u/cowgod180

them or whomever else does Limited Runs of Games

cliff notes for zoomers:

Sony going digital-only is nasty work.

Own nothing. Log in. Pray.

$50 physical Star Fox is a W.

Not Silksong. Chill.

But you can hold it, lend it, sell it.

The State of Gaming is Grim.

AAA got Huge Prices and no aura.

Tiny W.

Reprieve.

No cap

Sony is going digital-only and I know I am supposed to sit here like a good little modern gamer and nod and say wow yes the future is very sleek and convenient and frictionless and I love not owning things and I love when the game lives inside an account which lives inside a platform which lives inside a server which lives inside some lawyer’s definition of access and I love when the box is gone and the disc is gone and the store is gone and the only thing left is me clicking accept like a trained raccoon, but can we please, for one second, one dumb caveman second, one drooling controller-in-hand idiot second, just appreciate that Star Fox is $50 physical when price matched.

No, it is not Silksong, calm down, do not start doing Reddit debate club at me, Silksong is different, Silksong is the sacred price goblin, Silksong is the glowing bug oracle that makes the AAA people look insane because it just sits there being a real game at a sane price while the Huge Team AAA Devs are charging you seventy dollars and then asking if you want the Digital Deluxe Idiot Edition with three skins and a hat and the privilege of playing on Tuesday instead of Friday, but Star Fox at 50$ physical is still something imho because physical is not even some deep collector-brain thing anymore, it is not just “muh shelf” and “muh childhood” and “I like the smell of manuals” even though yes, I do, I am not above being a simple animal, it is literally just the dumb plastic version of property, it is the caveman stick you can hold up and say this one is mine, this fox is mine, I bought the fox, the fox goes on the shelf, the fox can be loaned to a guy, the fox can be sold to another guy, the fox can survive a password reset, the fox does not ask if I am online, the fox does not care if the platform holder’s quarterly strategy pivoted toward cloud engagement surfaces or whatever cursed bathroom-wall phrase they are saying at the investor day.

The State of Gaming is Grim, but Star Fox offers a Reprieve. Your move, AAA.

The Fox/Bill interaction. Fox seemed a bit too excited in the original. Why be so surprised to run into an allied pilot when there's a squadron there? '26 handles it better.

Fox/Slippy rapport and Fox's loyalty to Slippy when he was trapped on Titania and telling Pepper to btfo

Some of Falco's lines e.g. after Titania "we'd be bored if you weren't constantly trying to get yourself killed," or something like that, pretty funny imho

Sector X stands out more

Easter Egg: Slippy's Gamecube and Falco's Sega 32X on board Great Fox. Was surprised to see these tbh.

They probably should've retconned this to avoid triggering millennials imho

AAA Games have Huge Budgets bc the devs have to pay their employees imo. but if there are 300 unemployed Engineers applying for one position, wages would start to come down.

and if so, where does this leave indie games? Will they still offer a Reprieve?

iirc in Meteo on N64 I could line up the sight with the boss’s weak point and he didn’t move around too much and I could kill him fast af. ln the new version he’s moving around a but and trying to center the cursor feels like it moves the Arwing towards it son have to keep rurning away from him and then back towards him. makes me feel like it’s harder or like I suck at the game. Discuss.

is it really not worth the Engineering effort to do something like this? Bare Minimum. Basically a port of the PS2 games. discuss.

I'm going to Kill him once and for all in the upcoming Title.

🐖🥓💀

Star Fox Zero is one of the bleakest games Nintendo has ever made because the ending accidentally exposes the Company’s creative decay in real time imho (note: this is my opinion which I don't state as fact).

In Star Fox 64, after the ceremony, the team runs on foot while the Great Fox rises behind them. No Arwings. No gimmicks. Just four exhausted mercenaries moving forward together while their carrier ascends in the background like some old myth leaving the earth. It was simple. Fast. Beautiful. That scene is iconic because suddenly the pilots stop being vehicle operators and become animals again. Fox. Falco. Slippy. Peppy. Running through Hell alongside Gray Fox like creatures escaping extinction itself. It was primal. Fast. Quiet. Strange. One of the few moments in Nintendo history that actually approached myth.

Then Zero replaced them with running Arwings. Running. Arwings. It is impossible to overstate how badly this ruins the scene. The original worked precisely because the pilots were outside the machines for once. Flesh instead of hardware. The Arwing is a thing of speed and silhouette. It exists to fly. The second it starts scampering around on little legs like a wind-up toy the illusion dies instantly. The image stops feeling mythic and starts feeling desperate, like Nintendo itself begging you to remember the Walker gimmick one last time before the credits roll.

