Welcome to too late who gives a shit? A show focused on answering the most answered
questions of gaming history. There’s no safer statement than “Star
Fox Zero was a disappointment,” and if there is, it’s “the Wii U was a flop.” And for some reason everyone on YouTube decided
to do a Wii U video while I was working on this, so it may be the most gloriously redundant
video on the internet. But there is one thing that still interests
me about Star Fox Zero, and that is that you can’t really review it without reviewing
the Wii U itself. The game was so tied to the hardware and its
struggle for relevance that it’s almost as if it spontaneously congealed within its
disc drive. In the same way The Lord sent his only son
to Earth, lo, the Star Fox Zero was begotten from Wii U. HARK! So, with a new console generation still struggling
to get off the ground and Nintendo’s next hardware release growing closer, maybe it’s
not such a waste to sift through the Wii U’s ashes for a lesson. According to Nintendo, the Wii U began as
an extension of Wiiconnect24. You might remember Wiiconnect24 as… nothing,
because it basically just lit up the system when there was an update. They wanted a second screen that could quickly
show what the system was doing without having to boot up the TV. It’s a very bizarre thing to design a system
around, especially considering that the Wii U was too slow, painfully so at launch, to
outpace an average TV and deliver any of the conveniences they were talking about. There had to be more to it than that... The success of the Wii was driven by filthy
casual gamers, a demographic Nintendo didn’t have very much information on. It wasn’t clear if these people would stick
around to buy a second system or not; Nintendo had hoped that they would transition to playing
hardcore games as the generation went on but there were many signs that wasn’t happening. Wii sales peaked relatively early and it seemed
more and more like its success was a fad rather than a permanent seismic shift in gaming demographics. Miyamoto would eventually call casual gamers
“pathetic,” and while it’s debatable whether he meant to sound that harsh in Japanese
it’s clear that Nintendo was frustrated by their lack of progress with the demographic. They obviously still wanted to try to hold
onto some of that Wii success, but rather than putting all of their eggs in the casual
basket they decided to reach out to hardcore gamers as a safety net. This meant walking back a lot of what the
Wii had been about. The Wii remote was a dealbreaker for this
crowd, so they had to go back to standard dual analog to appease them and third parties. That decision was likely easier to make considering
the partial failure of motion to take hold; the wii remote was intended to have a gyro
sensor at the start but it was too expensive to include, so- by Nintendo's own admission-
its accelerometers mainly just let the system know if you were shaking it or not. Wii Sports made clever enough use of this
to feel novel but traditional single player games struggled to do anything with it other
than waggle- the pointless shaking of the remote to do the exact same action a button
could do. I’ve talked before about how much damage
this type of motion did to the perception of the technology in general, suffice to say
most gamers were not impressed. The infrared camera was the best innovation
of the launch remote and it mostly went unappreciated by the hardcore gamers that would have benefited
from it the most. By the time Nintendo added gyro with the motion
plus accessory, it was too little too late- they dumped it out without consulting with
third party developers, many of whom were developing games that would have massively
benefited from the hardware. Lucasarts was making a lightsaber fighter
and was reportedly deeply upset that Nintendo didn’t bother letting them know that there
was an accessory that could have made their game ten times better. Third parties had a hard time selling anything
hardcore oriented on the system anyway and Ubisoft was one of the very few to attempt
to launch a serious game using the new remote- all their effort and research into motion
ended up being a loss. Even Nintendo didn’t do much with the new
remote, with Wii Sports Resort and Skyward Sword being the only two high profile games
for it, and the swordplay in the latter was extremely polarizing. So dual analog it was then, but Nintendo’s
new blue ocean approach depended on innovation. The lesson they learned from the Gamecube
was that it wasn’t enough to just make a good system with good games on it; they had
to capture your attention with something different, and in the Wii’s case that was done with
the controller. How could they repeat that with dual analog? On paper, in a boardroom, putting a touchscreen
in must have seemed like a clever solution. It let them have a standard control layout
while still adding a feature that set them apart from competitors, and a feature that
