Cool game, the last title NDcube made before getting sent to the mediocre party game mines until the end of time. Despite being developed by a literal first-party nintendo studio this was published by NEC and was only released in north america. Weird.

It's a fun zero-G racer, leaning more towards Wipeout than F-Zero. The courses are all composed of the titular slidable tubes, and while it seems like a gimmick at first the courses are definitely designed around being able to ride on all sides. It makes cornering particularly unique, as turns can become bumps if you are on a certain part of the tube. Getting bumped into the air significantly hinders your speed, so the best way to go fast is to treat it more like a bobsled luge of sorts and keep your vehicle glued to the floor at all possible times. There are 3 different types of turns that you can make depending on which combination of joystick and trigger directions that are inputted, and the game doesn't really do a very good job explaining the best use case situations for each so there's a lot of trial and error when it comes to picking up the controls and mechanics. It's really hard to to drifts without spinning out, losing all the speed gained throughout the course, getting passed up by 3 different other racers while you watch helplessly. There's also a boost system that's designed around a meter that increases over time. There's a weird combat mechanic thrown in where tailing other racers from behind allows you to steal their meter, but I found that due to how the AI works there weren't many options for me to take advantage of that whereas the AI loved to just suck me dry every opportunity they could get. Apparently there's like a parry window where you can input to reverse card their succ attempts but nowhere in my entire playthrough could I successfully pull it off (but of course the AI can do it without breaking a sweat). You can also choose between like two different boost types where one accumulates up to three boost stocks that you can spend and another where it's a bar you can pull from any time. There aren't any items or such to speak of, so it's a rather straight-laced racer.

The game has vibes for days though. The menus look like they have been ripped directly out of some 2003 ass jetix/toonami cyber-futurecore ad bumpers and I'm totally here for it. The vehicle designs are rad, the soundtrack is some bumpin techno, and the levels actually have decent environmental variety despite all being enclosed in clear metal tubes. There's your typical cybery metal city landscapes, sure, but there's also stuff like a giant withered tree, a lush jungle, a shady neon-lit city block, and the classic underwater ocean tube. Every game with an underwater ocean tube is a good game, I don't make the rules here.

My only major problem with this game is in its pacing and difficulty. This shit is paced like a mfin SNK fighting game, where even though the game is short 75% of my time playing it was spent in the mfin final nayuta cup instead of having my playtime spread evenly across the games full breadth of content. The AI is such a blatantly cheating bastard in this game it's not even funny. It's not unusual to be running a decent race in like 4th place or so, look at the map, and see that first is halfway across the fucking course isolated from everyone else. Once the game spreads the AI out like its joever dude you might as well restart and save yourself the time. There's only 3 cups in the game split across two classes and while the first cup on the first class is piss easy to the point of being braindead, the second cup starts to take the gloves off and the third cup puts on the brass knuckles. And then you have to do it ALL OVER AGAIN on a higher speed class with even more fiendish AI! I'd really chalk it up to being a case of the devs not really playtesting too well and tuning the game balance for themselves over the average player because the game spikes up the difficulty way before I could grasp the game enough to be ready. Maybe they expected players to grind out each course in the training free run mode or time trials before tackling the third cup? This game would easily be bumped up a star if the balance was toned down by like two notches, it's super demoralizing to watch an entire run go awry from the CPU just being utterly merciless.

Overall it's a cool racer with sizably thought-out mechanics and hella vibes made slightly sour by just how unbalanced the AI opponents are. I've seen videos of SPEEDRUNNERS getting second place in certain races due to the fucked up balancing!!! If I had a nickel for every brutally difficult zero-G racer that's exclusive to the gamecube I've played, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's weird that there's two of them. They really should let NDcube run wild again sometime instead of having them make Everybody's 1-2 Wii Party the top 100, this game is probably their best work.