The running Arwings in gameplay was always an obsession of Miyamoto's and we all tolerated it grudgingly. I've never heard anyone say they "liked" it but it also didn't necessarily ruin the gameplay segments it was in. It makes the Landmaster redundant af but oh well. But it wasn't necessarily offensive. That ending was offensive. I am genuinely shaken. That is Miyamoto’s late-era curse. Nobody could tell him no anymore. Every prototype survived. Every gimmick stayed. The original ending understood restraint. Zero understood..... filial piety.

PREFACE AND CLIFF NOTES FOR THE "NOT READING HAPPY FOR U OR SORRY THAT HAPPENED" REDDITORS:

• star fox species lowkey determine personality/class/faction
• corneria = dog civilization so their on that order loyalty military timing type beat
• fox hits different bc hes canine adjacent but fundamentally untamable
• andross is basically hyper-intelligent monkeymaxxing gone wrong
• pigma slimy af because pigs are spiritually too close to humans lmao
• peppy is washed gen x unc prey-animal wisdom posting
• falco got italian-american urban bird energy no cap
• leon is literally a cold blooded opportunist build
• whole game kinda slaps harder once u realize its about biology/archetypes/species destiny instead of “good vs evil”

————————————————————————————————————————

Wolf O'donnell and Fox Mccloud have Irish last names and this is no accident. Wild canines are outsiders in this galaxy and are seen as a rogue-ish types much like your classic irishman. Wolf and Fox have more in common than they realize. However, Foxes basically cannot be tamed. They are far too sly and cunning. Like, not at all. Dogs evolved from wolves and not foxes for a reason. Hence, Andross, the Primate, was able to enlist Wolf to his cause but not Fox.

the Monkey race is bad because humans are bad and are always fucking with animals. It's an allegory. They are also intellectually superior just like irl. Andross excels at Engineering and wants to dominate the galaxy for no other reason than he can. He's an analogue for humanity. Andrew, particularly in this version, is a bourgeoisie WASP who definitely looks down on the other animals. The Lylat Wars are about ethic – nay – species Cleansing. The primates want to Enslave the other animals.

Pigma is a complete piece of shit, like unbelievably so, and is exactly how you'd expect a pig to be irl, particularly if you are a member of certain ancient religions who forbid eating pork. There's a practical reason for this. Pork can be dangerous af to eat because pigs are an intermediate host for tapeworm and other maladies. Pigma is complete Scum anyway because the animals are somewhat analogous to their irl compatriots.

btw, Pigma's betrayal of James has its roots in biology. Pigs have uncanny biological similarities to humans which leads to, imo, a kinship of sorts between Andross and Pigma. Pig skin stratifies and heals closely enough to human tissue that medicine has repeatedly used it as a surrogate body. Even the organs occupy an uncanny middle ground where they do not resemble “animal parts” so much as imperfect human approximations. Xenotransplantation exists largely because the biological gap refuses to stay comfortably wide. Pig eyes are the part people remember because they fail to look properly animal. Ophthalmic surgeons train on pig eyes since the tissue behaves with an almost offensive familiarity, and once you know that, the stare of a pig in dim light becomes difficult to process cleanly. Anyway, irl, Bad People are cruel to domesticated animals so Pigma aligns with Andross and wants to destroy Corneria which is, afaict, a planet predominated by domesticated Dogs.

Corneria being populated heavily by Dogs is not an accident either because Dogs are the quintessential domesticated animal. They literally evolved alongside Civilization itself. Obedience, hierarchy, loyalty, police work, military work, shepherding, companionship. Corneria is basically the Galactic Kennel State. Naturally this makes them the primordial enemy of Andross because Andross represents the nightmare endpoint of human intellect detached from empathy, the laboratory animal finally taking revenge against Creation itself. A Dog Civilization would instinctively oppose that because Dogs exist symbiotically with order and civilization whereas Primates endlessly destabilize and dominate everything around them. Fox exists in a weird liminal state between these worlds because he's canine-adjacent but fundamentally untamable. That's why Corneria trusts him but never fully understands him.

Falco being a bird also matters because Birds in fiction are usually coded as arrogance and freedom. Falco is basically an Italian-American fighter pilot stereotype mixed with an urban hawk. He's loud, territorial, vain, impulsive, constantly posturing, but ultimately anti-authoritarian which is why he follows Fox instead of Cornerian bureaucracy. Slippy meanwhile is exactly what a Frog would become in a hyper-technological civilization. Amphibians are fragile prey creatures biologically speaking so naturally Slippy overcompensates through engineering and machinery because physically he is completely unsuited for direct conflict. His constant panic over comms is literally prey-animal biology leaking into dialogue.