Ninentendo already had ample experience with on their handhelds. But when it was revealed to the public, I
and I think most people wondered the same thing: what’s the point? Nintendo didn’t have- and never found- an
answer to that question. Their announcement sizzle reel had a lot of
small throwaway ideas but nothing that seemed as substantial as what the Wii offered. This moment in particular stood out as a bad
omen- last gen’s controller is doing all the interesting stuff while the expensive
new tablet displays a golf ball. What kind of idiot would be impressed by-
oh, I’m sorry. They didn’t show the console itself at the
reveal because they knew the moment that people started talking about specs they would be
fighting a losing battle. A standalone gamepad hovered around $120 in
Japan, which was almost as expensive as using a DS Lite as the controller. Obviously, that didn’t leave much budget
for the console hardware. There was endless debate about the Wii U’s
specs, but I think it’s settled that the CPU was worse than the 7th gen consoles. An anonymous developer told Eurogamer how
Nintendo blew off his studio’s concerns that the Wii U’s processor wouldn’t keep
up with Xbox 360’s. A developer of Warriors Orochi 3 publicly
confirmed the same, that the CPU was not capable of matching Microsoft’s seven year old hardware. Seven years is an eternity in the tech world. To fail to outperform the 360 in any way after
that long was an embarrassment, and the Wii U wasn’t even competing with the 360. It launched in the same window as the Xbox
One and PS4. Based on their interviews, Nintendo had a
very bizarre concept of power that seemed limited to a binary option; either it’s
HD or it’s not. We’re HD now, so that problem is solved. The hardcore gamers who had been mocking their
underpowered hardware for six years, the very ones that Nintendo was trying to appeal to,
did not agree. Game after game struggled to perform on the
system, and outlets like Digital Foundry often declared the Wii U versions the very worst
to play. The system did have advantages when it came
to the RAM and GPU but it never seemed to be enough for visible improvements, but the
poor framerates were very easy to notice. So this was the pitch Nintendo was making
to hardcore gamers: buy a bunch of full price games you’ve already played and our $350
system that will run them worse than the box you bought seven years ago. Geoff Keighley was exactly right, and not
even Reggie could spin his way out of it. Hardcore gamers had no reason to buy this,
and they didn’t. The tragedy of it is that the seventh generation
was very long and I recall a lot of people being very hungry for new hardware. Had Nintendo offered a more powerful box that
could run the new Call of Duty and other multiplatforms better they may have actually gotten some
attention. As terrible as their pitch to hardcore gamers
was, at least I can see some kind of pitch was made. I don’t know why casual gamers were supposed
to be enticed by the system. If you’re watching this then you’re a
class five platinum game master with probably a big dick, but put yourself in the crocs
of a casual gamer and let’s return to that golf ball demo for a second. You’re seeing Wii Sports being played with
the Wii remote and there’s no new console in sight. You might understandably assume that “oh,
this is a $350 tablet that connects to the Wii,” which is something that only an idiot
could wan- oh, come on. Another major pillar of the Wii U was supposed
to be its convenience for consuming content; Nintendo, like Microsoft, saw the number of
people using their console for streaming and decided to make TV a major part of their next
platform. Remember it? Nintendo TV? It didn’t last very long, and while the
gamepad was a convenient thing to have in the living room it was rendered mostly obsolete
by the rise of tablets that could do basically everything better. Nintendo acknowledged their both lack of emphasis
on the console at the reveal and the growth of tablets as major factors in the system’s
failure. So they completely blew it with both the casual
and the hardcore audiences. That left nerds like me as their only demographic-
the longtime fans that would buy, as Michael Pachter put it, a cardboard box if it played
Mario. It was kind of a hurtful statement that unfairly
cha- oh, for fuck’s sake! I’m done! I’m done doing this! And if you were a devoted Nintendo fan then
you might have liked the Wii remote features they were now killing off. Games that were designed for sticks, like
Resident Evil 4, were completely transformed by the remote, and the games themselves barely
had to be altered. IR aiming is better, so just patching it in
is enough to elevate the game. This is the kind of innovation that I think
most people want; the kind that lets us do the stuff we already do but in a better way. Every second of Metroid Prime was better with
the remote because you could both aim and turn more fluidly; what would the Wii U gamepad
offer that could make up for the loss of that feature? Most people speculated that it might work
