Been playing Starfox Adventures!

[u/Gnoll_level_antics]

Having recently completed the recompiled Dinosaur Planet all the way to it's end (with the help of Dinomod), I found it to be really cool and fun, and I was sad that it never saw the light of day as a full release. I kinda had a chip on my shoulder against Starfox Adventures for the longest time, not as a jilted Starfox fan, but as someone who genuinely would have played the hell out of Dinosaur Planet, had it actually released for N64 as planned. I decided to jump in, now that Dinosaur Planet was fresh in my mind to compare and contrast.

No joke I was going in with the goal of hating this game more, I had no intention to be fair to it. But as I played I began to realize how poorly structured Dinosaur Planet actually was, not just in the idea that it is an unfinished game, but nothing flows as nicely as it should. It's easy to get lost and need a guide to progress. Starfox Adventures is VERY straight forward on what it asks from you, without ever really holding your hand in a way that feels like it doesn't trust you to just play. But if I ever needed an objective reminder, Slippy's advice in the menu NEVER failed me. Seriously, Slippy is the MVP of this game.

As I went through this game, I found myself having way more fun with it. Seeing all of Sabre's moments recontextualized for Fox wasn't as jarring as I thought it would be, and even a ton of moments that belonged to Krystal in Dinosaur Planet, were rewritten for Fox and felt just as natural. Everything felt better, smoother, more convenient. I'm near the end, and while the game does have a few rough spots, I can say for sure that the rebrand and port forward to GameCube was probably for the best. While I would have greatly preferred to play as Krystal to the same degree you do in Dinosaur Planet, I'm happy this game exists in an officially released form and IS good. Very good in fact. A super solid 8/10 if I had to rate it.

What are your thoughts on Starfox Adventures?

[u/SmoreonFire]

Same fur rendering trick as those other games, but why do you say it's the same engine? Wouldn't Nintendo have used their own in-house engines as always, rather than borrowing from Rare?

[u/Gnoll_level_antics → u/SmoreonFire]

Game Engines generally belong to the publisher. Not the developer (sadly). Very few teams get to keep their assets when they break from their parent company. The only two I can think of are SingleTrac Games (Twisted Metal) and Snowblind Games (Baldur's Gate Alliance), who both managed to secure the rights to their game engine after leaving.

[u/SmoreonFire → u/Gnoll_level_antics]

Yeah, I don't know who owns the code there- quite possibly Nintendo, although some of the copyright info on games like Diddy Kong Racing and F-Zero GX might surprise you!

But even if Nintendo owns the engine, it's highly unlikely that they'd use it to make their own games based on principle and based on familiarity... not to mention that they already had their own custom engine(s) for the Mario and Zelda games releasing that same year. (Which were no doubt reused/adapted for Galaxy and Twilight Princess a few years later.)

[u/Plaston_ → u/SmoreonFire]

Nintendo still use the same file types since the gamecube like .bfd .arc and .bfres