Tetris 99, Mario 35, and Pac-man 99 are allowed to be openly disposable products and kind of bad games because they are just a novel way to play well-trodden entries in high profile series. We can safely assume that there is going to be some kind of new Tetris, Mario, or Pac-man. This treatment doesn't really work for F-Zero, and the idea that this game could be a way of gauging demand seems sort of absurd.
What makes this game "99" anyway? Tetris, Mario, and Pac-man have things like scoring systems and timers that could be used for competition, but the main conflict is between the player and the computer; in a race, the conflict is already against other racers, so what's so different about F-Zero 99? From a quick search it seems like real life racing competitions have at most 60 cars on the track, so 99 simultaneous competitors is a high amount but it's not a spectacular amount.
Tetris, Mario, and Pac-man aren't just solo games, they're solved games. Pac-man is basically completely deterministic, Mario has an ideal, computer-controlled playthrough that humans have nearly matched, and what randomness Tetris has is still completely manageable without altering the difficulty in other ways. Even in their 99 incarnations they're really still against the computer, the multiplayer element comes exclusively from tampering with other player's games, introducing more extreme randomness or at least semi-randomness, changing the solution or even making the game unsolvable.
A game like Mario Kart uses power-ups to introduce randomness, to make things easier for players who are doing worse, to make victory less guaranteed for skilled players. They do this in service of the game being a casual, "party" experience, so that the game can be a fun thing for a group of people in a room together who may not all be familiar with games. The power-ups more or less separated from the game's main mechanics; you race according to the course, power-ups are given at set positions on the course, the effects of these power-ups influence the race but your focus should always be on how you maneuver your car.
Even where F-Zero 99 is not strictly random, it has enough variables to be semi-random enough that it knows you won't win, and instead highlights a handful of players that you will be rewarded for beating. You have a boost but it doubles as health, depletes when you collide, and only refills in a specific place once per lap; there is nothing in the way of tactile engagement with the track or with your vessel's handling. F-Zero 99 knows that the tracks are crowded enough that you won't even really be "racing", some tracks even introduce wind for you to fight against. You spend most of your time avoiding other players while trying to collect gold particles that randomly fly off of colliding players to build a meter that lets you fly over the other racers for a little while.
Calling games "Skinner boxes" is sort of missing a lot of the point, an operant conditioning chamber can used in different ways, and different things were learned from those methods; the scary thing about them isn't so simple as "hit button, get treat", the scary thing about that is that if you only give treats after a random number of button presses then animals will just hit the button over and over. F-Zero 99 isn't just frustrating because it's a random mess and a lot of people will love it because "addictive" game design is something people see as desirable these days, it's frustrating because I thought F-Zero was something else.
Though, let's be honest, Nintendo didn't even make GX. If Nintendo actually did make a new, "real" F-Zero it probably wouldn't be as good as any of the other sci-fi racers that exist today.
What makes this game "99" anyway? Tetris, Mario, and Pac-man have things like scoring systems and timers that could be used for competition, but the main conflict is between the player and the computer; in a race, the conflict is already against other racers, so what's so different about F-Zero 99? From a quick search it seems like real life racing competitions have at most 60 cars on the track, so 99 simultaneous competitors is a high amount but it's not a spectacular amount.
Tetris, Mario, and Pac-man aren't just solo games, they're solved games. Pac-man is basically completely deterministic, Mario has an ideal, computer-controlled playthrough that humans have nearly matched, and what randomness Tetris has is still completely manageable without altering the difficulty in other ways. Even in their 99 incarnations they're really still against the computer, the multiplayer element comes exclusively from tampering with other player's games, introducing more extreme randomness or at least semi-randomness, changing the solution or even making the game unsolvable.
A game like Mario Kart uses power-ups to introduce randomness, to make things easier for players who are doing worse, to make victory less guaranteed for skilled players. They do this in service of the game being a casual, "party" experience, so that the game can be a fun thing for a group of people in a room together who may not all be familiar with games. The power-ups more or less separated from the game's main mechanics; you race according to the course, power-ups are given at set positions on the course, the effects of these power-ups influence the race but your focus should always be on how you maneuver your car.
Even where F-Zero 99 is not strictly random, it has enough variables to be semi-random enough that it knows you won't win, and instead highlights a handful of players that you will be rewarded for beating. You have a boost but it doubles as health, depletes when you collide, and only refills in a specific place once per lap; there is nothing in the way of tactile engagement with the track or with your vessel's handling. F-Zero 99 knows that the tracks are crowded enough that you won't even really be "racing", some tracks even introduce wind for you to fight against. You spend most of your time avoiding other players while trying to collect gold particles that randomly fly off of colliding players to build a meter that lets you fly over the other racers for a little while.
Calling games "Skinner boxes" is sort of missing a lot of the point, an operant conditioning chamber can used in different ways, and different things were learned from those methods; the scary thing about them isn't so simple as "hit button, get treat", the scary thing about that is that if you only give treats after a random number of button presses then animals will just hit the button over and over. F-Zero 99 isn't just frustrating because it's a random mess and a lot of people will love it because "addictive" game design is something people see as desirable these days, it's frustrating because I thought F-Zero was something else.
Though, let's be honest, Nintendo didn't even make GX. If Nintendo actually did make a new, "real" F-Zero it probably wouldn't be as good as any of the other sci-fi racers that exist today.