One of the games that were released alongside the SNES, F-Zero is a F1-inspired game that takes place in a futuristic world. The player must learn when to throttle and when to slow down to get the most out of the vehicle. There's also a health system, crashing into obstacles or bumping into cars will make you lose HP and you will blow up if you lose them all. You can always try again as long as you have spare cars (lifes). In order to win, the player must finish the final lap on each track in third place or higher. The game's ok for a while but, once you realize how the AI works, you'll realize the game is simply unfair.

It turns out the game doesn't keep track of the runners' actual position on the track, instead the game sets a fixed distance between you and the opponents, which is based on difficulty (the harder the difficulty is, the less distance there is). Basically, the enemy runners will always have a safe distance and will never be further than that distance to you. This means that reaching the first place and running faster won't give a distance advantage, you will always have someone tailing you (which, for some reason, it's Golden Fox). More than staying on the first place and leaving the opponents behind, the point is to not lose speed once you are at the top. If you slow down too much, the other racers will catch up in no time, specially in normal or higher difficulties. This wouldn't be a problem if the game didn't require you to let go of the throttle to get past the turns on the road.

That's not the only advantage the other cars have. As I said before, your car has health points, Well, this rule doesn't apply to them: they have infinite HP. It explains why you can't destroy them and why you never see them on pit rows. However, the actual reason why I scored the game that low is the way the infinite HP and guaranteed position combine together. Since you need to slow the pace to traverse most turns, the enemy will easily reach you and, since they got infinite HP and they will always be at a fixed distance if left behind, they have no problem bumping constantly into you. Sure, you can try to dodge them, but trying to do that requires precise movement on tracks that already require precision against opponents that have nothing to lose. As a result the difficulty curve is artificially steeped, standard difficulty is hard and later difficulties are simply unforgiving

Clearly this game does not deserve to be on the must-play category nor it's good enough to complete it once, guess hardcore fans will forgive that. Only good point I can find is tha Mode 7's false 3D perspective does impress me

F-Zero is a game where you race and that's basically all there is to it. It is fun, the controls are good (unless you have to drift, in which it becomes ass), and the music is nice but honestly, this game is more like a tech demo or an arcade game and because of that, i don't feel like giving it a score. You don't really "beat" this game like you would in Mario Kart, there's no trophies or anything. In fact, much like an arcade game, this game is really more about the best score than actually, you know, beating it.
Honestly, once you've done one Grand Prix, you've done them all.

It does suck that there's no multiplayer mode tho.

If you want to see where the F-Zero series started, this may be interesting, but if this is your first game I don't see it convincing you to play the other ones. Only two vehicles are useful (the Stingray and Goldenfox -latter for only the third league) and the tracks can get repetitive as you go through all of them. The AI is always rubberbanded so even a simple mistake will mean they pass you even if you have a big lead. They are also aggressive, to an uncessary extent. They are willing to crash you and themselves just so you fall behind. This is most noticeable in the final league, where track design is frustrating and the AI makes it even worse, the final track in that league is the only redeeming part of it. Even when you master the movement, there is not much else you can do with it. The audio is however nice. The soundtrack apart from a track or two is forgettable but the vehicles themselves and crashing and turning all sound nice. The graphics for a SNES Launch Title isn't too bad, and gives the nice illusion of "3D", but some wide turns suffer from a lack of draw distance. For all it's flaws though, when the game works on a good track, it is fun to play for a while but nothing more. That doesn't make it bad by any means, but don't expect much out of it.

F-Zero (SNES) is a racing game, which is similar to Super Mario Kart, but is infinitely times faster which makes the game feel better paced and fun.

Turning is a bit sluggish and hard to do, but it's not the worst thing ever.

This game can be a bit of a challenge for newcomers, but I found learning the game can be easy and doesn't take super long to do.

The game hasn't aged the best either, the graphics look awful by today's standard, and there are better racing games now-a-days like Mario 8 Deluxe, but this is definitely the best 1st party racing game for the Super Nintendo.

Remarkably better than Super Mario Kart; this game has a jammin' soundtrack, responsive controls that perfectly suit its relatively fast pace, and even three decades later it still has a solid sense of visual style.

That's not to say it's perfect. The way the AI-cars can ricochet into you and easily derail your race feels excessively brutal, there are moments of level design that similarly feel surprisingly harsh (the jump in White Land 2 is heinous), and you can see almost all the content the game has to offer within an hour or two. Still, holds up much more solidly than I expected.