Calling something "good with friends" is often the cruelest thing you can ever say about a multiplayer game. Yeah, you can have fun with friends in basically anything, it turns out friends are good, not Phasmophobia. And it's so easy to see that in Lethal Company, especially from the outside looking in - some bullshit lame horror coop horror game to scream at, acting as the new steam flavour of the month game to merely moisturise the slip and slide of socialisation.

Despite the resemblance, Lethal Company is not that. Flavour of the month, maybe, but versus the thousand souless PC games out there of it's breed it's truly closer to something like Dokapon Kingdom and hell, Dark Souls, for the kinds of emotion and socialisation it brings up.

Because truly, Lethal Company is a game about having a really shit job. There's no real sugarcoating it. It's a game about being explicitly underpaid for dangerous, tedius work salvaging objects from ugly factories, where the corporation you work under and the true majesty of visiting planets and experiencing it's fauna are so stripped back and corporatised that you don't even notice it. This setting and the gameplay really sets out a very clever vibe for the game, as frankly, it on it's own, is almost deliberately not fun, but it is a wonderful way of building up a camraderie between players and really get into the boots of a worker in a bad job slacking and goofing off a bit. On my first playthrough with friends I found some extraodinary catharsis in one of the gang spending some of our quota on a jukebox playing license free music and just having a jam for a while, and likewise, a good haul which takes some of the pressure off others is appreciated, and the "man in the chair" - the guy left behind at the ship to deal with doors, turrets etc, feels both valued as part of the team, but also themselves lonely, tense, awaiting their friend's safe return.

It is also, as a more obvious point, very funny. Basically every run of this game you'll make something funny will happen. A comrade fumbles a wonky jump to their death based on bad information. You walk just inside the range of your comrade's voice to hear them screaming for help for half a second. You watch as the man in the chair as a giant red dot slowly bears down on your comrade, try to warn them and then see the red dot taking delight in eating them, and there's so much more. It's surprising really as a game with so little going on in gameplay and so limited in variety of stuff that it keeps on bringing up new stupid shit to happen.

Its rarely legitimately scary, even in the rare case you're alone amongst monsters with all your friends dead. The stakes established are just set too low, the animations a bit too goofy for the intensity to ever feel too much. And that kinda folds back in on that "shit job" thematic of the whole thing. Being almost indifferent to the surprising variety of monsters, seeing them as much as obstacles as hell demons that want to eat your face, is ultimately part of the job. Yes, the fourth angel from Evangelion wandering around whilst you slowly crouchwalk across the map to your ship is tense, but almost amusingly tense. Gotta roll with it.

It's a delightful experience, really. If you wanted to you could linger on how cobbled together the whole thing feels right now and how limited the actual gameplay really is, but they do nothing to take away from the truly great times Lethal Company sparks. The closest a game will ever get to being on the last day of your christmas contract with debenhams and just slacking with the other temps, giving people discounts on their items for no good reason and occasionally the weeping angels from doctor who come out with a giant spider and they're in the ONE hallway that leads back to the exit and Ernesto is dead, damn.

In a year of wonderful Nintendo games, F-Zero 99 is perhaps the most surprising. And I don't mean surprise solely in the context of its announcement and revival of F-Zero after a near twenty-year hiatus. F-Zero 99 is surprising in that it's exceptional.

I wouldn't call the other 35/99 games exceptional, their success feels, in part, closer to novelty than anything else. Tetris 99 is a brilliant concept, but there's a routine asynchronicity to the gameplay - everyone's boards set off independently, intertwining only only a predetermined moments. It's interesting, I had a great time with the game, and it laid a unique foundation.

But at a certain point, it, Mario 35, and Pac-Man 99 all circle a similar drain of simply overlaying competitive-lite elements and busy UI onto insulated, solo gameplay loops. By my later hours with Tetris 99, I was really fighting against myself and my own skill ceiling with the junk lines thrown by my opponents being something of a secondary concern.

F-Zero 99 could've been similarly designed with the Tetris 99 philosophy and UI, Grey Bumpers being thrown onto your track by opponents, the track narrowing with each successive lap.

But, it tries something else. F-Zero 99 is exceptional because it synchronously puts you in direct contact with 98 others on track. This is genuine chaos, a twitch bout of kinetic action and reaction as you fly around corners and burn your boost power, each collision on track chipping just a bit more away.

There is a brilliant synthesis of F-Zero's decades-long ethos of aggressive racing and the intrinsic competition of battle royale here. The concept is not only harmonious but the execution is fantastic. Merging mechanics from F-Zero (SNES) and F-Zero X with modern sensibilities, there is a sort of timeless feel to how the game has been crafted. Like NES Remix before it, F-Zero 99 feels out of time in best possible way.

It also feels remarkably complete for being entirely free-to-play. Solid progression systems, illustrated menus, multiple game modes (with more on the way) - in breadth the game well exceeds what I expected from a 99 title as well.

Most critically though, the depth of F-Zero 99 feels bottomless even after my fifteen hours of gameplay. You begin by floundering on track, trying just to finish races. But then you become taken by interlocking systems that don't begin to appear until you're able to just handle yourself and cross the finish line. You start to manage your Golden Sparks and employ strategic usage of the Skyway. You start to identify weak racers and Bumpers to chain KOs. You learn when you hang back and when to surge ahead, saving your boost for the all-out final lap melee. And, given that absolute mania of being repeatedly jostled by dozens of other machines, you're weighing up each aforementioned concept in response to the snap decisions of the racers around you.

Fold all of that into rock-solid netcode alongside a brilliant rival progression system and you're staring down one of the most potent "one more round" experiences in ages. I love F-Zero and I expected to enjoy 99. What I didn't expect was that I'd be entirely captivated by it.

Sorry folks but it actually kind of rules. Clearly has a lot of love for the series behind every aspect of its design (porting over elements like boost/health management and the spin attack from later entries is great, the character art in the menus is cool) and the skyway is a genuinely well thought out comeback mechanic. Of course it's not a GX remaster or big budget new entry, but so called F Zero fans really seem to hate... the original F-Zero with X's mechanics. There is an element of luck that's going to come with a 99 person race, absolutely, but I'd say that the skill based racing and really tense risk/reward are here just as much as in prior series entries too. Really addictive arcade like experience that is unfortunately being beaten on by people for imo pretty superficial reasons.