Peppy Hare is fascinating because Rabbits in literature are almost never true protagonists. They are survivors. Prey animals. Creatures of memory, routes, caution, inherited terror. Hazel from Watership Down is probably the closest analogue, not because Peppy is a “leader” necessarily but because both characters possess that same exhausted civilizational wisdom prey species develop after generations of catastrophe. Peppy survives James. Survives Andross. Survives the wars. Survives irrelevance itself. That matters. The Boomer reading of Peppy is that he is a coward because he steps aside for Fox. Completely wrong. A Boomer animal would have refused succession outright. Peppy understands something much older and sadder: prey animals survive specifically by knowing when their epoch has ended. Peppy is analogous to Gen X imo. There is an almost Japanese melancholy to him by later games, especially in the way he becomes institutional furniture inside Corneria, half advisor and half relic, endlessly briefing younger pilots who barely comprehend the scale of what he witnessed. The hare in mythology is often associated with the moon, with cycles, with recurrence, with anxious perception. Peppy sees the catastrophe coming before everyone else because prey creatures always do. The famous Do a barrel roll line becoming a meme is itself weirdly appropriate because modernity reduces all elder wisdom into disposable signal fragments eventually. Entire wars. Dead friends. Traumas. Lost civilizations. Compressed into soundboards and algorithmic repetition. Peppy becomes data before he dies. Which is, imho, the bleakest thing in the entire franchise.

Kat in the remake looking weirdly exhausted and used-up honestly tracks too. She's a street cat archetype. Cats in cities survive through adaptability, opportunism, charm, and navigating danger constantly. The N64 era made her look glamorous because that was late 90s gaming romanticism talking. The remake accidentally made her look more plausible. Of course a smuggler / drifter cat woman flying around the galaxy hanging around Falco would look rough around the edges by her 30s. That's probably the most realistic character design decision Nintendo has made in years even if they stumbled into it accidentally.

Even Leon being a chameleon or gecko type thing makes sense because reptiles in Star Fox are coded as cold opportunists. Leon has no ideology whatsoever. Wolf at least has honor buried under resentment. Pigma has appetites. Andross has imperial ambition. Leon just likes violence and proximity to power. He changes colors socially the same way reptiles camouflage physically. Entirely transactional lifeform. Also he's Haute Bourgeoisie just like Andrew but he's Gaul instead of Norman. Fits in perfectly imo.

The entire series imho, fwiw, lowkey operates like an ethnic conflict simulator disguised as a furry space opera. The animals are not cosmetic. Their species determine their psychology, class position, military role, and relationship to power. Nintendo probably did not intend all of this consciously but Japanese fiction constantly does this subconsciously because they still understand physiognomy and archetype in ways western media largely pretends do not exist anymore.

Andross becoming a Brain is the franchise accidentally glimpsing something ancient and ugly about intelligence itself. Not wisdom. Not civilization. Pure cerebration severed from blood, kinship, land, instinct, animal reciprocity. The old anthropologists and structuralists circled this phenomenon constantly without daring to name it directly: the terminal phase where symbolic manipulation escapes the constraints of organism and begins feeding exclusively upon systems, classifications, populations, abstractions. By the end Andross no longer even desires conquest in a normal imperial sense. He wants taxonomic dominion. Total semiotic victory. The reduction of living worlds into legible categories subordinate to cognition itself. A floating cortex surrounded by machinery and terrified servants is not "evil" in the fairy tale sense. It is intellect after it has forgotten why bodies existed in the first place. It's also philosophically offensive because fiction instinctively understands that disembodied intellect is not a legitimate basis for sovereignty. The Hero almost always requires phenotype, presence, vitality, lineage, charisma, physicality, some visible proof of biological legitimacy. Even on completely anonymous forums people immediately start posting height because human beings cannot actually conceptualize status outside embodiment for very long. Pure cognition floating in a vat terrifies people on an instinctual level. Fox wins because he still possesses animal form, movement, youth, danger, reproductive fitness, all the ancient signals the nervous system recognizes before ideology has time to intervene. Andross, meanwhile, is intelligence after it has metabolized itself into something post-physical and therefore fundamentally anti-life.

