A massive mod for the original Super NES Star Fox has launched after two years in development, and it's so impressive that even the game's original developers are taking notice.
Star Fox EX (or Exploration Showcase) is a massive romhack for the original game. If you're not familiar with romhacks, they're basically mods for old console games, made by fans to patch in new features similar to what you'd see in PC games like Skyrim. The neat trick is that they can actually run on old consoles, opening the door for modern developers to push the hardware far beyond what was thought possible back in the day.
In the case of Star Fox EX, that includes a mode that lets the game run at up to 60fps, a 5-player multiplayer mode, an original campaign with new bosses and 15 new levels, support for control options like the SNES mouse and Super Scope, a 3D model viewer, expanded camera control, ship customization options, and more.
Star Fox EX is led by the work of a modder who goes by KandoWontu, though a team of over a dozen additional contributors also added to the project. Now that it's out and in players' hands, they're working on bug fixes and patches.
It's an impressive enough piece of work to have drawn the attention of some of the game's original developers. "This guy is a madman," veteran Star Fox programmer Dylan Cuthbert jovially notes on Twitter. "Great work getting it running so fast! Back in the day we were kind of flailing around in the dark and with only ten months to make the game so there are probably lots of places to optimize in there."
You can grab the mod for yourself over on Romhacking.net, though you'll need to provide your own copy of Star Fox to apply the patch. If you don't have the flash cart and Super Nintendo necessary to play on original hardware, Star Fox EX should run just fine on most SNES emulators, and a recent update has added MiSTer support.
Star Fox is one of the best SNES games of all time, even without a mod to improve it.
