Now I've seen everything. The GBA, pushing polygons with no help, before my watering eyes. When I popped Bam's new GBA shooter, Star X into my Game Boy Advance, I almost wet myself looking at what the machine was doing. A Starfox-style 3D shoot-em-up, in a fully 3D polygon world, made portable. This was awesome to see for the first time, and thoughts of the GBA's possibilities ran amuck in my mind. Unfortunately, once the "gee whiz!" graphical factor wore off, and I settled into the meat of the gameplay, I began to get a bad taste in my mouth that could not be attributed to childhood paint-chip consumption; too many things were just done poorly in this game, leading to the game being nothing but a huge disappointment.

First, let's get the gameplay out of the way. This game is so blatant a rip (or as the developers might put it, "inspired recreation") of the classic Starfox SNES game, it almost seems as if they just excised a couple of letters from the game's name to avoid copyright trouble! Now, to bite off of Starfox isn't a bad thing at all. Flying through polygon terrains, and dodging and weaving through clusters of enemy aircrafts and aliens, only to meet the big-ass boss at the end of the stage is cool. And even cooler, the 360 degree stages where you fly in a preset area freely, wasting enemies are great, ala Starfox 64. Of course, all of this is in pretty sweet GBA polygon graphics. This is just about where the good stuff ends in this game. The controls, for starters, are abysmal. In a shooter, perfect control is everything. This game will have you struggling to compensate for the ridiculous "over-response" of the ship to the Control Pad. As a result, targeting the enemies is about as easy as placing a camel through the eye of the proverbial needle. Next up on the hit list is hit detection, or lack thereof. Sure, your ship takes damage. But when it does (and it will, as you'll never be able to dodge enemies with these controls), you will never know it. There's no ship damage noise, no on screen "damage flash", no screen shake, no nothing. The health bar, which you will not be paying attention to while futilely attempting to survive, just drains until you randomly blow up. Your standard shooter "mega bomb", that savior of blaster aficionados, is worthless here too, in that it doesn't even appear when launched except for it's icon appearing and vanishing on your HUD. Hopefully with a quality display like that, you might actually hit something with it!

Extra features in this sad cart are a nice 4-player link mode, which is marred by the shoddy controls, and the password save. Password save here isn't such a cop-out as it normally is, as it records a nearly obsessive amount of data: your lives, your score, your weapon, your health, your shield, etc. It stops just short of recording your position on screen! Problem is, the codes are pretty long, and the typeface the characters are in makes for a lot of mix-ups. Be prepared to cry when you get to the last stage, and can't get your password right because you mistook an "O" for a "0"!

At the end of the day, you have to give kudos to the developer, Graphic State for the sweet polygon engine the crafted for the game. Then you also want to run up and punch them in the face for the way they implemented the controls and the gameplay in this cart! It almost makes you long for a Nintendo Starfox GBA remake to show these guys how it should be done. Oh well, at least this game sets a standard for GBA power... graphics wise, but not gameplay-wise.