Hurricane Ernesto blew through New York this past weekend, and when you live in a town where trees outnumber power lines by about a million-to-one, that spells a 24-hour power outage. No showers, no life-giving internet, no oft-taken-for-granted ceiling lights. Nothing but me, a candle, and my Nintendo DS… and a great excuse to go out and buy a new game for it. Boredom and me go together like water and elemental potassium. If you don’t know, look it up.
I’ve been in love with the StarFox franchise of games since the original Super Nintendo first used it to demonstrate their newfound usage of polygonal graphics, which was both revolutionary and fascinating. Piloting your simple spaceship through space and across planetary terrain, you’d blast strange enemy ships from the sky as they approached you head-on from the deep distances within the screen. The graphics were relatively simple rotating shapes, but the sheer dimensionality of play and various paths that you could choose through space made the game endlessly playable. At the end, you’d fight a giant monkey face, and if you were lucky, you’d vanish completely into a secret world where you’d fight origami airplanes against a backdrop of rainbows and smiling planets. There was even a special issue of Nintendo Power that contained a folded paper Arwing, along with instructions, that I lovingly assembled. Thanks to the internet, I can make it again!
Nintendo followed up the success of their original character, the dashing and daring Fox McCloud, with games spanning their major consoles : StarFox 64, StarFox Adventures, StarFox Assault, and finally, StarFox Command. Seeing as how Nintendo is relatively protective of how their signature characters (Mario, Link, Samus Aran, Donkey Kong) are treated in gameplay, all of these games have been exceptionally realized. And that last one? You can play it after the power goes out for, like, ever and you’re about to fork yourself to death with boredom. Bless portable gaming.
StarFox Command makes a wonderfully unique use of the Nintendo DS’ touch screen. For the first time in the history of flight games, the DS allows your flight path to be completely intuitive and determined by the relative position in which you touch the screen. Past StarFox games were made difficult by the fact that they’d emulate real flight controls, in which pressing upwards sent you downwards and vice versa. Touching the bottom screen to fly takes a little while to get used to, but mostly because regular players of flying games have been so completely trained to reverse the controls in their minds. Once you adjust, nothing could feel more natural. Wiggle the pen to do a barrel roll, tap the top of the screen to get a speed boost, drag the pen from your bomb supply to drop a bomb. At the same time, the touch screen operates as a radar, showing you the location of everything on the battlefield, while the top screen displays your actual fighter. Darting your eyes between the two screens is an exciting challenge, and not nearly as frustrating at it might seem. If you want genuinely complex controls, try Steel Battalion for XBox. That’s a 2-foot wide controller with 40 buttons.
In addition to the clever dogfighting system, you must also strategically navigate your way through star systems and protect your mothership from enemy fighters and missiles. In a turn-based system, you draw very particular flight paths to intercept enemy clusters and recapture fallen cities. Should you fail at any one mission, you can always have backup fly in for the rescue, but if they’re off fighting giant space jellyfish, you might just well be screwed. It’s a rare mix of strategy and actual battle, and I’ve become pretty taken with it.
I have a hard time paying thirty dollars for any video game, but I’ll gladly pay that much when you can actually take that game online, for free and wirelessly (at an acceptable WiFi hotspot) and play against opponents all over the world. StarFox Command features both online, worldwide play, as well as the ability to transmit a scaled-down 2-player version of the game to anyone within 30 feet and who owns a Nintendo DS system. Not only is free (temporary) distribution of the game and free online play exciting, it’s completely unheard of and wildly generous for only thirty dollars. It’s been added to my cache of Nintendo WiFi games (which I avidly collect) for those lonely winter nights when all I have is cocoa, a snowstorm, and some guy in Japan’s ass to kick at Tetris.
