Star Fox has such great potential, yet at times it looks like Nintendo doesn't know what to do with it. After two excellent shooters, it turned into a third-person adventure, then a mostly-on-foot action game that barely acknowledged the Arwings that made the first two memorable. Years later it morphed again, now into a stylus-driven, semi-tactical outing on DS. Based on sales and review scores, it's clear this series' greatest strength lies in vehicular combat, not character-driven missions. Makes sense then to ditch the single player and go for an all-out 64-player battlefield that catapults Wii to the top of the online multiplayer heap.
This one's fairly easy to sell: take Star Fox 64's excellent four-player mode, complete with Arwings, Landmaster tanks and rocket-launching soldiers, and supercharge the hell out of it. People in the sky coordinating attacks on rows of player-controlled hover tanks while foot soldiers plant mines and lay out midair nets to yank buzzing Arwings out of the sky... oh yes, we would play that forever. Add in character classes (Fox-type commando, Falco-type speedy assassin, Slippy-type engineer) and a host of new animals-in-armor and this simply screams "make me."
And that's really it. Ignore the on-rails single-player stuff for a while. Nintendo should show us it understands just how epic the Star Fox universe can be. Sure it's tough to take talking frogs seriously, but the characters will be secondary - this one's all about flying, driving and shooting. Hell they could even call it Lylat Wars and it'd make sense for once.
