I think it has sold out and I guess it will be up again soon, but not sure. Anyways, remember that if you buy the standalone game you hace a discount to download Guard, so in the worst case you can get it online at the same price.

lol'd

Barkley raises good points. I thought the game looked pretty good originally, but this thread is a bit of an eye opener. The screenshot comparison with Project Sylpheed shows SF0 absolutely looks outdated.

Goodnightmoon's video comparison, however, makes Project Sylpheed look really boring. Space itself looks much more vibrant, but it looks like a ton of empty space with nothing happening. I don't know if the footage was cherrypicked, though.

There were some other unfair comparisons earlier in the thread, like a screenshot showing Fox on foot in a city on the Gamecube compared to a zoomed out screenshot of a city in SF0. The zoomed out one looked a lot crappier with less going on, of course (the scale and scope of the images are entirely different).

SF0 looks like an improvement by Nintendo's standards, at least. Things look blocky, but that seems to be an unfortunate style choice for the series. Without a doubt, this thread has made it evident that Nintendo has not kept up with the times, though, or at least not with this game. The game does not look "bad" overall, but there are certainly games that look better. Some PS3 games I've played looked much worse, others looked much better. To say it looks "last gen" is fair, but any older than that is an exaggeration. The graphics do seem kinda hit and miss. As Barkley pointed out, certain mountains or where the mountains meet water looks really crappy. Other areas look really nice, though. You have to wonder if you'll notice these graphical flaws at all when you're flying through the levels quickly while watching 2 screens.

I'm a Nintendo fan and a happy Wii U owner, but I'm not sure if I'll buy the game or not. $60 seems steep for a game that can likely be beaten pretty fast. I do think it looks interesting, though, and I've enjoyed Star Fox games in the past. I'm taking a "wait and see" approach, gonna wait for reviews, discussions, and more gameplay footage. The last time I was skeptical about a game was Mario Party 10. I thought the reviews were overly harsh and exaggerated, so I bought the game regardless, which was a mistake. Mario Party 10 is crap, every past entry I've played was significantly better (2, 3, 5, 8). Mario Tennis and Amiibo Festival also look weak, I'm glad I avoided those. SF0 looks far more promising, though. I hope it turns out to be a worthwhile game.

You asked for honest thoughts, but you seem very quick to defend the game and dismiss the points others are making. This doesn't seem very fair.

Oh, I didn't know that. I guess I'll skip the special edition and stick to the standalone one then.

Gamecube could do Pixel shading in a way and thus so could the Wii.
For instance "Bloom" is often used in Gamecube and Wii Games.

Remember Factor 5's comment that the Gamecube *could* technically achieve everything that the Original Xbox could achieve, pixel shading included... The difference is, your approach *would* have to be custom because of TEV. - And chances are you would require multiple passes.
Only a few games would thus use it to any great degree. (I.E. Rogue Squadron.)

Granted you aren't going to get Xbox 360/Playstation 3/Wii U levels of shaders on a gamecube... And even Xbox 360 games there is a VAST difference between launch titles and end of the generation titles in terms of shader complexity, allot of the early games had shaders that *could* have been done on the prior generation they were that simple.

Gamecube can render in HD. It just cannot output HD, because it doesn't have the interface to do so.

The point is... A game that is only slightly "touched up" (Despite being a decade+ old) can be competitive to StarFox Zero.

The Gamecube could do normal mapping just fine in hardware, it's supported.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_GameCube_technical_specifications

The issue with the Gamecube was that most of it's game library was ports from other platforms and Nintendo hasn't really been known to push hardware to it's absolute limit.
We did see a heavier use of Normal Mapping in the Wii though. (Which is derived from the Gamecube's hardware.)

I said Gamecube didn't have programmable pixel shaders. It used a fixed function shader pipeline. While it could do normal mapping to a limited degree, (as we saw in games like Rogue Squadron 2 and 3, and later in Conduit 1 & 2 and Metroid Other M on Wii) you couldn't spam it all over the place the way PS3/360/Wii U tend to. If we look at the Titania stage in Zero, the way the sandy terrain is covered in normal + specular maps is something you just couldn't do on Gamecube.

And is there even a single case of a Gamecube game rendering internally at HD? Even if it could, it cannot output the image, so the fact that Zero outputs at 720p on the main screen puts it beyond the reach of the Gamecube.

Then it's not a shader by definition since they are programmable units ...  

What the Gamecube has is a pre-cursor to programmable pixel shader like the TEV units or what Nvidia calls register combiner's ...

There's other ways to do normal mapping via multiple passes like Pemalite pointed out but that's not useful since it eats up tons of bandwidth alive but the PS2 certainly did it that way when it had 4MB of extremely fast eDRAM on the GS ... 

Even if you can't output in 720p it was still useful to render at higher resolution since you were practically supersampling the image ...

The TEV unit was not as flexible or as capable as the newer shader systems used by PS3/360/Wii U. As such, there's a clear divide in shader tech between Gamecube and the aforementioned systems.

And again, did any actual GCN games ever use a HD internal resolution? Even if they did, the fact it can't output it means Zero's output resolution alone puts it beyond what Gamecube could do.