A tantalising glimpse of what Nintendo EAD was capable of when allowed to step off the family-friendly Mario-Zelda-Mario hamster wheel: a 2000 AD Comics adaptation of Death Race 2000 that uses the word “Death” far more casually than just about any other Nintendo game that’s ever existed.

It’s interesting to me that some of EAD’s biggest mold-breakers (Starfox, F-Zero, Pilotwings) ended up being sourced out to Namco and Sega in the succeeding games generations, as if Nintendo were afraid of being directly responsible for games where your soul could run wild, blow big things up and flirt with death-destruction. I was very much in the “Mario Kart 8 IS the next-gen F-Zero!” camp until I replayed this at the weekend and realised that X is as much about its presented attimood as it is its precise handling. It’s hard in ways Nintendo games simply aren’t, usually - in MK8 you can’t make Mario break 1400mph and lose his fine-tuned grip on a deep-space heavy-metal mag-lev, screaming “noooOOoOooOooOoo!” while plummeting painfully into explosive oblivion. This is a once-in-a-lifetime Nintendo experience - GX carries its torch, but it isn’t really a Nintendo game; this right here is something you could plausibly imagine Shigeru Miyamoto observing on his coffee break, and that makes it particularly special.

As far as an actual game review goes - Santa gave me Ocarina of Time and my brother F-Zero X on Christmas Day, 1998. 24 years later, we both still refer to this day as “the best Christmas ever”. That should tell you everything you need to know about this game and its quality.

Have you ever seen Redline?

If you haven't, you really should. It's a beautifully animated and delightfully outrageous film, which focuses on an intergalactic grand prix that takes place in the far-off future. Redline spent seven years in the oven and includes over a hundred thousand frames of hand-drawn art, and it shows. Every second is packed to the gills with motion and vibrant colors, and the cast of characters you meet is equally colorful. Contestants include a team of spandex-garbed bounty hunters, a corrupt police officer, a pair of witches who follow the Bayonetta school of presentation, and a guy with the greatest pompadour you've ever seen racing a souped up Trans Am. It's telling that his car manages to look ridiculously cool even next to everybody else's outlandish speedy space machines. I don't want to spoil you on anything if you haven't had the chance. It's cool dubbed or subbed. Go check it out, and I hope that you love it, because I most certainly did.

After watching the credits roll on Redline, I was left with a very strong impression. It was only an hour and a half long, but I was impressed by how inspired every aspect of it was, from the concept to the character designs, and of course the obvious craftsmanship that went into creating it. I thought to myself, "man, a game based off of this would be so cool."

Then I looked over at my shelf at my F-Zero cartridge and said "Oh."

It's not a one-to-one comparison, to be sure. The racing in Redline is far more chaotic and violent than what's on offer in the F-Zero series (at least insofar as the cars have weapons and staying on the track is a mere suggestion). There are other series out there that would probably be a better comparison with regards to the action happening onscreen - but conceptually, stylistically, Redline feels much more like the best F-Zero movie that was never made. Or more specifically, it feels like the best F-Zero X movie never made. While I love the SNES original, F-Zero X injected some much-needed nitro into the experience. Thirty racers, each with unique character designs, machines and backstories, tear across massive anti-grav tracks at speeds pushing a thousand kilometers an hour. Some of them have something to prove, some of them have beef with another racer. Others only race for the thrill of it, and even more still just want to see something blow up. All of them want to cross that finish line first, and casualties along the way are by no means unheard of. All of this is wrapped in a gritty comic book style and accompanied by an outstanding rock soundtrack that really gets the adrenaline flowing. All at a smooth sixty frames per second!

