Starfox: is General Pepper a dictator?

[Adrian Laguna]

Star Fox 64 implied that once, long ago, Venom was way more advanced. The large golem creature you fight in the last level, inside the Venomian ruins, was supposedly left behind from a previous, less barbaric Venom civilization. Thus once could also posit that Andross' technology may be harvested from what is left of the previous Venom civilization's stuff.

What i'm saying is, they're the ur-Covenant.

Not just Venom, there are ruins in Aquas and Titania too. Titania is particular is interesting because some of the enemies you see look like they're natives rather than Andross' troops. It's likely that mad scientiest Andross, aside from inventing weapons of great dooming, is also taking advantage of ancient technology and manufacturing facilities.


BTW - I'm not convinced the Wulfen II fighers are better than an Ar-Wing with blue lasers. Me with blue lasers vs. Cyborg Star Wolf results in an complete and utterly merciless slaughter. The poor bastards don't even get a chance to dodge, I'll usually kill two or three of them in single-pass attacks.

[VT-16]

the map clearly shows Venom in orbit around Lylat's star.

Lylat's star is Lylat, again from the Japanese guide. Solar is described there as a planet, and even if it is some kind of star or protostar or whatever, it's not the same object.

Besides, I don't think it's big enough to be a star, either. Don't we see some kind of curvature of the globe when flying close to its "sea"? And the fact that it doesn't even look similar to a real star (I know showing an actual glow would make players blind, but the behaviour of the environment doesn't really come close. And there's actual living creatures in it. :P

But, you're most likely correct about the rest.

[Peptuck]

Solar also doesn't behave like a star. Its got an obvious "surface", the critters in its surface throw what looks like chunks of rock and magma at the Arwings, and IIRC Slippy says the surface temperature is only nine thousand degrees. A bit cool for a star.

[Molyneux]

Solar also doesn't behave like a star. Its got an obvious "surface", the critters in its surface throw what looks like chunks of rock and magma at the Arwings, and IIRC Slippy says the surface temperature is only nine thousand degrees. A bit cool for a star.

How hot do dwarf stars run, exactly?

[Bounty]

Solar also doesn't behave like a star. Its got an obvious "surface", the critters in its surface throw what looks like chunks of rock and magma at the Arwings, and IIRC Slippy says the surface temperature is only nine thousand degrees. A bit cool for a star.

How hot do dwarf stars run, exactly?

Low-thousands K, if I remember my geography classes. Enough for Slippy's dialogue to make sense.

but then you have the issue of how a civilization can evolve on a red dwarf's doorstep.

[VT-16]

Can't we just agree it was extensively BDZ'd? ;P

Andross developed some kind of planet-buster raygun on one of his weapons (that Area 6 boss that could "phase" in and out of reality), so maybe he did some damage to a random world?

[Bounty]

Can't we just agree it was extensively BDZ'd? ;P

I don't think you can really make sense of Solar. It's presented as a star, except it doesn't look or act as a star up-close.

Maybe Solar is the name of a dwarf planet in a really close orbit to the sun? One that's so near it gets referred to by the star's name? It'd explain why it has a surface and wildlife.

[Darth Ruinus]

Can't we just agree it was extensively BDZ'd? ;P

I don't think you can really make sense of Solar. It's presented as a star, except it doesn't look or act as a star up-close.

Maybe Solar is the name of a dwarf planet in a really close orbit to the sun? One that's so near it gets referred to by the star's name? It'd explain why it has a surface and wildlife.

Solar and that ocean world dont make any sense to me, why would they go after bio-weapons that can only roam around one planet?

[VT-16]

Perhaps those worlds serve some sort of industrial purpose, energy-generation, underwater farming etc.?

[Ford Prefect]

Or, I don't know, there might have been people on them. Maybe not on Solar, but Slippy was supposed to have come for Aquas, yeah? I mean, that one is a no-brainer.

