Rare’s 2002 GameCube game takes Fox McCloud out of the cockpit. Dinosaur Planet is breaking apart while General Scales and his army overrun it, and Fox explores it on foot, solving puzzles and fighting with a staff instead of a blaster. A young triceratops prince, Tricky, follows him and helps on command. The game began life as Rare’s Dinosaur Planet for the Nintendo 64. If you own it, Nagori lets you play it on iPhone and iPad.
What you need
- An iPhone 12 or newer, or an iPad with an A14 chip or newer, with iOS 17.6 or later.
- Nagori from the App Store. Your first game is free.
- A disc image of your copy of Star Fox Adventures:
.iso,.gcm,.rvz,.cisoor.gcz, or a.zipor.rarcontaining it. The game fits on a single disc.
No BIOS file is needed.
How to play Star Fox Adventures on iPhone
- Install Nagori from the App Store.
- Copy your Star Fox Adventures disc image to the Files app, in iCloud Drive or On My iPhone.
- Open Nagori, tap + and select the file. Add GameCube games from inside Nagori: the Files app’s Open in menu doesn’t hand formats like
.rvzand.gcmto Nagori. - Find Star Fox Adventures on the GameCube shelf and press Play.
- Switch to a layout with two sticks. The default Standard layout has no stick at all. Pause, open Settings → Touch Layout and choose Twin Sticks or DualShock. With a controller connected, you can skip this step.
Controls
Fox moves with the control stick. The C-stick opens the game’s quick menus, where you pick an item, a staff power or a command for Tricky, such as telling him to dig or breathe fire. Nagori puts the C-stick on the right stick, which is why the two-stick layouts fit this game.
You walk far more than you open menus, so open Edit Layout in the pause menu, make the right stick smaller and give the face buttons more room under your right thumb.
A controller is the more comfortable way to play a long adventure. Bluetooth controllers that iOS supports work, including DualSense, DualShock 4 and Xbox controllers. A is the bottom face button, B the left one, X the right one and Y the top one. Z is on the right shoulder button, and L and R are the triggers. Pressing the left stick opens Nagori’s pause menu. L and R register as full presses, and GameCube games don’t vibrate in Nagori.
Arwing flights
Fox doesn’t walk between the pieces of Dinosaur Planet. He flies the Arwing, and these short trips play like the older Star Fox games, with gold rings to fly through on the way. Miss too many and you don’t get through, so you fly the route again.
Pause and choose Save as a flight starts. If it goes badly, Load puts you back at the start of the run in a second, without replaying anything that came before it.
Saves: memory card and save states
Star Fox Adventures saves to the memory card, and that card works in Nagori as it did on the console. It stays inside the app, though: it isn’t in the Files app, isn’t part of Export Saves and doesn’t sync to iCloud.
Nagori adds two things on top:
- Quit any time. Leave the app mid-puzzle and Continue puts you back exactly where you were.
- Save states. Save before a boss or a tricky puzzle, then Load to try again. Nagori keeps your last four saves per game.
Keep saving in the game too. A save state may not load after some Nagori updates, while the memory card save stays.
Best settings
- Quality: Medium, the default, balances frame rate and heat. High gives smoother motion on the newest iPhones and iPads.
- Drop to Low on long sessions if your iPhone gets warm. Exploring Dinosaur Planet for an hour at a time works the device hard.
- Resolution: Nagori shows GameCube games at their original resolution. Full Screen stretches the picture to fill the display.
