r/gaming • u/TestTrack91 • 1d ago
Playng Starfox Adventures on NSO. The game holds up really well visually!
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u/JohnathanSinwell 1d ago
Outside of Melee, this was my intro in the Starfox series. My dad bought me this game for my GameCube, and I fucking loved it.
I could never beat it though. That dude you have to beat by button mashing was like impossible. It also explains my taste in women.
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u/thatagory 23h ago
I got my mom to do the button mashing sections.
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u/JohnathanSinwell 23h ago
Were both of your arms broken
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u/DontForgorTheMilk 1d ago
I took the back of a spoon and did tiny little circles around the a button to get through it. Idk how it works but it does. Genuinely have no idea why they thought it needed that fast of a button mash. I doubt I could get through it now as.an adult but I'm curious to find out.
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u/CatastropheCat 23h ago
God that was impossible until I got really good at double tapping, idk how I could beat it with the small A button on a joycon these days
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u/SimpleSimon665 1d ago
Oh wow I remember that tug of war challenge in the village! I needed help as a kid too haha
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u/bobmlord1 1d ago
Rare was on something accomplishing that level of detail at 60fps detail with 3MB of VRAM.
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u/drmirage809 1d ago
Optimisation was an absolute art form in those days. Devs had limited hardware and had to get creative to make the games work.
There’s some really unique trickery going on in a lot of old games to make it all work.
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u/RecentMatter3790 22h ago
is the trickery still active when in the emulation of nintendo switch online classic games?
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u/drmirage809 21h ago
It should. A good emulator should reproduce the behaviour of original hardware as accurately as possible. Some games might rely on those quirks.
If I understand what the GameCube emulator in the Switch 2 is doing though then it’s doing custom configurations for each game to run as smoothly as possible.
Now most game console emulators do allow you to go well beyond the original hardware. Which is pretty fun. Running Wii games at 4K is neat.
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u/Shas_Erra 20h ago
That’s because they didn’t have post launch patches to fix it. If a game went out broken, it was DOA.
Over reliance on pushing a game out fast to please shareholders and fixing the problems later is what has led us to bloated 100gb+ installs
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u/GigaSoup 23h ago edited 22h ago
Textures were streamed in and out of the 3mb with the main memory to achieve this
Edit: PS2 also did this
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u/Euphoric-Mammoth-261 1d ago
Did anyone else get stuck in the raptor village in the mini game where you had to press a button repeatedly fast enough to clear the game? Got so frustrated with that as a kid and it blocked me from progressing
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u/sendhelp 1d ago
That's where I learned the spoon trick. But I do have a controller with turbo now so I may just use that when I get to that part.
I remember shrieking at the top of my lungs with rage when I did that as a kid because I couldn't do it. Luckily someone online suggested rubbing a spoon over the A button back and forth super fast. Pen might work too. It worked well with the large GameCube controller A button.
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u/FewAdvertising9647 22h ago
I did for a few months. its because of that minigame that my skill at pressing a button fast in mario party is probably above average. Had to develop a fast press technique for myself specifically for the gamecube controller.
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u/Eatenten 20h ago
Yes! It took a very long time for me to finally grab a tool and use that off and on the A button to finally do it.
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u/NarcolepticPyro 2h ago
That's how I developed my signature button smash technique over a week of frustration. I discovered if I pressed my thumb against my index finger to stabilize it, flexed my forearm muscles, then the quickly vibrated my entire arm instead of relying just on my finger.
It made me completely dominate all button smashing games with my friends for decades. I remember playing one of the Pokemon Stadium mini games with a friend and when he heard it, he looked over in shock and was like, "what the heck are you doing??" Because it sounded like a machine gun lol
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u/Batugal 21h ago
When will I be able to play Rogue Squadron 2 again?
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u/Shas_Erra 20h ago
Factor 5 are gone and the Star Wars IP is firmly in Disney’s death grip, making it a tough one to bring back
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u/Killzone3265 16h ago
while they do work on dolphin, the rogue squadron games have been notoriously difficult to emu, especially 3. i'd hope for a remake, but man... i don't know if we'd ever get that magic again. most people don't know that rogue sqaudron 3 had the entirety of 2 baked in as a 2-player co-op campaign. the whole game.
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u/Aimfri 21h ago
Asking the real questions here. I was a fan of Rogue Squadron as a kid, but I never had a GameCube so I missed on the sequels. Wish they were re-released, maybe in a retro collection or something.
