Oops. I accused this game way back on the 22nd April 2006 of being boring. Which, in retrospect, wasn't entirely accurate. What can I say? Will sorry do?
Let me first explain why I thought it was boring. It's not an excuse, it's an explanation. Star fighter does have a number of failings, and this one is a big one, and it's this: It doesn't explain itself very well. Is it a flight sim? Well not really, the physics engine is sort of realistic but gravity isn't included, so no, no it's not a simulation. So, it's an arcade shooter then? No not really one of those either. It lacks the immediacy of an arcade shooter, it's nearest rival on the 3DO is Total Eclipse and Total Eclipse is a fast paced action shooter. Star Fighter really isn't. The physics engine is too realistic to be an arcade game, not real enough to be a sim, although there are hints of arcade influences in this. Not least of all the Lasso-weapon concept pinched whole-sale from Raiden II. To slow to be an arcade game, to unreal to be real.
So, what is it? Well, after putting the mighty 3DOkid mind to work I figured out exactly what it is: It's a year 3000 Star Fighter sandbox game. Thank me later!
The game gives you a well presented 3D world, a space craft immune to gravity, a series of sixty missions, and freedom to do things however you want. If you want to spend three hours powering up? Go ahead. If you want to blast your targets or your mother ship with lasers? The choice is yours. Do you want to spend your time skimming the outer atmosphere, or flying under bridges and admiring the third person perspective or seeing how close to the building you can get and completely ignoring the mission, or just carving away at mountains and blowing up trees? -- Well go ahead.
After playing it for quite sometime, one thing is very transparent, Star Fighter is one of those games that is horribly under valued. In a way, it reminds me of Iron Soldier on the Atari Jaguar. (Whatever one of those is eh?) Technically it is a marvel, just like Iron Soldier. In regards game play it's very good, again like Iron Soldier.
Forgotten or swept under the carpet? Ignored in the drive to lament these early super-generation consoles during the mid-nineties? These consoles, the Jag, the 3DO, the CD32, weren't the darlings of gaming very long, and people turned on them viciously towards the end of the tenure. People seem to prefer to forget what was great about these systems, what they achieved and prefer to just mindlessly whinge on about FMV games and their other failings. Studio 3DO released this game in 1995, and nobody at that time I guess wanted to hear about a good, deep, engrossing 3DO game. Especially when there was a mountain of tat and soul-less rubbish on the Playstation and Saturn waiting to played which was infinitely more sexy. Game reviewers being the worst kind of hypocrites often.
This game also deserves another moniker: I would say it was the last great 16bit generation game. I better explain that too. Star Fighter was developed originally on the Acorn Archimedes which was a British answer to the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. Star Fighter was a greatly enhanced, and then ported to the 3DO from the Archimedes. So it feels very much like it was from that generation of machine however. The graphics were next gen, by their quantity and quality that's undeniable, but the feeling, or aura of the game if you want, is that the game was last gen. And this probably didn't help it either. It feels like it's part of David Brabens Elite series in many ways too; You have to dock your space ship on a mother-ship. You can fly from the surface of the planet into space anytime you feel like it. The game has multiple viewing angles. If Elite owes a nod to the movie 2001, then Star Fighter owes a nod to Elite. There is also a hint of 16bit Demo Scene buried in Star Fighter. There is something eerily familiar about the way you enter your name for high scores: Spinning swirly 3D graphics style. Then there is the music which also feels like it needs a scrolling 'Greetz' bar to really compliment it.
So in a way, Star Fighter didn't endear itself to a hungry next-gen 32bit world by being a super-amazing 16bit game. If you are callous enough to leave your last girlfriend because she was getting a bit old, the last thing you want to see is her looking a million dollars, and super sexy, and her showing up and looking better than your new bimbos. And perhaps there was a bit of that in Star Fighter. After all, it eclipses the original Air Combat on the Playstation in many many ways and is technically more competent than the original version of Virtua Fighter on the Saturn. Ouch. On the 3DO?
The heart and soul: There is also a romance of Star Fighter. It is clear that Star Fighter was a labour of love. It's clearly very clever, made by very clever people who loved it. They loved making the game. They loved experimenting with it. Each new mission they created wasn't a bullet point on a list of objectives they had too meet, it was an exciting moment of friends sat around imagining what was possible. But it doesn't always feel like that cleverness and love was channelled always where it was needed or indeed in the right way. For example: Sweeping down through the mountains, strafing enemy gun placements, weaving between tower blocks is done perfectly. Plays great, feels great, looks great, is great. Game mechanics tied with human emotion at their best. All very very clever. The speed and the frame-rate are fantastic. But, and here it comes, once you do destroy your target a slightly ugly floating crystal emerges from the wreckage that jars badly with the pseudo-realism. It's like the magic is gone, the bubble burst. "I'm Star Fighter pilot! I'm Star Fighter pilot!", you cry, then BLAM!... "NO! I'm Super Mario". Doh! That said the crystal system is quite clever, you have to collect the crystals in the right order to create power-ups. If I was being picky, I'd say I would have wanted more power-ups, but the system is intriguing and clever but the execution with giant floating coloured blobs is debatable. There had to be a more delicate way of doing this than the one that was implemented.
It's not, as I said, a pickup and play immediate game. To be a good Star Fighter pilot takes some practice, but the physics engine is well designed and very rewarding and there are sixty varied levels to keep you going. It does struggle in the story department - there is no cleverness in this department at all to be fair, and perhaps this is another failing. Maybe if Star Fighter had a story to rival Colony Wars on the Playstation this game would have been remembered more fondly.
One other thing that will not have won Star Fighter many fans over the years is that the game is as hard as nails. It will mercilessly take you down, and when you are down, punch you in the face and then laugh. Since the demise of the 16bit generation and the rise of the toy consoles, most games have been dumbed down to interactive story books, if you are lucky that is, and the mighty reviewer lament of the 1990s was indeed difficulty. So Star Fighter probably suffered another blow: If you can't beat a game in a single three hour sitting, on your first go, well then naturally no-one is really interested. Me included I guess.
Star Fighter is a beautiful game, that has flaws. None of which make it a bad game.
It's also not rare.
3DOKid.
Best soundtrack ever... well maybe sonic cd is better, or MSR. but it was great.