Played via the Atari 50th Anniversary Collection on PS4 and PS5, because – i’m just gonna make it clear now – i ain’t buying a frigging Jaguar to play this. I’m simply not gonna.
Frankly i wasn’t even aware of this ever being a thing until i was flipping through the Jaguar library on the Atari 50th Anniversary Collection (you don’t need any of the DLC, as the Jaguar library – and by extension Trevor McFur is part of the base package and wasn’t expanded, not yet anyways), you’d think this would have been featured a bit more in retro reviews of the console itself, but it wasn’t, and i struggle to grasp that.
You’d think a game called Trevor McFur and with a cover art of a jaguar man embracing a jaguar woman with space in the background would be easier to bait people with, even if just out of curiosity, but i guess, as usual, i do have to do everything myself.
I mean, it’s really writing itself, given it was supposed to be a launch title for the console but instead that went to its “sister” title, Cybermorph, yeah, the “where did you learn how to fly?” one.
Also, yes, i was gonna make a Starfox Zero review, but i delayed, then thought if i really wanted to play Starfox Zero, i remembered the demo version i’ve played a decade ago…. so i figured, furry for furry, might as well do this one, that Starfox Zero review is gonna get delayed to when i can be fucked to, or for any new Starfox project that might emerge after the Switch 2 remake of SF 64/Lylat Wars.
To my surprise, this is not a bad game, at all… kinda, but i was surprised that it was actually more playable than its reputation made me expect.
It’s a fairly simple 2D shmup, where you move left to right as the screen scrolls, you have the regular shot (no charge shot here), a bomb that drops at an angle below the spacecraft, and a variety of special weapons you can stock and toggle through to use.
There’s actual a decent variety of these to collect and use, going from the classic smart bomb to the big thin lazer, a shield, an orbitating green sphere, to more original stuff like the magnet that moves away all enemies in its trajectory, a ricocheting orb, and even a spaceship aid which summons an ally spaceship that shoots enemy and provides a lot of help in both shielding you and dealing with the many enemies and obstacles.
You can upgrade the regular shot and the bomb, but the special weapons are essential, a life saver, to the point gameplay it’s a bit too reliant on these, because recovering from a death that removes all the ship weapon upgrades can be harsh, for a game that’s already pretty difficult.
Aside from the fact the game lacks any music, even ignoring this cardinal sin in a genre whose soundtracks gave us inforgettable classic videogames tunes, Trevor Mc Fur indeed is brought down by more pressing matters than it generic sound effects and it having no music during gameplay.
First is level design, as frankly the stages (split into a space and moon section with a boss each) are overly long, repetitive and often the graphical style doesn’t make clear at a glance if that foreground is just decoration or something you should avoid, not that it matters to the enemies that can spawn out of nowhere or ignore the level design and move whatever, which not only makes them feel more than animated images slapped on a surface than actual enemies you fight in space, but makes it harder to get any proper beading, so forcing you to keep shooting and dropping bombs just in case.
The latter especially because of how the levels can be overly long, have the foreground obstruct vision and hide enemies even when it doesn’t kill you, and because there’s no real difficulty escalation, so the first stage really is as difficult as the last.
Yes, you can technically play each of the 4 moons/stages in any order you like before tackling the final level, but aside from some bosses being harder than others, and some levels being so absurdly longer to the point it feels like a cruel joke, the fact remains, there’s no difficulty scaling or sense that each section is harder than the others, this is a fairly tough shmup in a weird constant way that’s definitely not for the better.
It’s not even that it controls badly, it doesn’t, even though you wish the spaceship had a smaller hitbox and moved a bit faster, because at times you die by grazing a surface that you’d think you weren’t exactly touching or simply can’t move fast enough through the bullet patterns.
It could be worse, as the longer levels often have midway rovers that spawn power ups and special weapons pick ups, so it kinda throws you a bone, but due to the difficulty and the stages being so unbelievably long it’s absurd, it becomes a marathon, to the point i really can’t imagine playing this on the original hardware, with just 3 default lives and 3 continues.
Mind you, there’s like 10 levels, plus the bonus stages of flying through rings to get some extra pick ups, so it’s not short either, but i can’t imagine anyone really wanting to get good at this, especially as later levels somehow outdone themselves in being insanely overly stretched , making previous sections that you thought were a bit long than necessary look like brief inconvencies in comparison.
Yes i save scummed like hell after every stage clear, and even like this, still, Trevor McFur is insanely long and difficult anyway, and i can’t really say its difficult for good reasons.
It’s not impossible, and i’m sure it can be done the proper way, it’s not THAT hard but since the stages go on forever and aren’t really balanced difficulty wise, i’m not devoting weeks to learn a shmup that i mostly found decent, despite the issues i had some fun with it, not gonna lie.
