Nintendo revealed a Star Fox remake last night without telling anyone

Fox McCloud's Star Fox screenshot — Not many games get two separate remakes (Nintendo)

It is not enough to a secret shop in London, Nintendo has revealed the highly rumored new Star Fox game in a Direct that they didn’t advertise just a few minutes ago.

Acting weird is, and always has been, perfectly normal for Nintendo, but they’ve really been onto something this year. We are in May now and they still haven’t had one first party Nintendo Directso we know next to nothing about what games they have planned for the rest of the year.

Unusually there have been credible rumours, including one Zelda: Ocarina Of Time Remake AND at least a new Star Fox game. There has been some disagreement, among insiders, as to whether there are one or two new games, but most agreed that an old-school entry in the series would be released in the first half of this year.

It has now been revealed that the game in question is a remake of Star Fox 64 (aka Lylat Wars) and not an entirely new game. That’s a bit of a surprise, but what’s even more curious is that Nintendo decided to announce it at 11pm BST on Wednesday night, with just 10 minutes’ notice.

It’s pointless to ask why they did it this way, since they clearly don’t care when and how Europe will discover the new game (11pm is midnight on the continent). But if nothing else it proves that even Nintendo isn’t immune to leaks and now there’s absolutely no way to guess when or how they might announce other new games.

Even ignoring all of that, it’s a bit odd that it’s Star Fox 64 that’s being remade and not the original game, but then Star Fox 64 has already been remade once before, for 3DSso it was probably a bit easier to do, compared to the massive upgrade the original SNES game (known as Starwing in Europe) would have required.

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Star Fox 64 is also arguably the best game in the series, with both linear and versatile levels, where you have complete freedom of movement. It also had a four-player competitive mode, which, unusually for modern remakes, will be included and slightly expanded upon by the new version.

According to Nintendo, the level design is the same as the N64 version, but, as you can see, the graphics have seen a major upgrade. The characters have also been redesigned, but in a slightly disarming pseudo-realistic style that doesn’t look like Fox McCloud’s appearance in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie or the cuddly models from the original SNES game box.

The graphics are really good, but Fox has a mouth so wide it looks like he just swallowed a plate. Although the new feature that replaces your face with one of the characters when using GameChat is very impressive, as the camera maps your facial movements to the CGI avatar.

Other new features include optional mouse controls for first-person view, though you can also use the N64 wireless controller if you’d rather keep things old. There’s also a co-op mode where one person can be both the pilot and the shooter, along with three separate difficulty modes to make sure everyone can play to some extent.

There will also be a new Challenge mode with achievement-like goals and a number of new cutscenes and familiar details, with Nintendo showing off a new prologue featuring Fox’s father.

Confusingly, the remake is simply called Star Foxwhich seems to rule out the possibility that they will give the original game the same treatment and it will be released for Nintendo Switch 2 on June 25.

This is around the same time that Nintendo usually puts on a non-E3-style Direct, but given everything else that’s happened (or rather hasn’t happened) this year, it’s impossible to know if they’ll stick to that tradition.