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Star Fox Adventures
by Julius Bautista
Monday, January 7 2002
It's not called "Dinosaur Planet" but it's still "Dinosaur Planet". Check-out the fur!
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Title:
Star Fox Adventures
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Platform:
Gamecube
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Publisher:
Nintendo |
Developer:
Rare |
#
of Players: 1 |
Genre:
Action/Adventure
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Origin:
United Kingdom
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Expected
Release:
Q4 2002 |
Grapevine:
Check-out the fur! |
In the next major Rare/Nintendo "handover" since Donkey Kong Country, Fox McCloud jumps out of his Arwing in an epic adventure formerly known as "Dinosaur Planet" on N64. Sporting Zelda-style exploration, fully spoken dialogue, a grand visual facelift, and some new flight combat levels, "StarFox Adventures" has made a lovely transition to GameCube.
Set on the remote "Dinosaur Planet" in the StarFox universe, SFA follows Fox eight years after the events in StarFox 64. Armed with a mystical staff, Fox must venture through the untamed world, meeting characters such as Krystal, Prince Tricky the triceratops, and the antagonist General Scales, who were all transferred from the original N64 build.
StarFox Adventures was first unveiled at E3 2001, and has since shown substantial graphical improvements. Initially, the playable E3 2001 demo was pretty, but still showed evidence of being an N64 port with a lack of environmental complexity and low-rez texturing. Later in August, Spaceworld 2001 presented us a much more "complete" upgrade, with sharper textures, more screen activity, improved water animations, and an overall more vibrant image. The most "amazing" technical advancement came recently before New Year's, when Rare released new screens depicting their "state-of-the-art realtime fur-rendering techniques." Considering what we think of next-gen polygons and such, this new "fur" is quite the head-turner. It continues to show how nuts [talented, of course] Rare's graphics teams are when it comes to hardware. The screens posted below reflect these updates.
Originally, SFA was supposed to be a launch title. Then it got pushed to December, then was given the odd release date of "March 25, 2002". NOW, we find out it's not on Nintendo's Quarter 1 release list at all, which means it's been delayed to April and beyond. *sigh*. I have $5 that says Rare's adding multiplayer modes -- if we want to see an April release, I'd better be wrong...
--- Julius Bautista, VGLN
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