[Darth Ruinus]

Or, I don't know, there might have been people on them. Maybe not on Solar, but Slippy was supposed to have come for Aquas, yeah? I mean, that one is a no-brainer.

I completely forgot about that frog.

My bad.

[Molyneux]

Maybe it's a multiple-star system, with Solar being a dwarf star in conjunction with the actual sun (which, of course, would be far too hot to actually set a level on).

[Peptuck]

Solar also doesn't behave like a star. Its got an obvious "surface", the critters in its surface throw what looks like chunks of rock and magma at the Arwings, and IIRC Slippy says the surface temperature is only nine thousand degrees. A bit cool for a star.

How hot do dwarf stars run, exactly?

Ah, there's my complete lack of real knowledge about astronomy talking again. :X

Thanks for the correction.

[VT-16]

Thanks for the correction.

Still, there's no rocks in a star.

[Molyneux]

Thanks for the correction.

Still, there's no rocks in a star.

They're magic rocks. Hell, it's a game where the main villain is a giant anthropoid floating head, who comes back after death repeatedly, and you're saved by the ghost of your dead father not once but twice. And they always looked more like poorly-rendered fireballs than boulders to me.

[RedImperator]

Given that in the original the Arwings did belong to the Cornerians (Pepper tells you to be careful with his Arwings), maybe that's why their military just sucked so much - it was all spent on those four fighters. Whereas Andross actually had a fairly reasonable idea of how to build an army, and thus populated it with a smaller percentage of ludicrous super-weapons. Which is unusual given that he's the goddamn mad scientist supervillain.

On further reflection, the main advantage the Arwings seem to have over everything else is their shields. Without them, the Arwings are just as fragile as everything else; even those piddly yellow lasers can swat an unshielded Arwing out of the sky. I don't know how much it cost to develop them; it could be the Cornerians were planning to put those shields into general production, in which case Andross would have been curbstomped in a fight even with his numbers. Four Arwings were enough to blow through his entire army, smash half a dozen high value targets, muscle through Venom's defenses, and assault him personally. An entire wing of them might have held off the invasion singlehandedly.

In a way you can see the whole game as a concerted military effort. Star Fox functions as a spearhead for the Cornerian forces, but the Cornerian Army contributes as well by keeping Venomian forces occupied on other fronts. This can also help explain why you need such a decisive victory in Sector Y to make it to Aquas. By destroying the Venomian fleet so utterly, the Cornerian fleet is free to go assist Katina while Star Fox goes on underwater adventures. Another example is how destroying the fuel depot in Macbeth lets you go through Sector 6. By doing so you allow the Cornerian Army to advance enough that they can lend indirect support to your assault of Sector 6, while failure to do so means taking the safer route to keep from being overwhelmed.

This is a sound strategy. The Arwings can seriously disrupt Andross's forces by destroying high-value targets, giving the Cornerians an opportunity to strike back against now-unsupported conventional forces, while the Cornerians keep most of Andross's army occupied and unable to hunt down and destroy Star Fox before they get close to Venom.

[Peptuck]

On further reflection, the main advantage the Arwings seem to have over everything else is their shields. Without them, the Arwings are just as fragile as everything else; even those piddly yellow lasers can swat an unshielded Arwing out of the sky. I don't know how much it cost to develop them; it could be the Cornerians were planning to put those shields into general production, in which case Andross would have been curbstomped in a fight even with his numbers. Four Arwings were enough to blow through his entire army, smash half a dozen high value targets, muscle through Venom's defenses, and assault him personally. An entire wing of them might have held off the invasion singlehandedly.

This might just be the case. IIRC, Bill's souped-up fighter also has those barrel-roll deflection shields, as do Katt's and the upgraded Wulfen.

[TithonusSyndrome]

On further reflection, the main advantage the Arwings seem to have over everything else is their shields. Without them, the Arwings are just as fragile as everything else; even those piddly yellow lasers can swat an unshielded Arwing out of the sky. I don't know how much it cost to develop them; it could be the Cornerians were planning to put those shields into general production, in which case Andross would have been curbstomped in a fight even with his numbers.

