I loved F-Zero GX on GameCube, but I’ve never played the N64 version before. It turns out I love this version, too, even though it feels a lot more brutal than I remember GX being. This is Nintendo’s take on the sci-fi racer genre, and it does a great job at it.

F-Zero X features a whopping 30 racers at once (each with a unique ship) and – even with some obvious rubber banding – they all move like actual opponents, making mistakes and reacting to your presence. The game goes a great job at remaining smooth by adjusting the level of detail as the framerate is perfect throughout. The tracks twist and turn and it’s all incredibly fast.

One key part of the game is the energy bar. On top of representing your health, it’s also your boost. There are places to recharge on the track (usually near the end of a lap) so a key part of the game is deciding how much you’re willing to risk in order to go faster. Blow up and you lose a life and have to start the race again.

The tracks in F-Zero X start out quite gentle, but things take a sudden turn in the last track of the second cup (there are four cups in total, with 6 tracks each) and you’ll start getting thin portions of the track with no edges – fall off and you’re not placed back like other games, you lose a life and start again. Just surviving the tracks becomes the main challenge until you start learning them.

Not every choice is made against the player, though. You have barge attacks and a spin attack at your disposal. Take someone else and they won’t score any points for that round. To make good use of this, the game even highlights you rival (the opponent with the highest score) so you can try to target specific opponents and pick them out of the crowd.

On top of the leagues (which have four difficulties) and multiplayer, there’s a few extra modes. There’s an unlockable X cup that serves you up procedurally generated tracks and a “death race” mode where you race around a short track trying to take out every other racer (I personally would prefer if you could do this on other tracks as well).

F-Zero X is a great game that is quite full of stuff to do. It’s still a ton of fun today.

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.

In my opinion the peak of the series. F-Zero X has an infinite skill ceiling. There is a reason why there are so few TAS of this game. Many mechanics and exploits that require a deep understanding of the game, and feels designed and tuned for the N64 controller. Amazing heavy metal rock and synth soundtrack that fits well with the death race aesthetic. I don't think the sequel developed by Sega could really capture the magic of X. If F-Zero were ever to return, I would hope it follows this game rather than any other in the series.

Carries forward the speed and attitude of the original title, and that isn't a bad thing really. The music is given fuller rock instrumentation, and the racers are plentiful and have their own portraits and 2D sprites that provide personality. The inclusion of combat mechanics combines these two focuses well, and it's a smart addition that's risky but can have a big payoff, suiting the volatility of the races. To achieve its sense of speed, the game prioritizes performance. A steady framerate with all those racers and all the track flying by is pretty commendable when so many N64 titles were choppy.

But the overall look of the game suffers a bit for the cost of that performance. Tracks aren't that detailed, vehicles often look blocky (I've heard it called 'soap racer' and at certain distances that tracks), and something about the aesthetic just isn't that attractive. I liked the first game for its vivid colour and mysterious locations, and this game looks washed out and indistinct.

Moreover the game shows the flaws in its game design as you climb in difficulty. Early on you just feel puzzled when you boost next to a racer accelarating normally and don't make up any ground, but when you start playing on expert it becomes obvious that the rules the other racers play by just aren't the same. Rubberbanding gets egregious, and while I managed to beat a couple cups on this difficulty, it felt more like blind luck to me.

It's a solid and distinct racer for the system, a nicely polished iteration, but I think it loses a little bit of the magic and doesn't offer up many surprises.

Más frenético que sus muertos.
Si te aburres y quieres sentir que vas muy rápido este es buena opción si tu ordenador es una puta mierda,ya que el mío lo es y este juego va perfecto.
También que incluso para el 98 este juego se ve un poco como el culo,pero la jugabilidad es tan buena que los salva.
Y la música uff,Jordi Wild escucha esto y se nos va.
Ta wuapo

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.

Sequel to the original SNES classic, F-Zero X is, IMO, a major improvement and a pretty good game. From what I can tell, the mechanics and gameplay are similar between both titles, but the move to 3D let the developers go crazy with track design. Other than that, races only feature racers now, unlike the SNES entry which also had additional vehicles acting as hazards. Difficulty is also more organic now and feels much fairer than in the original game.

F-Zero X is a tough game, for my playthrough I managed to beat all the cups in Standard Mode and stopped there, since beating Expert would probably require way too much time of practice and I don't feel like it. Still, I really enjoyed my time with the game and think it's a recommended experience!

I've long maintained that F-Zero X is the best in the series, having played the game off-and-on over the years since first buying an N64 copy in high school. Sitting down with the game to see all the cups (aside from the bonus X cup) through now, I'm more assured in that perspective - particularly given the amount of GX I've played since my last concerted visit to X.

What X does so well, and better than GX in my opinion, is that it manages to evoke an unparalleled sense of speed while retaining a high degree of moment-to-moment clarity. The more densely-designed tracks of GX are more memorable, but X strips its aesthetic to the bone to lock you into the bare thrill of racing. It's quite a miracle that X moves this fast and this seamlessly on N64.

The game recognizes that spectacle can come from the intrinsic velocity with which X throws you around the track. It's an extremely enrapturing and precise moment-to-moment experience. Paired with plenty of unlockables and a novel (if incredibly shallow) Death Race mode, this really is a pinnacle racing title.