as a scan visor you could hold up, but a number of games tried that and the novelty wore off
after a few minutes… then it just became annoying. Zelda is another example. No matter what you think of the final product,
I think most people understand the appeal of swinging a sword with your own movements. There was a new type of combat that was enabled
by the remote, and playing Red Steel 2 made me think that there was an entirely new frontier
for games to explore now. What could the gamepad do to make up for the
loss of that? Display a map or inventory screen? This was a common use of the pad for a lot
of games and while it was definitely convenient it’s still fairly easy to just pause a game
to do these things. If touch inventory comes at the cost of hardware
so underpowered that it slows to a crawl every time I fire a cannon, I’d probably rather
just pause the game. New Super Mario Brothers allowed the gamepad
to create platforms that could help another player clear a level, which is another feature
that falls into the “ that’s moderately neat” category. Mario 3D World plopped in a few tappable blocks
in as if to say “look! We used the gamepad. It has been used.” These gimmicks were pretty easily converted
for use without a touchscreen in the Switch port. In fact, most Wii U games were easily ported
to Switch. The second screen obviously wasn’t integral
to anything. YES, I pronounced it “integral,” it’s
acceptable, and if you’ve got a problem with it I will fight you in the comment section
you COWARDS! The gamepad consistently being less innovative
and disruptive than the remote could have been a deliberate choice to broaden the appeal
of the controller and make it easier for third parties to support. But I don’t think the blue ocean strategy
works when you have subtle innovations that won’t turn any heads. Especially not when those small niceties require
a wildly expensive controller; the wii remote and nunchuk offered bigger leaps at the standard
$60 price. The gamepad was like a bad interpretation
of “lateral thinking using withered technology,” where the hardware was simple but still managed
to be impractical and expensive anyway. The most popular feature of the gamepad was
off-tv play, and while it was a great convenience it was also heavily limited. The image had to be streamed via wifi and
the signal degraded rapidly over a distance, limiting most people to the same room as the
system or maybe the very next room. The 480p image was also very compressed and
clearly inferior to playing on a decent TV. For those without a television or limited
access to one, the flexibility offered by the Wii U could be a godsend. Some people also just prefer the handheld
experience to a TV, image quality be damned. But for those who had a TV available and wanted
the fullest experience, the gamepad was often a useless boat anchor. Off-tv play alone obviously wasn’t enough
to get people interested; the controller had to do more for traditional TV play. Third parties arguably used the pad as well
or better than Nintendo. ZombiU took one of the drawbacks of the second
screen and turned it into a gameplay mechanic, using your distraction while looking down
to make you vulnerable. But this isn’t really innovation so much
as it is a sidestep or a one-off novelty. Wonderful101 used the gamepad as an interior
view when entering a building or spaceship, which again was more of a cute novelty than
anything else, and it was easily handled without the gamepad by picture in picture. Drawing shapes is not only possible on the
analog stick but arguably faster than doing it with touch. Mario Maker was a great use of the pad, but
it wasn’t exactly a game as much as it was a tool. The gamepad could be useful when something
was specifically designed around it, or for scattered minigame concepts, but the more
traditional a game was the harder it seemed to find a purpose for it. Splatoon used the screen for jumping to teammates,
which was handy but also somewhat easily replaced with a D-pad in the sequel. The better use was providing a minigame to
play while matchmaking, something that also could be done with picture in picture. And no, I’m not including gyro aim here
since that predates the Wii U. Pikmin 3 played best with the Wii remote while
the gamepad just sat there aside from an occasional “go here” command- It’s the golf ball
thing all over again. Nintendo updated the game to bolster the gamepad’s
usefulness and ended up with a gamepad-only scheme that still isn’t as good as the remote
in my opinion. Smash Bros deliberately avoided giving the
gamepad any advantage over other controllers and didn’t even allow the touchscreen to
work in the menus. Retro didn’t bother using the gamepad for
a damned thing- not even a picture of banana. They could have done something terrible, like
a version of this level that forced you to look at the pad to see incoming waves, but
no. They recognized it had no value for a platformer
