I decided to play Dinosaur Planet.
These days I cry a lot about how sterile and flat modern 3D action games are so I've yearned for the good old days of N64 games when things felt a bit more handcrafted and deliberate. It's wonderful to get a near complete build of one from what I consider the height of the genre by a master studio of the era. Though I lament that the build doesn't exactly run great. Not so much expected glitches, but framerate. It plays but it's very choppy. Almost hurts my eyes and it's unfortunate but I can't be too surprised. Oddly enough that hoverbike segment is less frustrating than I remember when pursuing Tricky.
It's fascinating to see how far this progressed before it became StarFox Adventures and ported to the GameCube. I think the most stand out thing is seeing that Fox really did thoroughly replace Sabre in this build already in all but some text still referring to him as such. There's also still Sabre's portrait for Fox's health. Some NPC's still refer to him as Sabre, but he calls himself "Fox McCloud of the Lylat Royal Knights". A lot of his VA lines were taken and moved to the Gamecube which is interesting. Fox has the same attack grunts and, from my memory, most of the same dialogue even here. It doesn't seem that SFA rerecorded most vocals for him. They're just obviously compressed on the clearly non-CD N64 cartridge. And I like him better with a sword. Might be my Zelda love in me, but when it comes to melee weapons in fantasy games, nothing beats a nice broadsword for me. Screams adventure and courage.
I feel like had this game continued on it's path for the GameCube, this probably would have been Rare's magnum opus. As far as adventure games are concerned. This seemed like an epic in the works with the same bold scale and tone as Jet Force Gemini (my favorite game from them).
Also Krystal got a big fat ass head.