Although I realise that legions of Nintendo fans disagree with me, I found Starfox Adventures to be refreshing and fun. I loved the story, presentation, graphics, audio, seemless world, gameplay variety, characters, and the item collecting (that pretty much every platform/adventure game has, but for some reason this game got criticized for.)
The only thing that was really lacking was the combat system which could have used more complexity. But you have to understand that it was clearly aimed at young children, which leads me to Grabbed by the Ghoulies:
GbtG is great - If you are a young child between the ages of 6 and 12. Otherwise your mileage will very substantially.
I've spent about an hour with the game and find it to be up to Rare's usual standards for presentation, graphics, audio, story etc... But the gameplay is clearly aimed at being simple enough, yet amusing enough, for young children to really enjoy playing it. This is precisely what Rare was trying to accomplish and they did so brilliantly.
Personally, for me so far the game is an 8.5/10, but I sympathize with the need for Gamespot (6.5) and IGN (7) to tell their main audience (16 - 26 year old hardcore gamers) to take a pass on Ghoulies. Conversely, I also agree with Gamepro for scoring the game a 4/5, because they service a wider audience beyond hardcore internet junkies.
I'm just about 10% of the way through the game right now and I'll be back to report more later, but I'm having fun with this game so far. In the end I think I'll agree that Rare should have increased the complexity about 30% of the way through to keep adult gamers attention as well, but I certainly don't regret buying what I consider to be an extremely polished, if simple game.