and didn’t deign to waste system resources streaming anything at all… and it was sadly
one of the best uses of the pad all generation. Bravo! The final snub came from the Breath of The
Wild staff, who had to convert the game to work without touch on the Switch. The D-pad solution they came up with in the
final game worked so well that they replaced the Wii U controls with it also, believing
it to be faster and preferable to the distraction of looking between two screens. Valve and Sony also considered touchscreen
controllers that generation and both cited the distraction as a reason they nixed the
feature, but to hear Nintendo’s own staff echoing that sentiment felt like a turning
point. Even they had turned their backs on it. Among growing calls for Nintendo to release
a cheaper Pro bundle and just put the gamepad out of its misery, they decided to move in
the other direction and double down on the second screen. Miyamoto promised that Nintendo would start
developing games that would show off what the pad could do, but I think most reasonable
people understood that it was over. When you’re only getting around to using
the controller you designed the system around years after launching it, it’s a vain gesture. E3 2014 revealed the fruit of Miyamoto’s
labor; more gimmicky novelties. Giant Robot failed to materialize into anything
and Project Guard ended up as an add on to Star Fox Zero. It all fell on Star Fox then, and boy, did
it fall hard. Flattened the little guy out. ___________________________________________
___________________________________________ In a lot of ways Star Fox Zero was just the
game fans had been asking for, but in a twisted monkey paw wish kind of way. It was a return to Star Fox 64… but it was
exactly Star Fox 64, with the same levels and story. I think most of us wanted all new worlds using
the same gameplay style, not a Force Awakens style do-over. It was being co-developed with Platinum Games,
who are experts in making intense, replayable action games. But they were handcuffed into showcasing the
gamepad first and foremost, with the game itself being a secondary concern. It wasn’t enough to have gyro aim- every
feature of the gamepad had to be used. This led to the game’s infamous control
scheme, which tends to overshadow talk about the actual game itself. So let’s set the gamepad aside and focus
on Star Fox Zero the game. This is a level in Zero. It is very boring. I remembered the asteroid field in 64 being
fun, and after revisiting the game, yes, it’s still fun. Zero just doesn’t have as much imagination. I’m going to bring Sin and Punishment 2
up a lot from here because it’s everything Star Fox Zero should have been. It’s levels were incredibly dynamic, disorienting,
and made the simple rail style levels of Star Fox 64 seem a little quaint and dated. And in terms of creativity Zero is a pretty
big step down from those. I don’t think a single mission lives up
to its 64 counterpart, and the quality dropoff is painfully stark. I remembered this boss being fun, and yes,
he is still fun. He’s got weak points and you shoot him with
lasers until he dies; the whole affair takes 30 seconds. Star Fox Zero stretches the fight out by making
his weak points so time consuming to get a clear shot at that I realized I was having
more fun shooting random debris while waiting around than I was fighting him. A lot of these bosses were already remakes
in 64, and I think even the SNES versions are more enjoyable than Zero’s. They really should have been more original,
because it does the game no favors that there’s a better version of pretty much everything
in it to directly compare against. Branching paths were part of the fun of 64
and a major incentive to do replays. Star Fox Zero’s map suggests at a glance
that it has more going on but it really doesn’t; this isn’t the same level I showed earlier. It’s a different mission, with the difference
being that they tacked the boss from another level on at the end. This is blatant PADDING- the game wasn’t
intended to have branching and they scrambled to add that content in the short time they
had. 64 often had clever conditions for finding
one level exit or the other, but here things are often simply locked until you’ve obtained
a ship upgrade. At one point, Star Wolf members appear in
old levels and locking onto them will lead to a mini battle. Fighting star wolf was a treat in the older
games but here it’s run into the ground with dogfight after dogfight serving as filler. No more, please. Any of this is better than stumbling onto
another gyrowing level, though. Someone at either Nintendo or Platinum had
the idea to take Star Fox but make it very slow, and to give you lasers that harmlessly
reflect off enemies, and to make everything revolve around a robot that barely has enough
cable to reach anything. One might assume these missions would be more
fun using an arwing on the second pass, but somehow speed running through these awful
