How the original Star Fox showed us that it's okay to have grey hair
Star Fox (1993)
Star Fox (1993)
A whore for graphics I am not. Do I really look like I’d be someone who only looks for looks? Well, it’s true that I do have more than a little bit of vanity in me. But when you’ve got a face like a truck, you need to make sure that you’re not left exposed to cruel laughter. In any case, if I cared that much about appearance, surely I’d dye the grey out of my hair?
It’s a strange one, you know. I’ve had these silver blighters since I was 15, and ex-teenagers among you will remember that that’s when schoolyard bodyshaming and aesthetic paranoia were both really starting to reach fever pitch.
The routine from others would usually be the same – you’d get the abrupt stop-in-mid-sentence, the bemused expression, the curious lean in for a closer inspection of this incredible phenomenon. And then finally, that excessively loud question “Do you have grey hair…?!”
Yes, I do, but judging by the fact that my hair doesn’t even attract spotters and watchers anymore, it’s something that’s just become accepted. I’m plainly old enough now. I’ve just forgotten about it really.
In fact, I had even planned to use my greys in my bid to land the role of Holden Caulfield, if ever The Catcher in the Rye became committed to film, but I suppose it’s too late for that by now – even Dawson’s Creek never asked you to mentally subtract so many years from an actor’s real age.
The greys have historically been sort of useful as a unique selling point too, you know. Girls somehow seemed to like it. I didn’t believe it either, but there you are. Still, the silvery locks ain’t getting any less prominent, so one day I thought I’d try my hand at dying my hair, just to see what it’d turn out like.
Off I went to buy some Just for Men, since their advertising had worked a treat on me and also because they seemed to have the hair paint market cornered. I ought to mention that one wee box of this stuff cost me about ten clams, it only advised one use, and it would quell my silver strands for just 6 weeks. Vanity, poor follicle genes and stress sure do cost big.
In the end though, I declined to even use the dye. Why? Well, what’s the point? It doesn’t bother me, so what do I care if my asymmetrical hair hue bothers anybody else? Although you’re perfectly entitled to secretly reckon that it actually does bother me – after all, I’ve just given you my hair woes at self-indulgent length.
So perhaps we’ll be closer to the truth if I just put my thriving greys down to a mixture of laziness and thriftiness, two highly negative personality traits that have typified my life perfectly.
I don’t get any guff over my hair anymore. Well, nothing about its colour anyway – using enough hair gel to cement housebricks together is a different criticism. This schoolyard mockery was a pretty sobering thing at the time, though. All these years, my mother always told me I was beautiful, while my father grunted noncommittally. Could they have been wrong? Was I never a contender?
Whatever about all that, once school was over and we all went full-blown adult, that was it. Childish jibes spoken aloud suddenly turned into a deep adult fear, where people would sooner die than utter an offensive comment to somebody. Covert bitchiness was fine, but God forbid ever actually fronting up and insulting somebody to their faces – it just wouldn’t be cricket.
We’d rather have our teeth pulled than do that. There comes a certain point in life when personal insults to someone’s face becomes crass. It would finish you at any dinner party. And if it’s not for us to pan a person’s looks, then it’s surely not right for us to pan a game’s graphical output either.
Good news for Star Fox on SNES then, which you’d have to say has performed about as well on the test of time as my old DVD Rewinder and Betamax Player did. Thanks to the power of something called the Super FX chip, 3D polygon graphics were available on a (popular) home console for the first time.
These days the game looks more like a papier-mâché festival gone wildly out of control with drugs everywhere, but you gotta understand – when this beast came out, and on a home console at that, it was like, “whoaaa.”
The price tag got us going “whoaaa” as well – at the time of release, Star Fox, or Starwing as I knew it, was 60 Irish Pounds. Now that was 1993, but in today’s Euro, that’s 76. Seventy-six of the best. That’s 81 US dollars, probably ninety thousand Australian dollars, and if you want to talk inflation, it’s closer to €140 today.
And it wasn’t much of an investment, either. These days, with millions of Star Fox cartridges lying around and with Super FX technology looking pretty Stonehenge, you can pick this game up for half-nothing – proof that retro game collecting doesn’t always have to cost you a kidney.
You take on the mission of saving the Lylat System from peril with your three ace pilot teammates, except they’re a wee bit hungover today. Looks like they were out chasing vixens well after hours at the Cornerian Dog and Duck – but they end up getting a chasing themselves off the enemy fighters, again and again and again.
And it’s Slippy who’s the worst, so much so that you’ll quickly start trying to shoot him down yourself. It’s not just him though, they’re all to blame. You know, it gets me pretty worried - we’ve rented these fighter jets from the Cornerian army at huge expense here, and we’ve got a chronically blind rabbit flying them.
Does Peppy Hare know how much these things cost? Would he perhaps get a better idea when he learns, as I have, that the F22 Raptor currently in US service costs 150 million dollars a throw? And the Raptor can’t go to space and it probably can’t fire lasers just yet. So when we’re flying through space in ships costing more than Mozambique’s national debt, you’d think Fox could bring a better team up there with him, wouldn’t you?
There’s no real branching in the game. You pick your route from the very start, easy medium or hard, and away you go. The game stages are broadly split up into two settings, planet or space. Planet missions are pretty threadbare in terms of scenery, while the space missions are full of enemies to pump full of lasers. Kill ‘em all, so what if they have family, and then get to the big boss at the end of the level, which is always a good set piece.
The music is fabulous, by the way. No other word for it. There’s a reason they brought back the original Corneria tune to great effect in Star Fox Zero. There’s some great remixes in the Smash Bros games as well. As for the sound effects, they’re classic too. Eventually the music will be fairly drowned out by the constant laser firing you’ll need to do to survive, which is a mild downside. But explosions, the bosses, the flying indoors, it all sounds great.
Probably the best sounds are the silly sound effects your teammates make when they start yapping to you. They’ll start going, “Bub bub wing dammit” and demand that you rescue them. So not only can they not fly a plane, but they can’t speak properly, either.
The controls are good too, moving on the 3D “plane” is easy. You’ve just got to accommodate for the shocking frame rate when you press the buttons. But since you’ll be barrel rolling at all times to deflect enemy fire, and you’ll be hammering the fire button at all times, your only real remaining stress is knowing where exactly to point your fragile jet. I like the challenge – it’s not really a game you can memorise, it’s all skill and frantic button-bashing, and it can be a tough bugger especially on the later levels.
So that’s Star Fox. I can very well see myself being the only person left on Earth who thinks that this game looks fine and hasn’t aged too badly. Perhaps you could say it’s gone grey prematurely, but like yours truly, it’s still got plenty of vitality. And if you’re still not impressed, the game got a lovely dye job when Star Fox 64 came out a few years later.
13 June 2023