Assault: The Missing Pieces

[Drasiana]

So, Assault. The topic of many debate, this game. Quite a few of you are probably aware that it isn't exactly my favourite game in the series, but I do find it interesting when viewing it under what it could have been.

I'm not sure if it's common knowledge, but Assault had a bit of a screwed-up development. Originally planned to be a part of the Triforce Arcade Project, there was supposed to be an arcade game attached to the title, but it was abandoned for unknown (?) reasons.

With this abandonment happening a ways into the development, production of the game was naturally disrupted. Now this is theoretical, but it's quite probable that the funding was cut and a huge chunk of the game had to be rebuilt from scratch. And if Namco was operating under a similar option agreement that movie games often do, this gave them a limited time--and, due to the resources already spent--a limited budget to remake the game.

There are a couple pieces here and there within the game, or the early promotional content, that indicate what might have been originally planned. Here are a few of them:

This character. He cropped up in the batch of found concept art for the game, but wasn't ever actually seen. Characters get cut in production all the time, but I think this guy might still be in the game, just at the beginning. Now, this could just be me being deaf combined with inconsistent voice acting, but in the opening scene with the Oikonny Rebellion, isn't one of the primary voices ("We underestimated the strength of his reserves") still unidentified? This might've been that guy, which makes me wonder if there were supposed to be craft interior shots in this scene, rather than the flurry of disembodied voices and explosions we got. That would have made a lot more sense cinematically, anyway.

Titania and Zoness both seem like they were intended to be main levels.

Early promotional footage of the game showed different designs and way better graphics than what we got. See in this video. Granted, the gameplay footage is clearly an early example and is even worse than the final product, but I'm talking about the sweet canyon sequence in the beginning and the model of Fox. "It's just pretty for promotional purposes", maybe, except the model for Fox had an animated run cycle already. Compare this early render to one more recent, including the horror-teeth.

There were three directors. Given that the game wasn't exactly so big that it justified multiple directors, this probably means that said directors were hired in as replacements for when the previous ones either left or were fired. I shouldn't have to explain how this would probably bone the production, and that's quite evident. Three directors and no writing credit? Yeah, that's pretty telling.

Plotholes! Oh, how we love these. The biggest one that comes to mind is the wrecked Wolfens in the Asteroid Belt that were never mentioned again. Could there have been another stage planned around this, or was it just weak writing?

I heard rumour that Leon and Panther were intended as playable in multiplayer, that there was some sort of leftover code or whatnot indicating as much, but I'm not sure how valid this is.

The name change from "Armada" to "Assault". This is probably superficial, but eh, might as well throw it up there.

There's also this, I'm not sure what to make of it.

So, what do you think? Anything else "hidden" in the game or early screenshots? Do you think Assault would have been much different if everything had gone as planned? How cool would it have been to be able to play Star Fox in an arcade?!

[ThePointingMan]

How cool would it have been to be able to play Star Fox in an arcade?!

Normally in this scenario I would type a long string of letters in capitals fallowed by an exclamation mark to show that I'm freaking out, but this... this is just to good a though for that, nothing can be placed in text to emulate the incredibleness of that thought.

Now as far as hidden things in it, I heard the game was originally supposed to be 8 player and use the gamecubes LaN ability, and I remember long ago some dude posting about his findings while he ripped apart the IOS on here, In the character list there was the whole starwolf for multiplayer like you said, there was also a multiplayer map for fortuna in there. I wander if that thread still exists/ could be brought up again.

As far as things I've noticed, you unlock something for getting all the silver medals, but nothing for gold, That doesn't make sense, so I figure maybe they had something planned for that, but i dunno. I also noticed if you beat a stage without dying your score for it turns blue, if you beat story without dying the whole story mode score turns blue, and same with survival mode.

Anyways, I really hate how this sort of thing happened for BOTH the GC starfox games... those doing terrible = people not wanting to play new starfox = poor sales = them not wanting to make more starfox and then theres the 3ds release and no one buys that one either cause the 3ds has no games!!! Why would they make a starfox game now :(

[Drasiana]

Ah, I thought I'd heard about that.

Also, good point in the "no reward for all gold medals" thing, that is a little odd.

[DZComposer]

Nintendo never called it "Star Fox Armada," that name was made up by the fanbase. Official stuff always referred to it as "Star Fox," "Star Fox GC," or "Star Fox 2."