Gameplay-wise, it's exactly what you would expect. Take the twists, turns and jumps of the courses head-on and push your way to the front of the pack by any means necessary. The boost mechanic here is altered in a simple but very meaningful way. You can boost as often as you want as long as you have the energy to support it. This energy is also your health, making for a risk-reward system where pushing your machine to its limits puts you in danger of losing it all over a single mistake. Since your competitors have zero qualms with taking you out to secure their place on the board, this is very much worthy of careful consideration. It's simple but it all works great, and you really feel that sense of speed as you strive for first. Is it lackluster in a few places? Absolutely. The tracks generally aren't very memorable aesthetics-wise, which is an understandable concession given corners needed to be cut somewhere to keep the framerate stable with thirty racers on the track. Multiplayer is still fun but it's limited to a max of four racers in that case, which definitely lessens the excitement. Artificial difficulty is very much a thing at the higher settings, with one bad play potentially costing you so much as placing in the top six. And vehicle-to-vehicle combat, despite ostensibly being a big part of the experience, is incredibly awkward and thus undermines a lot of the potential for taking out a troublesome opponent. Despite all of this, however, it's still a solid game that's great fun to pick up and play on a whim.

If there's any one way that F-Zero X truly stumbles, it's the fact that it's just a racing game. Yes, it's not especially heavy in content, but that's not really what I'm talking about here. It's just the fact that despite having an excellent framing device for a racing game, it doesn't really do anything with it. The cast of characters is really cool, but their traits, histories and relationships are all largely informed and seldom expressed out on the track. The F-Zero tournament is supposedly a big deal, but it doesn't feel like much of an event - partly due to the uninteresting track design, but also just because of the overall lack of fanfare, advertisements and sponsorships, announcer chatter, interviews, et cetera. The battle-royale style tournament structure never gets much chance to shine because of the aforementioned lack of focus on combat. The single-track "Death Race" mode feels like more of a way of saying "we know it's hard to blow people up most of the time so here's a place you can do it for fun". There's no career mode, or story beats, or vehicle customization beyond color and a stat slider. There's just so many things that F-Zero X lacks that could have packed it with a lot more personality and made it more than "just" a fun racing game. But considering it came out in 1998, I'd say F-Zero X is pretty damn great.

But that was so long ago. I need more. I dream of a sequel that adds more flair or improves upon X's shortcomings. I thirst for a title that brings all of the speed and excitement of F-Zero into the modern age. Maybe one created with assistance from a company that has a long history with making entertaining racing games. Something like that. If only...

Oh.

(text copied from something i wrote in a thread elsewhere)

i remember when F-Zero X came out it seemed like no one i knew really knew about or played the game. my friend who owned a gazillion n64 games did not own it. i got it heavily discounted like a year after it came out at Funcoland and even the dude at Funcoland was like “yeah this game didn’t sell well at all” and slagged off the game a little. perhaps the barren dreamscape quality of the game, due to them having to drastically scale back world detail in order to have a smoother experience, contributed to that. but i played a ton of it. it was like Extreme-G (another n64 game my friend owned that a lot of people don’t really remember) in terms of the speed but like wayyy better executed. i read about the 64DD expansion in a magazine and was real upset it was never released here cuz i desperately wanted a track editor. i’m not even sure how much i like the OST (prefer the original SNES OST guess) but that sort of cheesy guitar stuff hits a particular feeling of wistfulness from the gaudiness of a bygone era that things like the opening theme for the tv show Red Dwarf also inspires. you can imagine a warbly degraded version playing off of a VHS tape. it’s very of a particular time and era i guess.

anyway it took me forever but i eventually did beat all cups back in the day. that's when i had a lot more time to devote to the same handful of games and didn't have a massive unplayed library and a life to live. also i'm glad there's gradually been more tolerance and acceptance for the sort of low-poly low-detail dreamscape fog worlds of the N64 era as its own sort of look and feel in the last five years or so. i wouldn't say F-Zero X is this utterly timeless experience but it's still fun and fast (and hard) and worth playing regardless.

Pure unbridled entertainment. I don't even play racing games and I love it. The game could use some more maps but it's old, plus it does have randomly generated maps and if you're feeling like a wizard there's the map editor in the DD64 version. F-Zero GX takes some liberties to push the series into a new direction that's arguably better in some ways but as a casual racing gamer I appreciate this game's simplicity. To 100% it you're expected to get pretty competent at the controls and by the end of it you'll feel like a badass with the hard as hell soundtrack playing while you're driving 1,200 kms per hour on ice knocking an octopus dude or Mr. Fucking EAD into the abyss.

