On-Rails Blogging: STARFOX 64

Miss me?
I've been absent for a minute, out of sheer laziness and procrastination I suppose. HEY! I have a job! Don't give me that look...I've just been distracted is all.

With anime and video games okay! Stop badgering me!

So yeah, let's get back on track, let's get a few blog posts up here!

TITLE: Star Fox 64 (3D)
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Star Fox 64 is the On-Rails shooter game, without being fully on rails! It was my first experience with the Star Fox series, and basically the only reason I played the games that followed in its footsteps. Star Fox has kind of stuck around in my head since then, and even the games that I've had minimal exposure to I've enjoyed for the most part, but none have compared to the original (my original, not the SNES title that I've barely been exposed to at all.)

There's not a lot I can really say about this game, it didn't have a big compelling plot, super difficult levels, or even a lot of thrilling gameplay. It's just you, piloting the machine of choice for the level, and shooting down enemy ships. I say there aren't super-difficult levels, but then I never beat the "real" ending of the game, couldn't get past the Star Wolf team, but I beat the easy path of the game hundreds of times.

I can remember replaying the entire game a dozen times to get perfect medals on every stage, and then never being able to take down the final Star Wolf team, it was...really annoying to say the very least. I'd like to pick this sucker up for the 3DS just to give it one last try, really show Star Wolf what I'm made of! YEAH!

Remakes Galore

Change of Subject
I know, I know, I was supposed to drop a series of AI based posts last week, I didn't, I can't really tell you why, I just wasn't feeling it. I had a pretty good idea of what I was going to do, mostly the AI of strategy games and how ridiculous their ability to micromanage is, but I just sort of...lost interest.

Instead, this week, I want to hit a few high spots in my own experiences with gaming and the things that have come of them from the gaming scene as a whole, most notably: video game remakes.

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And there you have it, five games that I think definitely deserved a re-release, got that re-release, and I have yet to beat said re-release. Now for the most part, these are games I have not played at all, the exceptions being: I own the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, have not beat any game on it yet; I emulated both Pokémon SoulSilver and Super Mario 64 DS, but only played them for a brief moment to test the waters, a sort of demo, if you will.

Now, the original idea was that I would list five games that I had beaten in the past, and for the most part this is true: I beat Silver, Gold and Crystal for the Gameboy Color, alongside my aunt and mother I completed all of Super Mario 64, later playing back through a majority of it myself, and of course I've beat Star Fox 64 multiple times. Metal Gear Solid 2 was a huge game for me, probably only the third rated M game I played (next to Mortal Kombat Trilogy and Halo), and one of my favorite games of all time, alongside introducing me to the idea of playing games stealthily, prior to that I always sort of pictured games, particularly games with guns, as something you rush through and just gun people down in. Then there's that last entry, Rare Replay.

Let's be honest, unlike Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, Rare Replay embodies several generations of games and several types of game play, and unfortunately, I was not exposed to most of them, and did not beat those I was exposed to. I can really excuse my way through putting it on a list of games I've completed and anxiously awaited a remake for like I could Metal Gear Solid 2, because I never beat any of those games. To be fair, I completed arcade mode in Killer Instinct Gold...so I guess that's like beating it...right? Please don't go all Fulgore on me.

See, Rare created what is, in my opinion, the two greatest platformers of their generation, Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie, and that's just it, I've never really played a platformer after that which really drew me in as much as Banjo and the bird did. That's why, when I heard there was an official console sequel coming out, I couldn't contain myself, and after it released, despite the horribly weird vehicle based gameplay of Nuts'n'Bolts, I still played it all the way through, collected as many upgrades as I could, and never gave up on it. Loved every minute of it. Plus, there's games in there that I really wanna try out like Perfect Dark, Kameo, and Grabbed by the Ghoulies, and I always enjoy classics so the older games on the list I'd definitely like to try my hand at as well.

Anyway, that's a brief update on what to expect from me over the next several days, and I promise at some point we'll touch on AI again, but not this week.



Game cover images courtesy of Wikipedia contributors
Banjo thumbs up courtesy of RetroGamer: the greatest video game intro you'll ever see.