Did seriously no one in 1993 notice that this had 3x slower input than every other game ever made? I've seen a lot of console players claim they'd never heard of framerate at all until recently.
Did seriously no one in 1993 notice that this had 3x slower input than every other game ever made?
Most people were wowed at the cool 3D graphics.
The game was fun, not ground breaking. Pic related is a middling PC sim lite from 1993, Strike Commander, it ran fine on an old 386.
Nintendo was way behind the curve on 3d and they had to do something about it. Argonaut was their only way out of this conundrum and thanks to this they were able to do a little catch up and cut their teeth on a few 3d titles.
People didn't have the internet back then. If all you had was an SNES then you probably didn't even know about what was happening on PC. Speaking for myself, Star Fox was groundbreaking for me as a kid because it was my first time ever playing a 3D game.
Belive it or not most of the "Commander" games I got as a kid I got from Walmart. The first time I played Wing Commander was in Staples. The first time I played Star Fox was Software Etc. I enjoyed Wing War in the arcade even though it was 50¢ per credit. I didn't need internet to do that.
My point is that your experience isn't necessarily everyone else's, just because you had a computer and played 3D games on it doesn't mean everyone else did, too.
Strike Commander didn't exaclty "run" on 386, you needed a 486 for that unless you wanted the bare minimum of the settings etc. And new 486 machines were pretty damn expensive back then.
You simply can't compare SNES and a top of the line 486 in terms of price and performance because they were completely different beasts back then, each having their own role.
To add: Strike Commander was never a middling PC sim but represented the state of the art graphics at it's point of release and it had huge hardware requirements.
the game plays great and is still fun today
Legit, was a great game then and now. Groundbreaking at the time.
I bet. It probably help immensely the FPS which is great. But even back in the day the 10-15fps blew my mind.
Agreed. But I am so glad for the tech advances we have now. Not retro but I love playing TOTK at 2K 60 FPS which is well above what the actual system plays at. I love playing all retro games enhanced to, I prefer that over their original system performance.
I played it yesterday in an emulator (Snes9x RX on a Wii) and it felt much smoother than I remember it being on the original hardware. I guess it's better emulated?
a lot of emulators feature some degree of overclocking for SuperFX games
Lots of emulators are really inaccurate when it comes to slowdown. I don't expect that a snes9x port is particularly good about this.
I seem to pick it up once at least once a year and can't say the input delay has really ever bothered me. The controls feel a little floaty but still very precise, at least from where I'm sitting. Framerate's super choppy but completely serviceable imo.
>I've seen a lot of console players claim they'd never heard of framerate at all until recently.
That's pretty weird. I can only speak for my own childhood, the late '90s and early 2000s, but I remember reading about the framerates of games (30fps! wow!) in magazines back then.
>The controls feel a little floaty but still very precise, at least from where I'm sitting. Framerate's super choppy but completely serviceable imo
That's because the game is more or less built around it, it's the same reason why say the 60fps hacks just make it either really difficult or barely controllable relatively speaking.
Back then """gamers""" were simply too unsophisticated to properly constrain their enjoyment of electronic entertainment into a rigid framework of template checklists and contextless numerical variables. Embarrassing, really.
Kek'd
Back then we didn't care about frame rate, we just played it.
I remember having fun with AVP2000 at maybe 5 FPS. The year after I got a voodoo 3 3000 for Christmas and like 30 FPS and it blew me away.
The only memory I have of caring about FPS back in "retro" times was of looking at the FPS display in Sacrifice for some reason and noting that I felt fairly comfortable as long as it didn't go below 16. (Framerate wasn't a problem in the campaign, but some player-made multiplayer maps would drag it way down.) That was the first and last time I ever paid much attention to the matter. And yeah Star Fox was awesome
I remember learning the concept around the time Doom came out and you could fuck around with all them debug functions. But I don't think I actually cared as such about games dropping frames until the late 90s when emulators started popping up and my crappy Pentium had trouble running some of the more complex SNES games at full frame rate (the Genesis emus never game me any problem though, idk if that was about much lesser requirements to emulate that hardware properly, or better engineering of the software itself). And then again I only cared because I had played the games before and had a frame of reference as to how they should run.
wasn't it because people really like to program for the 68000 cpu? I don't know much about it but its supposed to be a lot easier to write code for.
