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by webwielder 4374 days ago
Hate to be a downer, but I wasn't impressed with Star Fox even at the time as an 8 year old boy. Clearly a case where the technology had not yet caught up to the ambition.

That said, I've always been fascinated by the idea of cartridges as expansion cards. When your medium is a bulky plastic box plugging directly into the guts of the machine, you can do some crazy things.
4 comments
voltagex_ 4373 days ago
So crazy in fact, that it took until 2012 to emulate all of them correctly.

https://archive.today/evDty

Byuu, if you're reading this could you please put your old articles back up?

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bluedino 4373 days ago
>> Hate to be a downer, but I wasn't impressed with Star Fox even at the time as an 8 year old boy

I had mixed feelings about it. It was a pretty good game.

On the other hand, I wasn't terribly impressed by the visuals (especially the framerate), and I think between StarFox and the coin-op Hard Drivin', a lot of gamers were left with a bad taste in their mouth when it came to polygon graphics.

Remember, at the time on the PC there were games like Doom and X-Wing. Sure, you needed a fully-loaded 486 at the time to play these to the best of their ability, and even a SoundBlaster card was the cost of the SNES console.

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joezydeco 4373 days ago
Well, chalk that up to expectations.

With a driving game like Hard Drivin', people expected the game to respond like, well, driving a real car.

There were other games that used higher speed polygons to better effect (Atari's I, Robot), or faster gameplay (Sega's Virtua Fighter).

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ekianjo 4373 days ago
> but I wasn't impressed with Star Fox even at the time as an 8 year old boy.

Same here. I was more impressed by the execution than the graphics. Most of Atari or Amiga games could do 3D at least as good as Starfox (and PCs were quickly becoming far superior at that, too), so the SuperFX chip seemed like a nice gimmick that could not really live up to its reputation.

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bane 4374 days ago
A "modern" version is the Atari 2600 Harmony carts, which have a 32-bit ARM processor that can be used for some new homebrew.

http://www.atariasteroids.net/archives/tag/atari-2600

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