30-May: Star Fox Adventures
So I have a bunch of GameCube games and most of them I never completed (like most games on any platform). I bought the game towards the tail end of my GC playing days because it was so cheap. I think it was $5 new. I loaded up my save from years ago and I only had played it for 40 minutes lol. I must have played it once and never touched it again.
Well, I can't say I hated it, but I probably would have been happier if I picked another game to spend 18 hours with. I don't care about it not being a regular Star Fox game. It just wasn't that good. First the positive: it is one of the best looking games on the system (with the exception of the Airwing missions). Rare always knew how to get the most out of the hardware. The fur, grass and other particle effects were all nicely done. The music for the most part was good. The controls worked well, I definitely liked how they made use of the C-stick to go through inventory, powers, etc.
The combat sucked. They took the Ocarina of Time mechanic and dumbed it down. You can't control targeting, the game auto-targets. If you want to focus on another enemy, you have to leave combat mode, enter combat mode again and hope the game picks the one you want. Then all you do is hit the A button. You can vary attacks by pushing a direction on the stick but all that does is change the type of attack animations that play. There is a whole lot of backtracking and item collection - the latter being common in a lot of Rare platform/adventure games. Most items didn't even serve much of a purpose except to progress in a particular area, then you never use them again.
And then those Airwing missions they threw into the game - terrible.
It might sound like I did hate the game, I didn't. It was just average gameplay and at times a bit tedious.