The FPS debate is not even really that often around the issue of "dropping frames". That IS a problem that shouldn't really happen in a properly coded game. But the FPS cult tends to simply demand that everything should run at 60fps and consider anything below that as fundamentally bad design, disregarding whether the game was designed around a compromise on a lower framerate to ensure consistency and/or make up for other features or complex in-game workloads while staying inside average hardware requirements.
I know this feeling! Bought a Voodoo 4 4500 new and was able to play AvP & AvP 2 at playable framerates even with an intel celeron 300 MHz (overclocked to 418-ish with a giant box fan on the side).
30 frames per second in the early 2000s was amazing. Morrowind was a bitch though and of course was single digits unless you were looking at the ground.
I haven't played Starfox, but even long after that game, people at large still didn't care much about slow framerates. I remember playing Perfect Dark with a terrible stuttering that would be completely unacceptable today, but back in the day we didn't care much about that shit.
Virtua racing was blisteringly fast and Daytona came out in Japan in 93
Everyone knew Starfox was shit, but for an underpowered console it was something different
The game could be beaten in 30 minutes so it was a glorified tech demo more than anything else
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Yes let's compare state of the art arcade machines to a Super Nintendo game.
I haven't gone back to it since but I'm pretty sure Stunt Race FX was worse. I remember it being so bad.
It was horrible!!
feels better on an emulator imo. very overpraised but its probably because of furfags so idk. the only good game in the series.
That is some weird take and a half.
Star Fox only really eats inputs when it comes to the roll move. Sometimes you can tap L or R three times and no roll comes out.
Other than that the game feels really good to play despite the low fps.
Yeah roll seems to be the odd one out, but it's at least not quite as vital as it is in 64 so it doesn't matter that much.
Sure is, as mentioned before it's why it suddenly becomes weirdly tough if you play it faster without any adjustments to the levels.
>Guys, I'm running an recently-downloaded-emulator on my laptop and the input through my LCD screen and touchpad mouse sucks!!!!!!!!!!
Ganker - Vain Regret
>Guys, 20fps isn't 3x slower than 60fps because (imaginary rationalizing)
Wanna try again...?
Star Fox is designed in such a way to account for the frame rate. It's not like it's a twitchy shootemup.
FPS on a CRT is different than on a flat screen.
A lot of people wish Starfox was still around but if you think about it the series was almost entirely just an irrelevant footnote of a series in the first place. Arguably one good game in Starfox N64. I say arguably because I am sure most today wouldn't give a damn to even try it due to its age and also the genre was declined by that point and was never the biggest thing. 64 just like the first game was pretty much a novelty and a Nintendo exclusive that featured talking animals. Without these two games what the hell even is this series? Nothing
I'm not even trying to bash it harshly at all I just don't know how else to put this that emphasizes the point here in regards to the series. The sequel was this cancelled thing that never was, there was this GC adventure game I think that nobody seemed to play or care about. I think there may have been a handheld game or no? The series is a fucking baffling mystery to me guys. Without Smash propping up franchises like Starfox and F-Zero with that Captain Falcon character these IP's would be deader than dead.
Yes, I rented it as a teen and the low framerate made me think there was something wrong with the game.
Even with the low frame rate this is among the best games in the series. Not that the bar was that high to begin with
At the time 3D was so novel that people didnt give a shit about slowdowns. People were already used to slowdown anyways since every SNES game had it to some extent.
3d wasn't novel it was common. Starfox resembled a 4 year old PC or Arcade game.
As other anons said, the controls are fine. They are adjusted for that framerate. What filtered me as a kid were the inverted axis controls
Define inverted axis because you can chose between traditional flight controls (pressing down on the dpad pitches up) or inverted (pressing down on the dpad pitches down).