little spaces with a vehicle they weren’t designed for just makes everything worse. KILL ME! KILL ME NOW GODDAMNIT! I’m completely confident that even if Star
Fox Zero had perfect controls that everyone loved it would still be a disappointing shadow
of the classic games. The fact that the controls are a nightmare
warps it into a completely different dimension of shit. The right analog stick might be the single
worst part of Zero. The rest of the scheme clicks more over time,
but using a stick to barrel roll and bank never feels right. In heated moments I couldn’t reliably get
the double tap to work and gave up on barrel rolling altogether. The signature move of Star Fox! Not worth doing! I did get very, very good at doing these moves
when I didn't want to, though. It seems like the sticks always happen to
align in a U turn right when there’s a wall to fly into. I wanted to see if I could un-fuck the piloting
so I dumped the game to Cemu and remapped everything as the SNES game did, with banking
on the triggers. It’s kind of stunning just how much better
everything immediately is; barrel rolling is simple and reliable, and I could also make
the swap screen button more accessible. Playing this way made me realize how much
of a failure the Wii U scheme was at every level, where even the most basic actions felt
worse than they needed to... And the game arguably plays better without
the second screen it was built around. The one thing that emulation still couldn’t
fix is the targeting. I’m a huge proponent of gyro aim but only
when it’s used in conjunction with a stick or trackpad. The sensor loses calibration with movement
and most gyro controllers are two handed devices that you don’t want to lift any more than
necessary. Ideally the gyro should only be used in this
area of the screen- with bigger movements done on the stick. Having to move the cursor all over the screen
with a jumbo gamepad casts gyro aim in the worst possible light by bringing all its faults
to the fore. The Wii remote was far better for motion-only
aiming. The cursor can move as aggressively as you
want it to with no calibration loss, and it’s more comfortable because the movement comes
from tilting your wrist rather than lifting a two handed controller. The pointing action also makes aiming more
intuitive, since you can point towards the edge of the screen and know that your cursor
will end up in about the same place. Like Star Fox Zero, Sin and Punishment separated
aiming and flying controls but here there’s no learning curve. Maybe it’s the complete separation of these
actions into different hands that makes the difference, but it feels natural from the
moment you start. And the cursor works! A common defense of Zero is that it wasn’t
possible to have a good cursor because of the decoupled aiming, but it can and does
work here. The only problem is that the game can get
confused about what depth the cursor is supposed to be targeting, but that’s mainly an issue
when sidescrolling in 2.5D, which Star Fox wouldn’t do. And it’s mostly a cosmetic issue, since
the cursor will always correctly target the enemy it’s placed over regardless of depth. Your character will just animate weird while
figuring it out. So why didn’t we get Star Fox on the Wii,
when it could have worked so much better? Miyamoto said it was because they had no ideas,
which really seems like they just didn’t want to make it. Because how else do you look at the system
with god’s gift to rail shooters and the capability for levels like this and fail to
see the potential? And they’re clearly not averse to doing
iterative sequels, going by the four copied and pasted New Super Mario Brothers games
in a row. This was never about doing justice to Star
Fox. It started as a random gamepad experiment
unrelated to the series which they then tacked the Star Fox IP onto, which is pretty on brand
for the series at this point. So instead of a potentially perfect Star Fox
on the Wii we got this. I think it’s fair to hold that grudge against
Zero because the Wii U supported the remote- they still could have done a Sin and Punishment
style game. In fact, Zero itself supported the remote,
but only for piloting the ship in co-op mode- not shooting. I guess this last ditch effort to redeem the
gamepad wouldn’t have looked great if the remote once again came along and rendered
the tablet obsolete. On the plus side, the game does seem more
fun with two players splitting the tasks. When solo, trying to aim in the classic TV
view makes you feel about as accurate as Liza Minnelli after a round of dizzy bat, so you
basically have to use the gamepad to shoot. And while targeting you have a poor sense
of what obstacles your ship can clear, so at any given moment you’re either experiencing
the worst aiming or the worst flying the series has to offer. It would seem natural for each section to
be weighted towards only one of those actions at a time so you could intuitively sense which
screen to use, but they constantly mix flying and shooting to the point that no matter which