I would like to say that Trevor McFur did look fairly good for 1993… at least in screenshots, because when you actually play you realize it honestly not impressive at all for 1993, even if the use of pre-rendered 3D assets i’m sure got a looking, it’s honestly decent at best, but pales in comparison of what the genre was showing off on older hardware,
Even ignoring the stupid “do the math” marketing campaign Atari did for the Jaguar and the expectations that created for anything releasing on the console, it’s kinda meh, at best: the background are drab, recycled, the sprites are big and the game is colorful enough, yes, but it lacks any proper style and especially the enemies are such a random hodgepotche of shit thrown together in a hurry, there’s no cohesion of anything, pure “everything but the kitchen sink” mentality, and not in a good way.
Spiders and random rolling rocks and floating disembodied human eyeballs are enemies like the giant silver cherubs, which are very Cho Aniki-esque, but even saying that would imply there is some theme or logic to the insanity, but here there isn’t, it really is a style-free grab-bag of random shit, and same goes for the levels, as we go from swamp alien worlds to caves with dinosaurs to super weird crap like a world made of painted-on construction paper blocks for a baby crib?
Same of course goes from bosses, though it’s not really an issue in this specific case, nowhere as it all never mashes with the fact they decided to go for a Star Fox thing, with an anthro cast… and they somehow made it both weird and boring, as they just slapped realistic animal faces on humanoid bodies, which brings us to the plot.
Which is just again doing “a Star Fox”, as you, pilot Trevor McFur and your co-pilot/fianceè Cutter, are sent in to save the Crescent Galaxy from a menace known as Odd-It, with the goal to reclaim the moons he has taken, his goal being to make everything as odd and weird as him.
Which feels like a convenient story explanation for the game enemies and locales being a complete and flavorless mish mash of random shit….…. But in this case i completely agree with the villain, since the “furry designs” are surprisingly boring, like your copilot/fianceè is a lynx woman, your chief is a lion man, but again, it’s just them slapping realistic felines head on humanoid bodies, and them handing some quippy dialogues to read.
Sine Mora this ain’t.
Once you beat the aptly named villain, you get a still of Trevor Mc Fur with his co-pilot/love interest, Cutter, talking about protecting the Circle Reserve by getting together… look, you can feline furnicate all you want, because sure as shit neither Trevor McFur nor Cutter are “household names”, and regardles of the implications, they never returned in anything else.
Considering the reputation of the Jaguar, the negative reviews at the time and the fact the console became a popular dead horse to kick and ridicule, the consequent whiplash in playing and realizing it wasn’t utter shit… because you were made to expect complete garbage, i’d still say – for me – that isn’t a bad game, but also isn’t “good”, let’s not dance around it.
It’s not bad, but it’s barely above average, and arguably it feels frankensteined together and rushed to market by a team tasked to work on the ill fated Jaguar, which if doesn’t quite explain the random mesh of element passed as “style”, sure as hell explains the lack of any music, or the lack of any multiplayer options for that matter.
Even if you didn’t believe the assumption of this being originally developed for the 32 bit Atari Panther, and then moved to the Jaguar when the Panther was cancelled, or that it was a tech demo of sorts they had to develop into a full game so it could be in stores as one of the very few launch titles , as the chosen pack-in game ended up being the aforementioned Cybermorph.. it still feels rushed.
It does feel rushed and kinda slapped together by a team that didn’t have much experience in actual development (it was developed by an internal Atari team, Flare 2, an off shoot of Flare Technologies) or the specific genre, and while it was dead on arrival as a franchise meant to represent the Jaguar and be a flagship of the Atari of the time, curiously remained the only 2D shmup ever released during the Jaguar life span, making for a great oddity…one that made perfect sense for people to ignore back in the day, considering there were MANY better playing and better looking games of this genre for the older consoles, which also didn’t feel or look so unfinished.
And those did actually have music.
To be honest, given its production history and feeling of a game barely started, it’s kinda of a miracle Trevor McFur in The Crescent Galaxy turned out to be just average, playable, very, very flawed and nothing compared to stuff like Thunder Force IV, among others games of the genre that outshined it in every possible facet, but nowhere that bad in itself.
Maybe it’s me having some subconcious pity of this one, but what can i say, it’s such a curiosity from the past of Atari that i still kinda struggle to believe really happened, yet i think it does kinda deserve its rest in the abyss, still unmolested by some one trying to resurrect its corpse, yet fairly preserved in the Atari 50th Collection for modern audiences that most likely never owned a Jaguar and want to indulge their curiosity about weird, forgotten videogames of yore.
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