Haldo!
I’m doing something a little different for this C-Blog recap. It’s October 2nd 9th as I’m writing this, two weeks one week before the release of Starlink: Battle for Atlas. Or as I’ve taken to calling it, Star Fox Zero But Actually Good. Star Fox Re:Zero? Star Fox Zero Plus One? I’m still working on a good title.
Star Fox Zero-Five-Eight Days Over Two comes out on the 16th, which is the same week I’m doing recaps. And let’s be honest, I’m not gonna spend my free time writing jack by then. I’ll leave that up to future me. With that in mind, I decided to write out the intro section well in advance before I actually get to the recaps. It’ll be a time capsule of my thoughts regarding the new Star Fox before and after its release! Which it totally is. It’s definitely a Star Fox game. Definitely.
On that note, Star Fox Rides Again is shaping up to be one of the most interesting space shooters I’ve played in a while. The aerial/in space combat looks pretty solid, reminding me of stuff like Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II on the Gamecube. Being able to seemlessly go from dinking around on a planet to rocketing off into space is really neat. Plus, the idea of customizing your ship with whatever parts you want is something I've wanted in a Star Fox-type game is something I've wanted for a long, long time.
The ground sections look a bit duller by comparison, as has been the case with every Star Fox game. Much as Nintendo has tried, Star Fox and ground-based gameplay just don’t work at all. At least this game shows how even that gameplay type can work in the context of what is largely a space flight game. And to its credit, the ground combat looks much better than what Star Fox Zero fucking had. Hopefully the traditional Ubisoft open-world busywork is toned down a bit here.
Also, this game looks set to have my favorite portrayal of Wolf O’Donnell to date. A scenery-chewing stud that sounds like he orgasms with nearly every sentence.
Part of me hopes that some of the devs for Star Fox on the Run join Nintendo to make new Star Fox games after this. As I mentioned back in my retrospective for Zero Escape From Bad Controls and Five Nights at Grippy’s, the soul of a good game was buried deep underneath a mountain of bad design choices. There are a lot of ideas here I think that, if implemented in a proper Star Fox game, would seriously revitalize the series. And they wouldn’t even have to take the series in a completely different direction via a spin-off game, even if I’d be totally okay with that.
Of course, even if the game turns out to be a big suckfest, at least I’ll have a neat Arwing toy and Fox McCloud figure to add to my collection of Star Fox moich.
Anyways, here’s what you guys wrote this week.
M - Aurachad gives a review of Dead Island, just in time for the month of spoops.
D - Osc has another update on his game development project.
M - Part 15 is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
M - Part 17 is Super Mario Odyssey.
M - Part 18 is Little Nightmares.
Future Zalno here. Star Fox: Battle For a Good Game was okay, I suppose. The Star Fox missions were pretty neat, but everything else was just a tad too grindy and bland for my tastes. Dunno what Past Zalno was smoking to get his hopes up like that. Either way, I sold it on eBay after finishing the Star Fox content in two days, which I then used to buy South Park: The Fractured But Whole for less. So now I'll have a dope Arwing toy, a neat Fox McCloud figure AND a good game!
And it’s a good thing I finished so quickly, ‘cos you guys gave me a ton of blogs to recap! It’s a bit of an undertaking to do these each week, so any volunteer help would be greatly appreciated. If you’d like to help us with these recaps, please shoot us a message in the comments! We greatly appreciate all the help we can get.
The next recap will cover 10/21 to 10/27, so keep writing and reading those blogs!
And remember; try not to look behind you. He really doesn’t like that.
Blog Count: 30
Last Posted Recap (10/7 to 10/13)