view you choose you always feel like you’re looking at the wrong one. Because this is still a score attack game
where shooting enemies is everything, I gravitated to the targeting view more and more as I played. As far as I’m concerned, this is a first
person Star Fox game, which isn’t a very fun thing. Star Fox 64 demonstrated that back in the
90’s. The TV gets even less useful in boss fights
by locking onto the enemy and only providing a side view, or by randomly swinging the camera
any which way. I thought the TV was for piloting- but now
I can’t even see what’s five feet in front of my ship? In areas where there are obstacles to crash
into? According to the best defense of this mechanic
I’ve read, you just have to use the gamepad view to scout out what’s ahead of your ship
while also shooting. DUH. So now you’re using the small, low res gamepad
view to both target the enemy and intermittently swing your view around to make sure you aren’t
flying into a building. It’s like they tried to make this as shitty
to play as circumstances could possibly permit. Using the swap screen button is an overlooked
way to improve the targeting view, but it still doesn’t explain why having two screens
is better than one in the first place. Why is splitting my attention in this way
better than being able to competently shoot and fly at the same time? Being able to shoot enemies that aren’t
on the TV is a plus, but that’s not something that really matters for Star Fox gameplay
unless you go out of the way to force it in. They had to invent enemy types that need to
be bombadiered in order for this to be useful. The classic approach is that you shoot the
enemies while they’re on screen, and if you miss, you miss. You play the level again and do better... That’s kind of the whole point. Being able to snag a missed enemy isn’t
worth making the controls so awkward that they become the reason you miss in the first
place. The game mostly forces the dual screens as
yet another gimmick, another novelty. You’ll have to keep an eye on the tv to
watch for a lot of energy shields, which will consume your ship if you get too invested
in shooting. Some of these pulse so quickly that you can
only get a few shots off before having to fly away again; this is fun, right? Fun enough to end the game on? Zero certainly seems to think so. Switching is the lifeblood of it; switching
screens, switching to robots, switching vehicle modes, switching between weak points, whatever
you’re doing, stop doing it because it’s time to do this other thing. Some of this can be traced back to Star Fox
2, whose DNA was absorbed by this project, but it’s pushed to an obnoxious level in
Zero. And most of it is in the service of trying
to somehow, some way make you interact with the gamepad. “Trust your view from the cockpit.” Yes, it’s no longer “trust your instincts,”
it’s “trust in the bullshit mechanic we wedged in to get you to look at the pad one
last time after a whole game of forcing you to look at the pad.” There is a fanbase for this game that claims
that the controls are great and that the entire thing was misunderstood by incompetent players. In that way it has some parallels with Resident
Evil 6, but while revisiting that game made me respect it at least a little more, the
deeper I go into Star Fox Zero the worse I think it is. I want to at least acknowledge that yes, this
works for some people, and after seeing so many gamers fail to give motion aiming a fair
chance the last thing I want to do is close my mind to a new control style. But Star Fox Zero isn’t worth the effort. By the time you get comfortable with the controls
you’ll probably have beaten the game once or twice already, and these missions aren’t
worth playing any further than that. Unlike gyro aim, you don’t have an entire
generation of titles to play using these new skills. Just this one short, mediocre game that nothing
will ever play like again. Sin and Punishment 2 only has seven levels
with no branching but they can be up to twenty minutes long, and the intensity of the gameplay
makes it seem fuller than the numbers suggest. Some of the bosses are so massive that they
have their own checkpoints, and even the mini bosses you fight on the way to bosses are
better than anything in Zero. And again, all of it is fun from the start. This is the difference between a developer
being inspired to make a game... and a developer being rushed to support a hardware feature
out of pure obligation. I don’t really have any forgiveness for
Zero because it’s the very worst kind of Nintendo game; the kind that masquerades as
innovation while in reality stifling it. Because every time people say that gyro aiming
is bullshit or that new control methods are a gimmick, they’re talking about things
like this. And they’re right, in this case. All the good done to advance motion by other
games can get wiped out by one Star Fox Zero. I think the main lesson from the Wii U is
that while innovation is important it also has to have a clear and practical application
