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Star Fox Adventures

by Jonathan Metts - May 28, 2001, 4:22 pm EDT
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How much difference can one year make? Not much, judging by Jonny's hands-on impressions of the so-called "new and improved" Dinosaur Planet.

Being one of the few PGC staffers who has now played both the original N64 and new GameCube versions of Dinosaur Planet, I think my perspective on it is a lot different. As I've said many times, Dinosaur Planet on N64 was a technically impressive, Rare-ized Zelda 64 clone. It was sharp, fun, and intriguing. Many people had asked Rare for years to dip into the RPG genre, and Dinosaur Planet was and still is the closest they've come since the old Ultimate days.

Now the game is Star Fox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet, and I can find little merit in either the system change or the new character license. Some of the playable areas in this year's E3 demo are exact lifts from last year's game. For instance, there is one boss battle, I think his name is GuardClaw. Not only does the whole segment play EXACTLY like it did last year, but it looks like an N64 game! The giant creature appears to have been retextured, but his geometry and animations are at least too similar to the old version for me to notice any difference. That's pretty pitiful with a whole year of development and an exponentially more powerful system.

Luckily, the new areas are a lot nicer looking, with much texture skinning and light sourcing thrown about. Fox McCloud, who looks eerily close to the original DP hero, is well animated and nicely rendered. His Arwing, however, is way too rounded for my tastes.

The gameplay hasn't changed much, although it comes off as less Zelda-like for some reason. Fox appears to have a few more attack animations than I saw last year, and there is one nice feature where he uses his "magical staff" to vault up to higher platforms. Other than that, the main addition seems to be the space combat missions, which were not playable at E3 and reportedly will only be a small part of the final game.

Perhaps what is most disappointing is that SFA was one of the least polished demos at the show, when it should have been the most. Odd and distracting jitters, presumably from loading, occurred every few seconds, while the tempting "secret area" was actually just a very buggy level deemed too unstable to fully show off to attendees.

Fox himself looks downright misplaced in these lush jungle-like environments, especially wielding a big staff, shooting magical fireballs, and commanding around a little baby Triceratops. I'm not opposed to established characters expanding their appeal through new types of games, but Rare has a long way to go before they convince me that Star Fox characters belong in a game once named "Dinosaur Planet". SF Adventures has the potential to become GameCube's first Zelda-style adventure game, and a great one at that, but Rare has a lot of work left to get the game polished up to the standards set by everything else I played at Nintendo's booth.

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Genre Adventure
Developer Rare
Players1

Worldwide Releases

na: Star Fox Adventures
Release Sep 22, 2002
PublisherNintendo
RatingTeen
jpn: Star Fox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet
Release Sep 27, 2002
PublisherNintendo
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