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The Mirage Dragon would have wowed me in 1996. It would have blown my mind. It would have fairly erupted from the screen, this twisting, sinuous metal spacecraft, mouth gaping and malevolent and firing laser beams in every direction. After it had blasted me to pieces, it would have made me call up a friend and say: man, I've seen it. I've seen the future of games. Graphics will never get any better than this.They did, of course, and yet in a way they didn't. The future of games as embodied by the Mirage Dragon is now the past - the distant past. But the Mirage Dragon still does the job it was designed for, too. It's a boss, certainly, with a glowing weak spot in that awful mouth, but it's also a graphical showcase. Star Fox 2, the game that would have given us the Mirage Dragon in 1995 had it been released, was a graphical showcase. It still feels like one. Running on the SNES Mini, its ROM legally available for the first time ever, you sense how hard it would have pushed the technology of 1995. Those strangely papery polygons that make up the game's space jets and planetary installations flicker and warp and still have a strange power to dazzle. The frame-rate judders along, eloquent as to the stress the hardware was suddenly under. The briefing screen for a mission in which you take down a giant cruiser shows the cruiser itself rotating in three dimensions, and it's still rather special. 3D rotation! They could do that in 1996? Clearly they could.
Star Fox 2 is an unusual game, an astonishingly inventive sequel that built on the combat and visual thrills of the first Star Fox but wasn't afraid to experiment with the structure. Rather than starting you at one end of a space map and asking you to pick your route to the far side, choosing from missions that can eventually be all but committed to memory through sheer repetition, you're suddenly protecting Corneria, your home world, from an ongoing attack from big villain Andross and the attack pretty much plays out in real time. Andross builds bases on nearby planets, and he has cruisers headed for you and IPBMs launching every few minutes. Your job is still to get across the map to take out Andross directly, but you have to respond to other things as they happen. Those cruisers! Those missiles! These are all problems that compete for your time and there's a panicky thrill in knowing that if you head for a planet to take on an entrenched baddy, there will be missiles still snaking through space towards Corneria, launched from other points. Throughout this wonderfully breathless game, you are asked to think on the fly, and to dash headlong between danger zones, constantly prioritising threats.
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