Indie Titles offer a Reprieve

😡 I hate Pigma iirc

the answer overall for most players is the Space Armada which is basically what Area 6 is.

followed by Star Wolf anything

then followed by Andross or Corneria or something

most fans are Confused by more difficult stages and Afraid of challenges and want everything to be The Same

I’ll never play it until why not just play it in first person and ignore the second screen? btw irl fighter pilots use a display to help them aim. the altimeter is also a display of sorts. why is this a big deal. my buddy is a Pilot and Star Fox Zero is his favorite Star Fox game (except Adventures which he loves bc of Krystal)

people misunderstand peppy hare completely. in 1997 he was the old veteran archetype. today in 2026 he’s something much more specific and honestly much sadder. he’s Gen X.

and that changes the entire emotional center of Star Fox because Gen X is the generation that gets passed over eternally. never the conquering patriarchs. never the exciting future. Boomers hold onto power forever while Millennials and Zoomers consume all cultural attention underneath them. Gen X becomes institutional connective tissue. the guy keeping everything operational while nobody notices he exists.

that is literally Peppy Hare.

he does not seize control of Star Fox after James dies. a Boomer character would have. absolutely. the old ace would come out of retirement, reclaim command, give speeches about discipline and grit and show the younger pilots how it’s done. but Peppy doesn’t do that because he already understands, on some deep exhausted level, that the world has already moved on from him whether he likes it or not.

so he becomes support staff in his own story.

“do a barrel roll.”

that line is almost accidentally genius now because it encapsulates the whole Gen X condition. reduced to tactical guidance. institutional memory. permanent advisor status. never central protagonist. experienced enough to know how dangerous everything is but culturally forbidden from being the actual hero anymore.

and now that Nintendo is remaking Star Fox again in 2026 it weirdly lands harder because Peppy no longer reads as “old WWII generation.” now he reads as the 50 year old operations manager at a collapsing company who knows every system, every failure point, every disaster that already happened, but also knows nobody is ever giving him the keys. he exists to stabilize succession for other people.

even the rest of Star Fox feels Gen X now. Fox inherits trauma instead of glory. Falco masks sincerity with sarcasm. Slippy survives by becoming comic relief. everybody is overextended. Corneria feels financially exhausted. the team operates like contractors holding together a declining institution one mission at a time.

the older i get the less Star Fox 64 feels like triumphant sci fi and the more it feels like a story about generational displacement and learning to live as infrastructure inside somebody else’s future.

not sure why. can barely remember any tracks from the N64 game. most of the tracks that play in Smash are from SNES iirc.

AAA gaming is in a terrifying state right now and people kinda know it but they dont REALLY know it yet because the graphics keep going up so their ape brain still activates when the sweat pores render correctly on a 43 year old actor doing mocap for a game that took 9 years and 380 million dollars to make meanwhile the actual game underneath it all is literally “walk to yellow paint squeeze through crack listen to companion talk about feelings open crafting menu hold up on d pad to track herbs” over and over and over until death. the industry became obese. spiritually obese. too many managers too many compliance people too many meetings too many consultants too many layers between the person MAKING the thing and the thing itself. games now feel like municipal infrastructure projects. like they required environmental review permits before development began.

and the funniest part is these games dont even feel expensive anymore despite costing more than small nations. they feel fake expensive. like disney star wars expensive. polished drywall. synthetic “prestige.” Sony especially perfected this genre of game where it’s technically impressive but somehow leaves absolutely no psychic residue afterward. you beat it and 4 months later your memory of it looks like a blurry hospital hallway. all these games blend together now. sad dad. ruined america. crouch walking. crafting pouch upgrades. “cinematic.” i am tired boss.

meanwhile some deranged finnish man releases a game coded in a basement where you nail goblins to a wall with railway spikes and suddenly gaming feels alive again for 11 hours than the entire AAA industry has managed in a decade. because indie games still contain HUMANITY. thats the difference. human fingerprints. obsession. aspergers. hatred. one man spending 6 years balancing shotgun recoil because he cares too much instead of a committee optimizing “player retention.” indies still accidentally discover mechanics because they are allowed to fail. AAA cant fail anymore because the budgets are so grotesque that every game must appeal to divorced fathers in Ohio and streamers in Berlin and HR women in Seattle simultaneously. which means the end product becomes nutritionally complete paste. safe for all mammals.

and yes i know 95% of indie games are complete garbage. i know. Steam looks like a digital landfill now. every day 600 new games appear called shit like “melancholy frog cafe simulator” with ps1 graphics and a plot about anxiety. but the remaining 5% are carrying the medium on their back right now. roguelikes. weird strategy games. boomer shooters. eastern european suffering simulators. games with actual systems and mechanics and personality instead of cinematic sludge. the innovation layer of gaming moved downward entirely because thats where risk still exists.

AAA feels like late soviet architecture. giant expensive dead structures maintained out of inertia. indies feel like weird little street markets where somebody might stab you or sell you the best meal of your life.

what if Zorad have Fox Mccloud legs? 😔