I'm not sure where it came from, though I do remember a site "starfoxarmada.com" that popped-up during this. I think it was supposed to be a new fansite that never materialized as I remember the domain not being registered to Nintendo, but that may be where that name came from. Though I also remember some promo material talking about Star Fox getting a bunch of characters together to form a "Star Fox Armada," so there is another possible source.

It would have been a trademark issue anyway. There was a PC game called "Star Trek Armada" that was all over store shelves at the time.

[TCPeppyTc]

I suppose if the development was more organized, and had the proper funding and time frame, it probably would have been much better. Maybe if everything had gone right, Starwolf wouldnt have been as altered as they were.

Despite its flaws, is this game worth buying? Ive never played it

[Drasiana]

Nintendo never called it "Star Fox Armada," that name was made up by the fanbase. Official stuff always referred to it as "Star Fox," "Star Fox GC," or "Star Fox 2."

Really? I thought it was the translation of that early promotional poster I linked. Oh well! :B

If it was Armada though, the explanation for the name change makes sense.

[DZComposer]

Honestly, I never paid much attention to the Japanese materials. I guess it is possible NCL may have used a name similar, but NOA sure never used it.

[Drasiana]

Nah, apparently it's just Star Fox in Japanese. So the poster says "Star Fox: Star Fox".

GEE I CAN'T WAIT UNTIL STAR FOX: STAR FOX COMES OUT. :I

[Thu'um]

neat stuff you found, g'job

[EchoFox]

Regards this, I seem to remember seeing that in NGC or Nintendo Official Magazine way back in like 2002/2003 sort of time, and the magazine article related to it definitely referred to it as Star Fox Armada. I remember that much.

Man, Dras, when that 2003 E3 trailer came out, it blew my mind and I was just like NEW STARFOX GAME CONFIRMED FOR BEST GAME EVER. And then it wasn't. And I only had 56k at the time, so I had to wait hours just to watch the stupid thing. Minus the bad early gameplay/rubbish voice over parts, it's still the coolest, most badass Star Fox thing to be produced in the last ten years.

Regards the Cornerian fleet engaging Oikonny's rebels, yeah interior shots would have made the entire thing 100% better. Then again so would, you know, some actual manoeuvring on the part of every vessel in the cutscene and actual damage being caused by the explosions. I'm not asking for ridiculous, Assault Horizon levels of stupid gratuitous explosions and debris, but come on. Not even a little bit? It's now a shame that SF is a Nintendo franchise, because it limits it to development on Nintendo consoles, the focus of which appears to be Wii Sports and Zeruda. If it were third party owned, I'm sure we'd have seen better games on different consoles.

[DZComposer]

So it was NOE that used it?

[Drasiana]

Now as far as hidden things in it, I heard the game was originally supposed to be 8 player and use the gamecubes LaN ability, and I remember long ago some dude posting about his findings while he ripped apart the IOS on here, In the character list there was the whole starwolf for multiplayer like you said, there was also a multiplayer map for fortuna in there. I wander if that thread still exists/ could be brought up again.

just to go back to this, can anyone help me find this thread? I'm not the only one that remembers it...D:

[Gestalt]

Wasnt the original idea for the game booooed (rejected) at its E3 screening. I thought that was why everything--including the arcade version of the game--was scrapped...ahh but what do I know it was so long ago...I might be mixing my games up here.

[Drasiana]

Uh, not that I'm aware of. As far as I remember everyone was just crapping their pants over a new Star Fox game that wasn't a Zelda clone

[Rik McCloud]

I just pulled out a copy of Nintendo Official Magazine UK I have had since June 2003 and it refers to Assault as Star Fox 2. The half page article features screenshots from the gameplay footage at E3 as well. I remember thinking despite the fact that it didn't look that good at the time, it was just in pre-production and it would be something really special.

Whilst I wasn't overly disappointed with the final product that was released two years later, it did leave me a little bit under fulfilled. The ten missions were interesting enough but it was way too short and I wanted a lot more that what we got. The story wasn't exactly brilliant either but the game's length again had a part to play. Shoe-horning in as much as they wanted to with the Aparoids taking over people and some of the more extreme events that happened to some of the characters was overly ambitious and sadly didn't pay off. If there really were three writers on this project at different stages, that would explain the reason why the story was so lacking. It would have been picked up by someone else and it wasn't given the love and care that someone writing the whole thing would have done.

The voice overs were at times incredibly cringe worthy and took me out of the experience during some of the cutscenes. Was interesting to see how they'd improved in the transmissions used in Brawl. Alesia Glidewell said in an interview with Mr Krystal that since she did the voice work for Assault, she did some training for accents and dialects and realised the mistakes she made when voicing Krystal.

