Lylat Wars is a perfect game
The older I get, the more I like things that don't waste my time.
Take movies for example. Does your movie need to be nearly three hours long? Lord of the Rings (LOTR) is it? I doubt it! And yet so many movies seem to be made with the goal of a 3 hour marathon. I watched Coach Carter recently- the Samuel L. Jackson sticks it to a group of young basketball atheletes film. Same old redemption story you've seen a hundred times before. Kids are badly behaved. Coach tries to help with focus. Some buck the change. Friction. Main or supporting character has emotional life problem. Coach learns to form positive relationships on the level of the kids. Everyone is happy. I recall the comedian Bill Burr has a related joke about this. I got and hour and quarter in, the team was on board, emotional struggle had been had. Tears were shed. Angry words spoken. Characters had changed and grown. It was done. Then it went on for another hour. An HOUR! I want my time back.
To be clear, some movies should be long. LOTR movies should be 3 hours long, so should Ben Hur and Schindler's List. In the world of computer games, Elden Ring should soak up over 100 hours if you want it too. God of War 2018 is rightly a journey that takes longer than a day. And i'm perfectly okay with spending days at a time in the Final Fantasies of 7 and 8. But the time hole, games as service, model creeps ever further. I don't have the time or inclination to play most games these days and I feel this is often due to their shear unnecessary size.
All of this timewasting preamble is to say that Lylat Wars is a perfect game. From switching on the Nintendo 64 (or Mupen64+ emulator these days), in order you get:
- The Introduction - Star Wars crawl with a little backstory. Just enough information to know Fox Mcloud and Starfox are the good guys, and Andross is the bad guy.
- The map screen showing you a line of planets / nebulae up to Venom (Andross' world) with multiple paths!. You immediately know what the goal is, it's to get to the end and fight the boss.
- Game start. And what a game! Did you like Star Wars? (Before the dark times, before Disney). Because I did, and Lylat Wars riffed on Star Wars heavily. The Arwing is damn cool spaceship (Why do its wings need to open in space? Who cares but it looks cool doing it). Shoot enemies with the green laser. Power up your laser twice with in-level pickups to get the double blue lasers which do way more damage. Hold A to lock on to enemies that are hard to hit. Fly around the screen as it moves you forward to be a badass. And the characters that chat to you over the radio. You want to tell Slippy the annoying child toad to shut up. You want to high five Peppy the hare for his old boy encouragement (Side note, Bucky O'hare and the Toad Wars was a grade A 90s cartoon). You definitely find yourself shouting at Falco the falcon to fuck off with his snarky attitude.
You get great level after great level of this, with hidden challenges that change the path you follow on the main map. One of the levels has you in a submarine (which the N64's frame rate renders at a leisurely pace). Another has you in a tank - I read quite a lot of people don't like the tank... I think it's bloody great. The game isn't hard (though Area 6 - the second to last level - can be rough), but it's just pure fun. And best of all? You can play through the whole thing in less than a couple of hours. It doesn't spend an hour teaching you how to play. It doesn't have a levelling system. There is no internet connectivity. You turn it on. You play. You turn it off. And you can finish it in a single (reasonable) movie-length sitting.
Lylat Wars is a perfect game.