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u/Batugal 20h ago
Working to gold medal every mission to unlock the special ships, then unlocking a 100 wave survival mode by completing the endor death star run with the millenium falcon with a gold medal
If you survived the 100 waves of tie fighters, you would fight Darth Vader's Tie Fighter and unlock it.
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u/CountChoculasGhost 1d ago
I played Starfox 64 back in the day and loved it.
I remember with Adventures came out and everyone (including myself) was disappointed that it wasn’t a “traditional” Starfox game. I still got it and enjoyed the shit out of it though. Excited to play it again so many years later.
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u/Djinnwrath 22h ago
Starfox 64 was one of my favorite games ever. I memorized that game.
I cannot fully explain how disappointing it was to not have a sequel that was space battles. My tiny child brain was in no way prepared to judge Adventures with any kind of objectivity.
Is it actually worth checking out? Do I need to pretend it's an unrelated franchise?
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u/jardex22 22h ago
Don't think of it like a StarFox game. Think of it like a game developed by the same studio that made Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong Country.
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u/its_justme 15h ago
Yeah it’s not a Star Fox game. At least not initially. It was developed as something else and then the Star Fox name and characters were slapped on at some point toward the end.
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u/Shikamarana 21h ago
In the style of zelda, btw. It plays like zelda, pre botw. Skyward sword is a good comparison with the flying and planets haha
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u/Corgiboom2 16h ago
Its a good game, along the lines of Zelda and Banjo-Kazooie. It wasn't originally meant to be a Star Fox game though. It is a bit more for the younger side but I think it held up pretty nicely.
Star Fox Assault has a good mix of ground and ship combat, and is a sequel to Adventures.
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u/ghostintheruins 19h ago
I bought this when it first released on the gamecube. It's one of those really short games that for the last two decades I've always kept saying that 'I must play that again' but never bothered. Maybe this time I will.
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u/BenjyMLewis 1d ago
Visually, yes absolutely. Gameplaywise, though......... it's kinda not great. Combat is mindless button pressing, and there are several gimmick segments throughout the game with button-mashing and QTEs, and other things game designers generally tend to avoid nowadays.
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u/Ameph 1d ago
I think a big issue is that most power ups are contextual. They only work in specific locations or on certain enemies.
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u/BenjyMLewis 1d ago
That's right. The developers were clearly trying to copy Legend of Zelda's gameplay with this game, but they didn't seem to understand that the tools in Zelda give you so much extra abilities and utility that are useful in many situations all throughout the game. The things you get in Star Fox are... not so useful.
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u/Ameph 1d ago
I think another issue was that Star Fox was added to it. I wonder if it would have been better as Dinosaur Planet.
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u/thugarth 1d ago
I always thought cramming starfox into it COULD have been better, but they put too much starfox in.
Like, (spoilers for 20+ year old game) andross being behind everything was stupid. Starfox running around the galaxy helping with local issues across multiple games would've revitalized the entire franchise. But that's not how it played out.
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u/Azulapis 1d ago
World-Building is super weird. To get to the store at the beginning, you first have to jump 10 meters into a pit and then scramble up a wall another 5 meters. INSIDE the store! Then there are what feel like a lot of paths that just stretch out the playtime. For example, right in the middle of the path to another area, you have to jump into a pond and climb back out.
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u/BenjyMLewis 1d ago
I think for a world populated by non-humans, it's okay to have weird paths that require a bit of climbing or swimming.
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u/Hoshiden_Lycanroc 1d ago
I think those link maps where done just to give the game more time to load the maps.I find them oddly charming.
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u/Cannonhammer93 1d ago
It's super bizarre, but they actually served a purpose at the time. It's to delay you so the game has time to load the next area you are going to.
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u/bibububop 23h ago
I've always said adventures is the best looking game of it's generation, Idk how rare did it
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u/JuryDutyToasterSmash 20h ago
LOVED this game.
I always considered it the best zelda knockoff ever made.
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u/Jitterjumper13 19h ago
One of the biggest boss fight letdown I've ever known. Enjoyed the game, but looking back and playing it again as an adult; damn it had some flaws.
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u/_Solarriors_ 14h ago
You used streaming?
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u/TestTrack91 8h ago
No it's part of the NSO GameCube catalogue, it directly downloads in the console!
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u/AardvarkWill 11h ago
I could never get past the part where you had to swirl the joystick in a circle motion really quickly…. And I was an avid gamer who beat all my games.
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u/Asuma01 6h ago
No tomato’s! The planet hates tomato’s!
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/09/27/may-not-be-spelled-correctly
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u/Neemoman 1d ago
I have zero interest in traditional star fox, but I played this as a kid and loved it. Cool game.