guess im on a retro binge, huh?


f-zero is a game that is full of clear cut bullshit, way more clear than dkc2. from the shitty physics engine, to the game turning into Bullshit Bumper Cars on Death Wind II(FUCK DEATH WIND II), to the random ass cars on the track that have no influence on your rank(why are they here????). there is so much bullshit here, the game so clearly favors your opponents, id be hard pressed not to call half the tracks rigged. which let's not kid ourselves, half the systems here are half baked, from the health system(which is genius but lacks good execution), which adds to the rigged nature of this game.

take the power/health system. giving you health adds a great risk reward, either you can go off course to heal if you need to, or you can risk it if youre low health, and play the best gamings of your life so that you can keep your place. but here's the problem with this system, the collision system is so ass that if you merely tap another car on the road, you usually end up getting stuck in a tight corner, getting passed between the damaging borders, and keep getting stuck there, not being able to get out because one after the other cars keep fucking hitting you. if you survive this unfair onslaught then youre usually fucked anyway, your health is way too low at this point to survive much else, so either you need to heal and lower your spot in the race even further, diminishing any chance of winning at all. or you just end up dying if you forgo the healing(which ill say, i do not appreciate the game peaking my headphones every time i crash. terrible sound design). anyway, you can see how the health system for these cars is a great idea, but meshed with the shitty physics engine, it works poorly

and that's another thing, the collision is totally rigged. hit a car from behind, you go spiraling and get your health crushed to oblivion, while the ai goes on it's merry way. you get hit from behind, you turn into a ballistic missile, slam into a wall, your speed halts to a crawl and you need to slowly turn whilst taking damage on the border to get back in the race. if a car hits you in the air, you get knocked out of bounds and die. to my knowledge, you cannot do this to the ai. if you hit them in the air, you also get fucked and knocked out of bounds. lets not forget to mention, all the unranked cars... what is their purpose???? why are they unranked? i think the intent was to not make things smooth sailing if you hit first, but the intent lacks execution. on wide tracks like mute city or red canyon, you can just fly right past them without much thought. on narrow tracks, if you so as much as tap them they can trigger a chain reaction where you get bumped 3 or 4 places behind. this is especially apparent on tracks like Death Wind II and Port Town II. honestly, these two tracks are way harder than mute city III and red canyon II, and even fire field. i beat them both once and then save stated past them because beating both DW2 and PT2 is almost completely up to rng, even if youre breaking and such. the track selection in king league is so weird, half of them are easy and the other half is total bull. anyway, the point is, these unranked cars are only a frustration. iirc(idk its been a year+) ridge racer type 4 had a much better solution to this. you start last every race and the goal was to get in the top 3, then 2, and 1. if you were skilled enough to reach 1st in that game early, the only opponent you had left was your own nerves, and that to me is a much better opponent than bullshit unranked cars that keep spawning.

despite all this bullshit, despite the rigged nature of f-zero, this game is fantastic. it feels wonderful when you beat something so clearly against you with your own willpower. when the puzzle pieces line up perfectly, the game's a masterpiece. probably my favorite retro ost. every track is banging, it's so good. there's no other place this is evident better than the final track of the game, fire field. it's an endurance track, full of tight turns, land mines, and ofc everyone's favorite, unranked cars that fuck you over... but the more you play, the more you discover ways to flip things in your favor, from purposely ramming into cars to make them blow up on mines for you, then using that momentum to carry you into the tight turn... or going on the healing runway while braking, then getting on the boost pad, regaining all your speed and then some. when you engage with the bullshit, there's such a tightly controlled racer that's on display. unfortunately, this philosophy isn't present in every track, and there could be some areas of improvement. like being able to fuck other racers more, like permanently outing them by bumping into them on a ramp. or more opportunities to use the unranked cars as fodder, instead of as an annoying, unfair headache.

regardless this was a great experience with a wonderful ost. im sold on the series, dunno when id play the next one though. hopefully i can get through mg1 and 2 and metroid before monday when p3r is slated to arrive. i might just do metroid before p3r anyway, idk.

I'm just like Captain Falcon, I'm getting exploded all the time.

Along with Pilotwings, F-Zero might be the most technically impressive entry in the Super Nintendo's launch lineup, though it is less a demo and more a proper video game. Sure, the Sega Genesis had been out for a while and had already simulated 3D spaces to great effect with games like Space Harrier, but F-Zero is so smooth and runs so fast that even with the leg up, it makes a strong case for investing in Nintendo's 16-bit hardware.