One of the good things that came out of it was the multiplayer which I remember playing with friends and enjoying quite a bit. Was always exciting and the games were close. Titania and Zoness could have been interesting single player missions, the one interesting me the most being Zoness as the atmosphere that place had was awesome. However, I think they must have been dropped due to levels such as Sauria and the Sargasso Space Station due to being too similar or too sparse. The soundtrack is definitely one of the stand out features of the game. Was great fun to listen to.

I was curious to see how the models for the characters had changed so much and with such a significant downgrade in the detailing. Whilst I was never a massive fan of Fox's new look (he will always look his best in the Adventures renders thanks to the amount of time Rare put into it), it wasn't as bad as what happened to him in Command. Pepper was a bit freaky looking but as for Falco, Krystal, Slippy, Peppy, Wolf, Leon and Panther, they all looked alright.

One thing which I found out later was that Krystal's reactions in the mission briefings were significantly changed in the US and European versions of the game. Check out these cutscenes, particularly the ones where Krystal talks to Fox and notice the subtle differences in facial expressions conveying her feelings.

I think that Krystal might have shaken some of the reputation she now has if Nintendo had kept in little things like these and maybe had given her a little bit more focus in the game, building her character. I see her in the same way I look at Samus. It's nice to see some lead characters who don't get captured all the time and rely on male protagonists to rescue them.

An arcade cabinet would have been cool but I would have had no idea where it would be available to play. The only F-Zero AX cabinet I knew of in the UK was in London and I wasn't traveling over 100 miles just to play an arcade machine so if Star Fox had the same thing, I'm not sure what the accessibility of it would have been like but I'm guessing that it would have been as difficult as F-Zero.

[Drasiana]

That video is very misleading, Krystal isn't the only one whose reactions were taken out and you'll notice some significant changes in the other characters as well. The most significant character-change I found was that she wasn't shot at by the Aparoid on Fortuna in the Japanese version, it was Slippy.

I had a whole topic about this a while ago and the best anyone could figure was that they sacrificed the facial expressions for the sake of fixing lip sync, and either didn't have the time or money to fix it so they'd have facial expressions again.

And there weren't three writers...there were three directors and NO writers, which is even worse than having three writers (which actually happens often and isn't always horribly disastrous, especially if you co-write with friends frequently like I do).

[Gestalt]

I'm sure it was e3 2003 the report said it sucked

[Drasiana]

Can you bring up evidence of that?

[Gestalt]

gimme a sec...

[Gestalt]

Well, its a teacher's worst nightmare but... I think Wikipedia will do for this debate....

Article: Star Fox Assault

Section: Development

"Star Fox: Assault was first announced on May 8, 2002. It had a tentative release date of April 2003 for Japan, and would be developed by the same employees who worked on Ace Combat 2 at Namco.^[3] New information about the game didn't show up until a short video montage at 2003's E3 in Los Angeles, which showcased the game's first-person perspective.^[24] According to Electronic Gaming Monthly, the video was booed by viewers, and EGM itself said the video was "remarkably unimpressive".^[25]

During development, the game had the working title: Star Fox Armada,^[26] but eventually came to be known as Star Fox: Assault.^[27] In 2003, the game was intended to be multi player oriented, and the ground missions of the game had a control scheme similar to the on-foot multi player mode in Star Fox 64.^[28]

At 2004's E3, EGM, the same magazine that wrote poorly about it a year before, wrote a follow-up that said the game looked "much better than...a year ago".^[29] Assault was scheduled for a November 2004 release, but was delayed to the beginning of 2005."

^{Please check the article for reference sites}

[Rik McCloud]

I had no idea that the original trailer got booed. Perhaps that's why Nintendo don't release any information about upcoming titles until quite near to when they are released or are at least in a decent looking state. I do remember the long wait for the game as well. At least they didn't make the same mistake of making the game available to rent two weeks before it went on sale.

[Drasiana]

Eh...I'm still sceptical. Especially considering magazines trash upcoming games all the time, that doesn't get their funding cut. What interested me more was the constantly pushed-back release dates. What more likely got their funding cut is the fact that the arcade stations weren't exactly hot sellers.

And...are those dates in the articles...right? ...I definitely do not remember Assault being announced before Adventures was even released.

intended to be multiplayer oriented

I do remember this, though. Co-op?