I don’t know what compelled me to leave Toys R Us with F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, the first and only game I owned for the Game Boy Advance at its release. I distinctly remember sitting on the couch by the window, trying to catch a cold grey sunlight filtered through a bed of clouds against the screen of the handheld watching my little pixelated flying car explode over and over again, wondering if I had made a mistake. Maybe I’d picked the wrong game.
Over time and after acquiring more GBA games that better suited the kinds of things I played as a kid, I would often dip back into F-Zero out of morbid curiosity — maybe it was good all along and I just didn’t get it? But no, I would get overwhelmed by the speed and blow up again and get too frustrated to continue before going back to Pokémon or Mario or something.
It wasn’t until much later when I played F-Zero GX on a friend’s GameCube that I fully understood the appeal. In a higher fidelity and surrounded by shouting friends, the speed and the stress and the music all finally clicked together — F-Zero is about being overwhelmed.
So here we are now with F-Zero 99, the latest in Nintendo’s experiments with massively multiplayer online versions of their old classics. Grafting 98 other racers into what was already a tense nightmare only ratchets up the fear, making for the most exhilarating rendition of F-Zero yet. I also find it freeing to know winning is most likely out of the cards, with every match you’re signing yourself up for the very thing that frustrated me most as a kid. In that way, it’s quite possibly the best version of the game ever made.
Over time and after acquiring more GBA games that better suited the kinds of things I played as a kid, I would often dip back into F-Zero out of morbid curiosity — maybe it was good all along and I just didn’t get it? But no, I would get overwhelmed by the speed and blow up again and get too frustrated to continue before going back to Pokémon or Mario or something.
It wasn’t until much later when I played F-Zero GX on a friend’s GameCube that I fully understood the appeal. In a higher fidelity and surrounded by shouting friends, the speed and the stress and the music all finally clicked together — F-Zero is about being overwhelmed.
So here we are now with F-Zero 99, the latest in Nintendo’s experiments with massively multiplayer online versions of their old classics. Grafting 98 other racers into what was already a tense nightmare only ratchets up the fear, making for the most exhilarating rendition of F-Zero yet. I also find it freeing to know winning is most likely out of the cards, with every match you’re signing yourself up for the very thing that frustrated me most as a kid. In that way, it’s quite possibly the best version of the game ever made.