Setting aside its role as a Mode 7 showpiece, it's just a well-designed racing game, with incredibly engaging courses, cars that handle great, and a satisfying sense of speed that is rarely interrupted by performance hitches. F-Zero isn't bogged down by a bunch of track gimmicks, it lacks depth mechanically, it's about as straight-forward as you can get, but I think that's a strength.

That's not to say it's perfect, though. F-Zero might be one of the better racing games on the SNES but it also suffers from issues typical of this generation. There's rubberbanding, and god help you if you screw up and smack into a wall near the end of a race, because your position will be taken by at least a car or two. Whenever you're behind a racer, they have a tendency to weave back and forth to prevent you from overtaking them, and during late game courses where tracks become more narrow and turns more tight, it can feel like threading a needle where inaccuracy is punished harshly by bouncing you against walls like a pinball until you blow up.

That said, I'm a huge Super Mario Kart defender, so I can't judge F-Zero too harshly for its sins, and if it came down to it, I'd knock Mario Kart off the shelf if it meant having room for F-Zero. Great pickup for Super Famicom owners. CIB sets are still affordable, and not only is the game in English, the comic in the back of the manual is, too. Even numbers the speech bubbles to guide native Japanese speakers as it's presented left-to-right. I thought that was neat. F-Zero is neat.

This review was originally going to go up alongside my next 2023 one (wow I wonder what game that'll be...) but since the game in question got an update just this week, I'll pull it back for a bit to let my thoughts swirl and collect some more to account for the new content added. One big addition in particular probably makes it appropriate I release this one first anyways, and there will be a second accompanying review that I'll put out probably after that one? It'll be a rather quick glimpse so it could go up any time, but we'll see.

So, F-Zero. The Nintendo franchise a lot of people seem to want back yet so few people have actually played for themselves; and that's not saying "there isn't anyone who actually likes these games" because that's not true. But much like the meme of "Persona 5 fans never actually played their game" I would believe the same to hold true here. Legitimately of all the people I know who've heard of this franchise (in-person, online is obviously a different story) it's because of Captain Falcon in Smash Bros. And it's not really a surprise that that's the case, but every time I'd bring this series up it'd be a response of "Oh Captain Falcon is from that right?". And heck, even my own brother who grew-up around me playing this game recently called F-Zero 99 "Captain Falcon 99" because he forgot the name of the series. He's not a kid by the way... I'm getting off-track. F-Zero! I'm very big on this franchise and as I just spoiled in the preceding sentence, this is a series I grew-up with so I'm very much fond of it. And hell, I even got my start with it on this same game. The original F-Zero for Super Nintendo, a classic in my eyes and from a period when Nintendo wanted to give themselves a 'cooler' image. Fun fact they nearly had Captain Falcon smoke cigars and holy FUCK am I glad they never went ahead and did that, because whilst this series does have a different vibe to its settings than most other Nintendo franchises it's not totally foreign and that's what I love about a lot of their games.

So yes. Off the bat I am admittedly biased for this game; it's one I grew-up with and one I hold in a special place for personal reasons I'm not going to state to internet strangers. But it's a big nostalgia trip for me and full of comforting old-school feels as a result. I do always worry a bit coming back to this one as I'm never fully sure how much of my positive memory is from the game itself having marks of quality or my warm and fuzzy nostalgia brain associating it with good times in my life... thankfully, I can attest that this game is still pretty great across the board! Let's start with the presentation because fuck me sideways I still think this game looks pretty damn fantastic to this very day. They made super effective use of the Mode-7 capabilities to make the "3D" gameplay work with tracks still being uniquely identifiable and memorable between each other despite being primarily limited to a 2D plane. It always mindfucks me when I remember just how this game looks beneath its layers, and that's because they do such a good job at giving you a great feel and sense of scale to the worlds here. The tracks all pop and look great, which extends to the playable vehicles too; all four are uniquely designed not just in gameplay but aesthetics too. In colour alone you can tell them apart at a simple glance and that works very well for a high energy, fast-paced game like this which is rather important in my eyes. Everything looks great and this game has visually aged remarkably well, but the gameplay...

