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curl-6 on 24 April 2016
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pokoko said:
curl-6 said:

I see nothing intrinsically wrong with a game being a throwback. God knows we have enough dead serious cutting cinematic blockbusters to go around. It's a nice change of pace to play something old school and whacky in my opinion. If you ask me, it's throwing back to a time when games were, on average, better than they are today. Certainly less cynical and unimaginative.

Could Starfox Zero have been better? Absolutely. But it should remain true to what it is supposed to be; a vehicular arcade shooter inspired by the likes of Thunderbirds and the original Star Wars trilogy. It doesn't need to try to be Mass Effect or No Man's Sky, those games already exist for those who want them.

"Yeah, some people are going to try to justify this by saying it's some kind of throw-back game"

That's what I said.  Not that throwback games are inherently bad but that people use the term to defend something that is lacking in effort and ambition.  Also, in no way does making Star Fox into a stronger IP mean that it has to be "serious cutting cinematic".  Those two things are entirely separate.  Just look at Insomniac's success with the new Ratchet & Clank.  They brought the IP forward and lost nothing of the charm.

I don't really think it is lacking effort though. The reason it looks cheap is because it's drawing two separate viewpoints with a 60fps target. It's not laziness, they didn't make the models blocky they couldn't be bothered adding more polygons, the game's design meant they had to work within the confines of a restrictive rendering budget.

The dual perspective may have been a misguided design choice, but it likely took considerable effort to get it running as well as it does on hardware only slightly more capable than PS3/360. It's close to 900p worth of pixels, in what's basically constant splitscreen, in a game where firefights can fill both viewpoints with performance-sapping alpha effects. If the game had lacked effort, it would have run at 30fps and below.