64 game and offers mostly the same experience. There’s an all new multiplayer mode that is unfortunately online only and also one player per system. Note that I will bring three Switch 2 systems with me at the party, but the game supports eight players online. The other main selling point is that there are new cut scenes both before and after a level where General Pepper gives a mission briefing or the team reflects on the stages events back on the mothership Great Fox. It’s unclear how long all the cut scenes are and how much they add to the game’s overall length but I would guess around half a hour in addition to the hour or so it takes to normally play through Star Fox 64. The graphics and music have of course been greatly improved compared to the N64 release. However some of the characters have been redesigned to resemble animals more and humans less. For example Falco now has legs like a chicken and uses his wings as hands which is an odd change. People are also complaining that they changed all the voice acting as well as almost all the dialogue in the game to match the new script. So if you like to recite lines from the N64 game while you replay it then you’ll probably be disappointed.
Nintendo released a demo of the Switch 2 version of Star Fox on the Eshop. It contains the second stage Meteo, a training area, and the intro cut scene which replaces the scrolling text at the beginning of the original game. After playing the demo and a bit of the N64 game I realize that I’m pretty bad at Star Fox, certainly below average. I’m ok at avoiding enemy fire and charging laser shots but I keep hitting walls and almost never u-turn or brake. Worse I often don’t use bombs since I prefer how they worked in the Super Nintendo version where you aim and fire. Having to press fire again to detonate the bomb often leads to me being stationary too long while I line up the shot and taking more damage than if I just spammed laser fire. I liked that the demo allowed me to play with uninverted flight controls where up is up and down is down. I always have trouble when the Y axis is inverted in games and it was nice to see an option to disable it.