...has also aged very well! It's very easy to describe so bear with me here. Racing around futuristic tracks as fast as possible whilst dealing with an ever-shrinking rank out and making sure to avoid blowing up your vehicle through the on-track hazards, barriers, magnets, the travelling bumpers, or mistiming a ramp jump and just blowing yourself up in one go. As mentioned already this game is very high speed and that makes all of this a lot harder than it would be in something like Mario Kart, as F-Zero is closer to a more 'traditional' motorsports game except with a much more exciting take on things with the addition of these hazards, very close rank outs, and especially the bumpers. Love them or hate them they're rather essential to not only making this game more lively without strangling the SNES memory to design 20 unique cars, but for preventing super easy wins. If the bumpers weren't here you'd be able to get into 1st place and hold it consistently without too much effort, provided you know the track decently enough. Bumpers add an extra layer of strategy and difficulty since even when you're ahead, you're not totally spared of having to combat other vehicles; you still have to think about your driving rather than mindlessly lapping the track until you claim your trophy. It makes this a proper elimination race at all times and I really enjoy it for the most part... we'll get there when we get there, shortly.

F-Zero has fifteen tracks to its name with a couple of reused settings, although given differences in the track layout in some way. Mute City I is your standard opening course whilst Mute City II changes the layout a bit to force you to turn where you'd usually drive straight whilst Mute City III keeps a more familiar layout and adds a mine field near the rough terrain segment. These differences are pretty simple spelled-out but do change how you approach the track in practice. Port Town I and II build off one other pretty naturally, with II essentially being an extended version of I and adds even more challenge to what is otherwise a decently difficult but always enjoyable track. The other variants are more different to one another, with choice segments being similar and otherwise primarily sharing aesthetic themes. And this is not a bad thing by any means! I really do enjoy all the tracks in this game, with none I'd say I outright dislike... sure I'm never waking up and thinking "Oh man I REALLY want to play Sand Ocean" but I don't hate any track is the point. They're all enjoyable in some form and that's a good thing for a racing game!

So you got all these tracks you can play on, how do you got about playing them? Grand prix mode of course. Fifteen tracks divided between three circuits; Knight, Queen, and King. The easier tracks are placed in Knight and the difficulty gradually builds towards the end of each circuit, as well as the harder tracks of course showing themselves as you go all the way up to King. In addition, you can have multiple tries on a track so long as you have enough lives to do so which is a small feature I really like. In most other racing games, you lose and that's it; you're done; your goose is cooked; so on, so forth. In F-Zero though you can have a number of chances in case you fumbled your first attempt, letting you learn a course through multiple tries and eventually claiming that victory. Lives are still limited of course so the game isn't giving you a free pass, but it's a suitably forgiving system that gives you a little leg-up without just doing all the work for you. Adding to this are F-Zero's difficulty options, so you aren't thrust into the hardest of hard right away. You can do a few runs on beginner if you like and work your way up through the higher difficulties that way, or as I like to do marathon each circuit in a specific difficulty until all difficulty levels have been completed. Now, I think beginner is a great way to ease-in a new player and standard follows up well on this too. Expert is mostly good until around Port Town II, but master is especially where I begin to take issue with this game's idea of difficulty.

At a glance, the difficulty mainly seems to affect the bumpers. Specifically how many can/will appear, how many are explosive, the competence of the slow and fast 'racer' bumpers... but it also increases how fast the other racers can go EVEN IF that car cannot usually reach that speed. Combine this with assholish Nintendo hard AI that does genuinely cheat (which also scales with difficulty level btw) along with the game eventually deciding to put parked cars in the middle of the road as extra obstacles... okay I don't mind the explosive parked cars in concept but it has always confused me, especially since some of the later games turned these into floating mines which make much more sense. Either way, the game's idea of harder difficulty is giving the AI cheat codes and leaving a bunch of drunk drivers around the track. This was a different era of gaming I get that, you can finish the tracks in an afternoon if you're not playing master (and the same could be said of expert but I just know the game too well at this point), yet I won't change my stance on this one. I feel this game IS well balanced to a point, but later tracks on expert really can take the piss whilst master as a whole feels really draining and honestly not too enjoyable... I don't think kid me ever 100%'d this game and I can see why, shit's not fun. And SPEAKING of NOT FUN,