This is almost certainly the case, considering that the player's manual went on at great length about their cutting-edge G-Diffuser tech and how it makes the Arwing all that and then some. Hell, I honestly consider the homing "laser" to be the most bizarre tech in all sci-fi, off the top of my head at least.

But I don't think they were intended for mass production; all of the gear Starfox uses is from the defense contractor Arspace Dynamics, where Slippy's father Beltino is a high-end muckymuck. Maybe Arspace did make the Bulldog and Husky fighters that Bill's squadron were flying, but they would represent a much more economic line of products compared to the Arwing, Landmaster, Great Fox and the like. Either way, I suspect that it was the Toad family's intellect responding to the needs of the Starfox team that came up with the G-Diffuser, not the Cornerian military.

[Darth Raptor]

I had previously thought Solar to be a red dwarf or a gas giant that reached critical mass, but I like VT-16's hypothesis better. Looking back, it's clearly a terrestrial planet with a molten surface for whatever reason; one that may be very close to the system's primary, hence both its name and position at the center of Lylat's oh-so-precise map.

Speaking of, that system and a lot of what's in it are clearly artificial. How many Earth-sized terrestrial planets are in its habitable zone anyway? Those orbits would have to be stationary relative to each other for the system's "topography" to be at all relevant. What are the chances of that? How many distinct sapient species, some of which boast civilizations over a million years ancient? None of it adds up, but the multiple system theory doesn't either. It's obviously intended and presented as a single star system, the implications of which just aren't well thought out.

[TithonusSyndrome]

At this rate, it's likelier that Cornerians have a totally different meaning for the word "system".

Minor tangent; I always liked to think that the Lylat "system", the Metroidverse and the F-Zeroverse were all set in the same galaxy, or at least examine the challenges inherent in trying to make them all consistent. I don't know too much about the civilizations of the latter two franchises, I just know that there's some kind of galactic union of sovereign powers in the Metroid verse.

[Bug-Eyed Earl]

I had the Nintendo Power official player's guide for the N64 game, and it was full of these little sidebars that expanded on the world in the game.

For starters:

1. Andross introduced all of the life forms on Solar; it said he may have engineered them to "spite his contemporaries."

2. There is reference to "The Lost Tribe of Cornerus" that once inhabited Venom; the golem and the ruins are explicitly stated as having been theirs.

3. A different civilization lived on Titania; the boss was stated as being a still active planetary defense machine.

[TithonusSyndrome]

I was aware that Titania was beyond a shadow of any doubt inhabited by the roving mechas of a long-extinct civilization, and that Aquas might have once housed a civilization as well. Also, RedImperator's suggestion that sources from beyond the Lylat system were responsible for upgrading at least one faction's tech is also meritorious, because the saucer ship that tried to destroy the base on Katrina was held to be an alien design by Cornerian intelligence or whoever the blurbs in the player's guide are supposed to be attributed to.

[TithonusSyndrome]

Can't we just agree it was extensively BDZ'd? ;P

Andross developed some kind of planet-buster raygun on one of his weapons (that Area 6 boss that could "phase" in and out of reality), so maybe he did some damage to a random world?

The phase cloaking Sector Z boss pales considerably compared to Andross' tech to create levitating blocks ex fucking nihilo, as is stated in the player's guide, during the approach to Venom.

[VT-16]

Maybe this is from mixing Starfox with Starfox 64, but didn't those levitating blocks come after you over and over again? Maybe Andross used building materials that he kept recycling with... magic technology things?

[Darth Ruinus]

Maybe this is from mixing Starfox with Starfox 64, but didn't those levitating blocks come after you over and over again? Maybe Andross used building materials that he kept recycling with... magic technology things?

Do you mean do those blocks follow you around? No, I dont think they do, rather it was just 2 or 3 seperates waves of them.