Best Star Fox Games, Ranked

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By Steve Watts on

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Since its first release in 1993, Star Fox has been one of the biggest vehicular shooter brands around. Nintendo set a new standard for technical prowess when it pushed polygons on the Super NES, a feat that was incredibly impressive despite its rudimentary nature. Since then, Fox McCloud has become one of the company's most recognizable stars, featuring in every Super Smash Bros. game with wingman Falco also joining for most of them. But the core of the Star Fox brand is the on-rail shooter, which balanced white-knuckled fighter pilot action with acrobatic stunts and hidden secrets.

Fox and his friends have been through a lot together--eight games when including spin-offs. And while Nintendo has mostly hewed closely to its shooter roots, it has also found ways to expand on the Star Fox concept with new ideas and gameplay styles. These experiments have sometimes worked better than others, but they're consistently interesting and unique. Here are our favorite Star Fox games.

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Star Fox 2, the direct sequel to the original groundbreaking SNES game, was canceled in 1995 as Nintendo prepared for the advent of higher-fidelity 3D games on the N64. Over the next two decades, it lived only as a rumor and prototype ROMs that made their way out among fans and gaming history buffs. That changed in 2017 when Nintendo restored the game and released it officially for the first time as part of its Super NES Classic Edition, one of several mini-consoles released around the time that house a library of classic games. A few years later, it