oh my great giddy aunt what the shit is up with the AI in this game? Okay... so you can be miles behind an NPC and still have to play catch-up. That's fine, that's fair, that makes sense. But racing the AI in this game is like being chased by a damn Ao Oni, they're always behind you and ONE slip-up means they're passing by you effortlessly. "Oh but I can at least obstruct or destroy them-" nope, not in this game, the AI cars found the secret to immortality because anything that would and should kill your car will do diddly pissing squat to them. This isn't so much a problem on beginner, standard, and some of the expert tracks but it becomes instantly noticeable on master where everything is not only max speed but totally INVINCIBLE (insert title card here). If you could even just damage the NPCs to hinder their max speed until they go into a recovery zone that would be fine, you could actually feel like you're playing the same game as them rather than having a constant target on your back presumably for kicking puppies off-screen. It seriously sucks that the last stretch of challenge for this game is honestly not a fun time, because up until then the game provides a primarily well-balanced challenge that rewards your skills in memorization of the tracks, when to drift, use boosts, different ramp velocities... but master makes it all about the already challenging AI becoming totally unfair and putting explosive cars in the middle of the tracks. Yet I still went and fucking did it, I get to be an "F-Zero master!" for what zero credit that's worth. Maybe if I put it on my resume, future employers will take pity on me.

For my last footnote before I wrap this one up, the game also has a practice mode which is fantastic in theory. It's as it sounds, you get to race around a track of your choice either by yourself or with a chosen 'rival' from any of the four playable cars. This is a lot of fun, a simple time trial mode is perfect for what this game is at it's core; racing fast and knowing the track. Seeing your improvement as you make new top scores with your favourite vehicle or even getting one with each vehicle, it's a very obvious inclusion that just makes so much sense. Unfortunately they only went ahead and put seven of the game's tracks in this mode, and this confused the hell out of kid me. I thought I maybe had to unlock the rest somehow but was never able to do it, just to find out years later that there wasn't ever a chance of me getting to use those tracks in practice mode. Why they did this escapes me, but it's literally the only F-Zero game to have a limited track selection for practice mode. I would love to be able to race on some of these tracks without running through a circuit just for the one, but that's fine I guess. Because honestly despite all my complaints about the game's expectations on higher difficulties and the way it handles said difficulty? I still really love this game.

This is one of those classic games that just holds-up extremely well. The gameplay feels fantastic to play even by modern game standards, everything still looks great, the sound design is oh so satisfying and god DAMN the soundtrack! One of my favourite gaming OSTs ever made, there is not a single bad song in this game. It might confuse you, then, why I reduced this to a final thought but trust me when I say: Everything is memorable for one reason or another and never in a bad way, seriously give this one a listen any chance you get. Or better yet, give this game a go yourself! There's a number of ways to play it and you can't really go wrong with any method in my eyes. If you've never tried this game or franchise, this is a good one to play even if you understandably don't want to do all of the difficulty levels. It's simple to get into and possibly frustrating to complete, but you'll always remember a lot of the journey no matter how much of this game is under your belt... I love this game. Pure and simple.

Future F-Zeros would be a bit different from this, but the GBA ones remained closer to this timeless classic. And after nearly 20 years off the market, this year blessed us with a new take on this incredible game as another fresh taste of F-Zero goodness. But that's a review I'll get to soon enough!

When Nintendo was releasing their brand new 16-bit behemoth they were already facing tough competition with SEGA's Genesis (or Mega Drive if you were not in North America). Nintendo of course had their mustached champion ready to spearhead the launch, but our fluffy friend was accompanied by a daring death-racer from outer space.

F-ZERO is a solid tech demo for the early SNES, it showed all of their rendering tricks including the now well-known "Mode 7" that would be one of the console's gimmicks to give an illusion of perspective over a flat surface, it turns out this one trick makes a pretty good job with racing games.

While F-ZERO is a challenging racing game with nice bells and whistles, these days it can leave you with much to be desired, one of those is a sore absence of a 2-player mode, leaving only the options to do 1-player races, time trials, and check your records.

While it may have received its round of applause in 1991, F-ZERO could have been far more, but it still delivers what it promised.

The game is fun and a good test to your skills, because is hard, like really hard, but mostly fair and skill-base, with enough practice you'll be able to win any circuit, BUT the random elements (The cars that spawn in the middle of the race) are borderline unfair, sometimes you find that some turns are impossible to make without taking a hit and others you ended taking damage for a car outside your range of vision (Specially in both Dead Wind's), all of this, plus the fact that the other racers aren't even affected by the brown cars most of the time (And can't detonate the purple ones) make me feel that that most of the time I was losing not because of how I was playing but because I got bad luck