for what games are doing right now. Even in failure I appreciate that Nintendo
tried something different, but you can’t force a vague new type of play that no one
was asking for and that doesn’t address any current problems. The wii remote addressed a problem; that joysticks
weren’t as good for aiming as a mouse. The Wii U gamepad mostly just invented new
problems, and in the case of Zero, an entire game to serve as a vehicle for them. It does seem that Nintendo has made the right
moves since then. The Switch found success by leveraging something
no other company had- a healthy handheld line. All of the convenience of off-tv play is here
but with much better quality and total portability, and for extra insult the Switch does it in
a sleeker form factor despite having all of the system hardware inside of it. The only Wii U feature it doesn’t render
obsolete is dual screen play, which was clearly not important. The split joycons also allow games like Arms
and Skyward Sword to revive 1:1 motion again. Switch can do just about everything from Nintendo’s
past aside from IR aiming and bongos. Its hybrid approach has obvious appeal and
it’s not likely that any other company could have successfully executed the idea. Nvidia, the very provider of its processor,
had just failed to do it. Switch checks all the boxes, but in the right
way this time. While things have been amended on the console
side, Star Fox is still in a bad place. I would hope Nintendo is able to recognize
that the failure was the Wii U’s, not Star Fox’s, but a major flop for any reason tends
to disappear a series for a while. Miyamoto also showed no interest in doing
a straightforward new Star Fox in the years prior to Zero, so the odds of getting something
that controls like 64 3D again may not be great. It’s anyone’s guess what kind of horrid
concept they’ll have to tack the Star Fox IP onto before we get another game. What I do know is that anyone hoping for a
new Star Fox should bide their time by playing Sin and Punishment 2 instead. And Nintendo should go back to study it. It’s better than even a good Star Fox game
on the Wii was likely to have been… Because it has swords. This is now a review of that game, and I give
it 10 out of 10 tingles. Pick it up at your local Electronics Boutique
and... forget about that... nasty ol' fox.
Great reviewer. Nerrel's really funny but also dives deep into the conflicting perspectives and issues regarding a topic with a lot of his own experience backing it up. Didn't even expect it, but of course Nerrel brought up obscure and awesome Wii title Star Successor that also made me remember how good rail shooters can be.
Nerrel has become one of the best video essayists in the space and it all started from that disgusting majora moon thumbnail lmao
I’m sort of a SF0 defender but I agree with nearly every point made here. The problem with SF0 is that it only becomes fun once you get good and the controls finally make sense and click with you. This didn’t happen for me until I cleared the game several times and started attempting to get the medals. I remember my first play through thinking the game was horrible but grew to like it after I forced myself to keep playing. Even then, I’m not sure if I liked the game or if I liked the fact that I was finally able to play it somewhat proficiently.
You shouldn’t have to play the game three times or more before it starts becoming somewhat fun.
I looked up Sin and Punishment 2 (the game Nerrel favorably compares to SF0) and the creator Treasure definitely looks like a company that priorities good gameplay design without thinking too much of the sales/technology. Gives me indie mindset vibes since the 90s.
[[3:59]] "The lesson they learned from the GameCube was that it wasn't enough to just make a good system with good games on it, they had to capture your attention by doing something different"
This comment really caught my attention. I know this is just Nerrel's interpretation of the situation, but it's still interesting.
Nintendo try to play their strengths (or at least what certain individuals at the company believe their strengths to be) and tend to sidestep their weaknesses rather than address them. This is why their response to getting trounced by the PS2 wasn't "maybe we should add a DVD drive" but something out of left field.
With the Switch Nintendo is not only putting all their eggs in one basket hardware-wise, but also with how the develop their software. They are sticking to their guns that X is what a video game is, and X requires certain things which they continue to focus on and the things they don't believe it requires they neglect, and in neglecting them I believe they make things far harder for themselves than necessary.
posted this yesterday and it kept getting removed. glad someone was able to get it up, nerrel is great. it’s shocking how shitty nintendo is to thier franchises that aren’t mario, zelda, or AC
See, this is a Wii U game I wouldn't mind seeing a Switch port of. But will we get one? Doubtful.