Star Fox 64 3D Multiplayer – Perfect Blend of Old and New

Remakes and rehashes are becoming ridiculously popular these days, and I can only assume it’s for the simple reason that they’re cheaper to produce than creating a whole game from scratch, and they have a higher chance of success than their more original counterparts. That being said, remaking an old classic isn’t always a bad thing, but you really have to be careful with how you portray it.

On one end, you can simply throw a game in HD and rerelease it at a slightly cheaper (or more expensive, I guess) price point. Into this category fall things such as the God of War Collection, Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil 1, Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The developers didn’t really put much into the ports; they just kinda did em.

I also heard Modern Warfare 2 is getting remade– Oh, wait.

On the other end are games that completely revamped to the point where you can’t really recognize what the original game was, such as Resident Evil 1’s GameCube.

Then there’s the middle of the road, where a developer can completely upgrade a game to the perfect degree, without losing any of the original charm and fun it had when it first came out. This is where Star Fox 64 3D should be placed.

I only had the pleasure of playing the multiplayer of the game, and for those who don’t know, here’s a quick overview: 4 players go at it in various vehicles, such as tanks, arwings, or on foot, and duke it out until the time runs out, at which point the player with the most kills wins. When I played, we could only use arwings- which was all fine and dandy because frankly, that’s by far the coolest vehicle anyway- and we had (I think) three minutes to shoot each other down as much as we could.

Chaos ensued.

Chaos ensued.

Okay, maybe chaos didn’t ensue, but I sure felt like it did. I was up and down, left and right, veering back and forth destroying my enemies until I could no longer. The graphics were crisp, the animations were smooth, the controls were– well, honestly the controls were a little sensitive for my taste, but that’s likely a matter of playing it and growing accustomed to how they work. All in all, I really enjoyed myself, and on top of that, I won the match!

The cherry on top of this delicious cake of a game is a cool new feature they added where they replace the in-game characters faces (Fox, Slippy, Falco, and Peppy) with a live broadcast of your face using the 3DS’s internal camera. I was initially very skeptical of this idea because it ran at like 4 frames per second, it made me surprisingly happy to see my victims’ faces and get to make faces at them after I won. It was like kindergarten gym class all over again.

Only in Star Fox I wasn’t actually destroying my enemies.

Overall, the multiplayer in Star Fox 64 3D seems to be shaping up really nicely, and despite the fact that we North American players won’t see the game hit shelves until September, I’d say this is one well worth pre-order. Especially if you’re like me and you played the original game like a gajillion times until your eyeballs fell out, had surgery to replace them and then did it all over again.

Man I love that game.

Image References: Here, here, and here.