Since Star Fox Command was released in 2006, I've been waiting for a good Star Fox game to come out on Nintendo's handheld platform. This fall that game finally comes, sure its not a new story or a new game made from the ground up for the 3DS, but its a childhood favorite, one of the better Star Fox games, and on the 3DS, so i'll take it.

At E3 last week, Nintendo had two setups where they were showing off Star Fox 64 3D, one area was showing the four person local multiplayer and the other spot was running score attack, I was able to get my hands on both and here is what I thought.



Local Multiplayer: Like like its console counterpart, Star Fox 3D will have support for 4 person local multiplayer. The mode that I played was a timed point match with 3 other people on a lava planet with giant tower in the middle of the map. The game played very smoothly even when there were multiple Arwings on the screen and lasers flying all over the place, and is still just as fun as I remember as a kid. After two minutes of barrel rolling, blasting and blowing people out of the sky I emerged victorious and able to see the look of defeat on my opponents faces. Yep, Star Fox watches you while you play it. During multiplayer games the inner camera is on and streaming the video of your face in real time in a box above your craft, which realistically is somewhat unneccessary during the match but I like post match photo op and can see younger gamers enjoying the in-match video stream.

Score Attack: Set in different stages of the game, Score Attack lets you re-fly missions with speed and accuracy being your goal. The mission that I flew was the first mission of the game, Corneria. Score Attack is pretty self explanatory and will be a good way to get a little more life out of the game after completing the game to get all of the endings.



Overall: The 12 and 26 year-old in me is very excited to see this title come to Nintendo's handheld, I do wish that it was coming to North America sooner or that the 3DS games were region free still(the game has a late July release date in Japan, which the first time I played Star Fox 64 was the Japanese version). Star Fox looks great with the standard picture or with the 3D on, however, like with any 3DS game, if you are using tilt controls I recommend truing the 3D effect down to improve the picture quality while you are moving around. My only other though is that I do wish that they would figure out something for Streetpass or Spotpass before the game launches but even without support for either, Star Fox will still be worth picking up on Sept. 11. Check back on Gamervision.com for more details as we get closer to release as well as the full game review around release.