Considering I loved F-Zero GX when I was younger, I jumped into its N64 predecessor expecting a "weaker version" of the gamecube title.... but I got surprised to see it wasn't the case.

It's kinda true that it lacks a lot of stuff compared to GX (less pilots, weaker presentaion, lack of goofy story mode, but the this series have been able to stand out extremely well, thanks to a bombastic gameplay and a risk reward system that makes every race harsh and enthrilling.
The track designs is solid and always caomes out with new gimmicks that makes you sweat at the first try... but makes you want to push forward on multiple races. And thanks to quick old school cheats you are able to enjoy the game to its fullest even without the necessity to farm and win every cup: just a quick set of button mashing and you are able to enjoy the incredibly varied roster and track selection from the get go (THIS GAME EVEN HAS A LITERAL RAINBOW ROAD).

As said before for GX, F-zero is more than a racing game: it's an experience. It's like the most adrenaline inducing and blood pumping ride in the history of racing games, so bombastic in everything it does that it will make you come back over and over again.

THe fact that Mario Kart 64 is a more beloved title than this is honestly blasphemous.

TOO BAD, YOU LOST UNITY¹

We used to play this with five players: two people would control Twin Noritta, AKA "The Dual Ship", one on steering and one on throttle/boost. Anyone finishing behind The Dual Ship would swap in next round, which made for some violent races.

Once the random track generator gave us a hairpin on the crest of a hill so tight that half the ships would fly off each lap.

I loved everything about this game.

¹unity with the track

Very satisfying fast-paced racing across excellently designed tracks, with plenty of fun things like jumps, half pipes, full pipes and loops.

One aspect of F-Zero X I love is the attacking mechanic. Winning a cup is not all about coming first in every race. While that IS an option (though I tend to think less likely in higher difficulties which require perfect driving), it's much more viable to take out the person currently winning the overall ranking (conveniently labelled "rival") so they get 0 points for a race and effectively remove them as an opponent for the rest of the cup.

The attacking mechanic is also a big risk vs reward factor, as missing a hit could instead have you slamming into a wall, losing health and slowing you down.

Speaking of risk vs reward, making the boost and health system the same bar is so evil and I love it. You really have to balance your greed.

A few things I wasn't a fan of, such as the fact the Ai blatantly cheats. As I mentioned, taking out your rival is a huge part of winning on higher difficulties. Unfortunately the cpu cars basically go way faster than you, so you tend to have only a single chance to knock out a rival at the very start, before they speed past you and get to the front of the pack for the rest of the race. Of course if you're good enough to consistently get to the front in a race you can have another chance, but if you're driving that perfectly AND want to risk your placement by trying to knock out an opponent, I'd say you're good enough to win even without knocking out your rival (at least on Expert, I never tried master and don't intend to).

I know it's a big skill issue, but the #1 tip I always saw for this game was double tap turning. While I could do this perfectly on truly sharp corners, and hairpin turns (which ironically made the later cups slightly easier as that's where they tend to be), it never worked for me at all in the corners that weren't necessarily sharp, but just enough to make me skid if I tried to take them raw. Anytime I tried to do it in those cases I'd just slam in to a wall, and I could never work out how to do it despite watching videos. That bugged me the whole time knowing I could be doing better, but could never get it to work how it's supposed to.

Supposedly the N64 version is the best because the sensitivity of the control stick, and the Switch pro controller just ain't built for the precision needed. That's why I did not feel bad about using save states between some races to win lol.

Anywho it's a really fun game, with exhilarating speed and tracks, with mechanics that can really turn you pro if you want to dig deep, otherwise expert may be a little frustrating (I only did it because it was needed for the credits).

Unmatched in the field of causing involuntary bodily responses in the player, the difficulty of F-Zero X itself’s exceeded only by that of trying not to squirm in your chair as you (un)successfully round corners at >1500km/h, bump rival racers off the track while trying to avoid speeding headlong into the abyss yourself or snatch first place out of an increasingly tenuous situation just as a guitar solo kicks in like it’s cheering you on.

