God it felt good to be back in an Arwing again. (Or in space even, the Star Fox Zero demo dredged up from within my soul sweet nostalgia for the Rogue Squadron series.) On the screen it looked like the Star Fox 64 of my youth with a third-person view of my space fighter (or later on, the new chicken-esque "mecha" form of the Arwing), and on the GamePad it looked like the beloved cockpit mode from Star Fox (SNES) of my youth. And the demo levels felt nostalgic too, what with the highways, buildings, and arches in Corneria being so familiar even though the level was entirely new.

Looks familiar? Don't judge a book by its cover.

But fear not, Star Fox Zero does not strike me as a game that is banking on nostalgia. The new "mecha" form of Star Fox's iconic Arwing, for example, made a short appearance in the secret alternate manner of defeating the level's boss whereby you expose a tunnel and then fly into the mothership (think the final space battle in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace) and then, with my Arwing's wings transformed down to act as legs, take on the enemy mothership's energy core. I felt confident as I made quick work of the demo boss without even using the GamePad screen to fine tune my aiming.

Even though it didn't figure much into my demo mode experience that time, that interplay between the TV (third-person vehicle view) and the GamePad (first-person cockpit view) is also new. I can see how this setup has the potential to be confusing: both screens show what's going on, but which do you watch when and how do you adjust your understanding of game space when switching between them? However, armed with a plethora of descriptions from NWR staff who've gone before me, I felt only marginal growing pains. The left analog stick was for controlling my direction, the right one for boosting or slowing down, as well as rotating my wings left or right (a double tap of which would "do a barrel roll"). (In the mecha mode, I didn't rotate my wings but did execute extremely useful sidesteps.) To perform a Loop maneuver I could flick my right stick up and my left stick down, but I made far more use of hitting the X button for simplicity and directness. I imagine the U-turn maneuver is mapped to the B button, but in truth I never intentionally executed one.

Versus the mothership core.

It occurs to me I don't know what button I was pressing to attack, all I know was I had no problem firing lasers, and I had no problem holding the button down to charge up a homing shot. As I held the charge, an automatic "lock-on" reticule appeared on-screen so I knew when I'd generated a firing solution and could release the button to launch my attack. Nostalgia again: the same hit bonus from Star Fox 64 appears to be back when you use a charged shot to take down groups of enemies simultaneously.

One of the neat things of allowing people to fine-tune their aim through first-person on the GamePad is it allows you to attack targets at an angle without flying directly at them. For example, the crawling ground robots in the latter part of the Corneria level can only be damaged from above. If my lasers were exclusively forward-facing as they are in Star Fox 64 or the many Rogue Squadron titles I'd have to gain altitude until I could essentially dive-bomb the target at the right angle. That was no longer necessary here: I could simply fly above the enemy and angle down on my GamePad to shoot them from above without changing my flight path. And those giant lasers the enemy mothership would fire directly at me? I didn't have to fly into their path to get a bead on the weapon emplacements, I merely had to fly a little lower, and tilt my GamePad up a bit. (In fact, this brings to mind modern weapon systems on attack helicopters where the guns are capable of rotating to the direction the pilot is looking even while the aircraft itself is flying in a different direction.)

Precise aim is necessary to hit this enemy's weakpoint.

Now that I think about it, it brings to mind the gyroscope aiming of Splatoon. I wonder if I could play predominantly through the third-person TV view, and blindly position my GamePad as necessary to tweak my on-screen firing reticle as needed, at most other times leaving it dead ahead.

In fact, I wonder if it would be possible to play 80, 90, or even 100% of the game through one view exclusively. The third-person vehicle view on the TV screen is of course the de facto standard of many games, and if I merely locked my aiming forward it would be inconvenient at times but perhaps not crippling. And as for cockpit view, it was my favorite way to play the Asteroid Fields in the SNES game, and I made it a point to play the Battle of Endor level in Rogue Squadron II from within cockpit of my A-Wing star fighter. (Perhaps a cockpit-only view mentality would also allow for off-TV play?)

What might two simultaneous views of the action do for our game experience?

Perhaps I'm geeking out a bit here, but the challenging newness of Star Fox Zero's controls seem to be opening up new angles for me as a player to approach this game from. There will be a period of adjustment, but I'm hoping that afterwards it will be followed by a period of unbridled play.