The constant multisensory tug of war comprising every race’s brought about in large part thanks to a significant emphasis on tracks’ newfound verticality, enabled by one of the N64’s relatively unsung (though no less impactful) series-first forays into 3D, but it wouldn’t be complete without the mechanics themselves getting a makeover too. What’s probably the most crucial example of this is that boosting’s gone from its own independent resource, as in the first F-Zero, to something you now have to sacrifice your vehicle’s health to use. It’s streamlining at its finest; races rarely play out the same way because there’s no longer a guarantee of either you or your competitors being able to boost upon the completion of each lap, it’s inherently riskier to use but with greater potential reward due to the momentum gained from it carrying over into slopes or airtime, and it paves the way for strategies and decision-making which weren’t really present before. Will you have a comfortable amount of health left for the next lap if you boost partway through the healing zone? Are you gonna do without healing altogether to go for gold and beeline for the boost pad between them instead? Boosting up this hill could rocket you ahead of the crowd, but is your health and the geometry ahead sufficient for a safe landing? With how little time you have to make up your mind, each race leaves your frontal lobe as sweaty as your palms.

All of this in turn has the knock-on effect of enhancing the death race concept at the heart of F-Zero, brought to the forefront by and intertwined with the addition of attacks you and your opponents’ vehicles can perform. At the cost of momentarily decelerating, you can either horizontally ram into other vehicles or spin to win, stalling whoever you hit for the most critical of split seconds and dealing damage proportional to each party’s speed and/or proximity to walls. How smartly this is incentivised becomes increasingly apparent as you ramp up the difficulty and other racers’ AI becomes accordingly aggressive – to come out on top on Expert or above, you pretty much have to kill your designated rival at least once both to broaden your own margin of error and halt their accruement of points, the health it grants you being similarly precious given how often you’ll be boosting. On a less tangible level, there are in general few outlets for gamer malice so cathartic as hearing a series of brrrrrings sound out as you position yourself for a double kill, nevermind doing so by rendering Fox McCloud an orphan in the opening seconds via the world’s least ethically sound game of pinball.

While the actual Death Race mode itself’s a bit anaemic, having only a single track (albeit one unique to it) in which other racers mind their own business instead of trying to bump you off too, it’s nonetheless a useful stomping ground for practicing these mechanics and is balanced out by more substantial post-game unlocks. My favourite racer doesn’t become playable until after the credits roll, for one thing, but the main draw in this regard’s the X Cup and its randomised tracks. Even if it seemingly can’t generate loop-de-loops, cylinders or steep vertical inclines in general, the layouts still manage to become chaotic enough and unlike any of the handcrafted ones to the point that you’ll invariably want to give it at least a few spins. “Ahead of its time” is a phrase I typically don’t like, since the way it’s often used feeds into the idea that new = inherently better and rarely references any actual points of comparison. That said, it feels appropriate in this case when you take into consideration the relative prominence of roguelike side modes and/or DLCs with similar emphasis on procedural generation that’ve crept their way into multiple major releases in the past couple of console gens – the people are crying out for what this game essentially had as a free bonus when I was still being wheeled about in a pram.

As much can be said of F-Zero X in general. Beyond its intentional minimisation of graphics exemplifying the uncanny foresight of Nintendo’s president at the time, it seems as if must have been on the minds of the team behind Mario Kart 8 (currently the second-highest selling first party title ever) to some extent given not just the appearance of both Mute City and Big Blue in it, but also the conceptual overlap between its anti-grav segments and X’s dizzying track designs. Tighten your frame of reference to just its own series and even more recent evidence of how rock solid these mechanics are presents itself in the form of F-Zero 99; while its Skyway and titular battle royale idea help carve out its own more accessible, comparably well-considered spin, it’s also simultaneously a fusion of the first game’s assets with X’s systems. In short, there’s at least a few reverberations of how much this game gets right still being felt, as well as of how timeless its appeal remains, enough so to be more digestible to today’s players than you’d initially assume. If and/or when they decide to prove as much again by taking another crack at the formula, hopefully it won’t be set upon by quite as many people who’ve never played any of them for not being the “proper” franchise revival they were definitely clamouring for.

This is all to say: don’t be intimidated by its steep learning curve and give it a whirl, because the F stands for fun and there are too few games which let you do something like this completely by accident. Like its announcer whose garbled voice gave my brother shellshock says, it’s way out in front.

I am not even good enough to get consistent wins on Standard difficulty, but I can't help but be blown away by how good this is. A genuinely challenging racer with great track design and possibly the most legit sense of moving at blistering fast speed I've ever felt in a video game. The slightest touch of the control stick will send your racer careening off in that direction, so micro movements and mastery of the drift is key. This very touchy control at such a high speed combined with the difficulty makes each race white knuckle. The boost being tied to your health is such an astoundingly simple yet well thought out risk/reward mechanic that I'm shocked every arcade racer didn't start copying it. Total masterclass of a game.

Oh yeah and the soundtrack freaking rules

I remember reading in magazines around the time of the release of F-Zero X that Nintendo had made the decision to bin off the idea of texturing the vehicles to ensure that the game ran at a rock solid 60FPS. I didn't really know what this meant other than it had something to do with SPEED and essentially, the development team behind F-Zero X were willing to do whatever it took to create their vision of an unbelievably fast, smooth racing game. It made the speed seem important - crucial, even - before I had even played it.

Thirty (!) different F-Zero pilots and machines are available to choose from, once unlocked, with each having a different feeling of weight and handling model, so not only can you belt along at ridiculous speeds but find the vehicle that allows you to stay completely in control while you're doing it.

That's the core of F-Zero X. The ability to fly around twisting, turning 3D tracks at great speed but retain total control while you do it. There's no rubberbanding, no weapons or catch-up mechanics to throw a random element into the proceedings. There's no space for luck in F-Zero X, only skill. The one extra thing that can influence a race is the ability to boost, which drains your health and there's nothing stopping you boosting to the point where even grazing another vehicle or wall will cause you to explode. Health can be regained by driving over specific parts of the track on each lap, but driving over these causes a slight, but crucial, reduction in speed. Pure risk/reward at its best.

For my money, this is where it edges out Mario Kart as Nintendo's finest racing game. I never feel cheated when I lose a race in F-Zero X. An extremely confident video game.

Its clear to me that what F Zero wanted to always be was held back by the hardware it was on until the GameCube. That isn't to say this game is bad because its actually great, but lacking all the extra flair of GX made the game feel crude in comparison (which isn't exactly fair either because GX is genuinely incredible). I do quite like how the cars feel in comparison to GX as a different way of gameplay instead of replacing it, but other than that GX just has more stuff to do, more compelling extras and just flat out better track design in my opinion.

Basically this game is the ultimate middle child.

If there was any game in the 90s that made kids want to impulsively air guitar, it was F-Zero X! This intense racing game was something no other racer could even come close to being as awesome (until its own sequel years later).

I also adore that the staff involved opted for the game to have a smooth, stable 60 frames-per-second, which meant sacrificing most textures and graphical fidelity. They just knew how important a high framerate was not only for playability, but also to emphasize the SPEED of the game. And damn, was it fast!

I also adore the character designs that perfectly meld with the atmosphere the soundtrack ensues! I wouldn't be surprised if the artists involved were inspired by "Heavy Metal" magazine and/or its 1981 film! Literally everything about F-Zero X kicks so much ass! I just wish we somehow got the expansion kit here, I definitely would've spent hours on-end making custom stages!

Also, the Switch emulation is garbage. Don't play it on there.

Kickass hard rock soundtrack and intense blistering speed.
A great expansion on the originals gameplay and roster. The way it’s able to take advantage of the hardware and have stages that loop and turn in odd ways is a nice touch too.

Graphically it’s a step down from the 16 bit game. (Besides character designs those are great.) as a whole it’s less pretty and not as stylish. But for gameplay like this it’s worth it to maintain the games speed.

Light 4/5

I want to play GX so bad yet it’s so damn expensive.