This hack looks interesting! Renders the whole course into the distance, plus tons more.
there’s nothing better than picking up a game for the first time in a while and turning in a great performance soon after.
Turned on my NTSC-J copy of F Zero X for a casual match, went for King Cup, Master difficulty. And I came in first! Can’t remember if I managed that on PAL way back in the late 90s but still, it’s really testament to the importance of muscle memory on these games.
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Muscle memory and the brain’s unique quirk to work on things without you even realizing. I can’t tell you how many games seen impossible until I put them down for a week and come back with a fresh perspective.
Kind of a good thing to do with some real life problems too.
Yup, exactly, sometimes doing a marathon session to try and get through a difficult part in a game yields worse results than sleeping over it and trying the next day.
I wonder if that’s why frustrating aspects of games became less tolerated in video game reviews - there’s now the expectation that you should be able to keep playing and not want to put down the controller.
Same here. It was F-Zero that made me sell my Mega Drive and Awsome Japanese collection for a SFC. The way the track moved was nothing like we had seen before.
By the way, I think Mario Kart is crap. But that’s also partly because I can’t stand the characters.
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The original Super Mario Kart is all about Battle Mode for me. I’m not fussed by the racing.
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That can be fun with some mates.
The layout of Mario Kart 7/8 track Music Park/Melody Motorway bears a striking resemblance to Silence 2 - Wavy Road from F-Zero X.
https://twitter.com/sabrinasaysshit/status/1549891344780460033
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Reminds me of when the courses for golf in Wii Sports were copies of NES Golf.
I would never think to even compare these types of things. How do people figure this stuff out?
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There’s a certain type of person that goes deep into these things. Nintendo IPs have whole discords for each!
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Just an update of my thoughts :
For what I’ve played of F-Zero this year, at the question “does he hold up against” the answer is yes.
I also played GX with the Logitech official GC force feedback wheel. It’s better than the pad control. It has all that you would expect from an ffb wheel control, surprisingly, because it’s a transfer of the arcade AX control. For me it’s clear that the game has been designed for this controls (so AX designed first) and then translate to the pad.
There are many differences:
game-notes/ax-gx-mechanics-differences.md at main · JoselleAstrid/game-notes · GitHub
So for me today:
F-Zero = FZero X >> F-Zero GX with the wheel >> F-Zero GX with the pad.
I did a F-Zero run, which can illustrate my point of view. Captain Falcon, Queen league in Master, all the races first, without using lives of course, heated.
Some concentration mistakes (du to many starting again…), but I made up for it and in the end I passed (going from fourth to first on White Land 1 was not easy…).
It’s precisely this relentless requirement in the concentration that makes me always have so much fun with it for 32 years despite the 3D sequels. It’s a bit like black and white movies, it remains a unique experience with its own qualities. Because F-Zero extracts the best gameplay of the mode 7 and its slippy driving (-> hovercraft, genius).
16/9 close up to display the CRT image:
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I grew up with F-Zero X and it’s one of the best video games out there, in my opinion. I also played GX back in the day and it’s good, obviously, but nowadays I consider it a spin-off, both in terms of gameplay and aesthetics. I also played Maximum Velocity, which is clearly not in the same class as the aforementioned games.
Anyway, I want to talk about the original F-Zero. I did not play it growing up but was aware of its existence. I was never particularly interested in it and more or less subscribed to the point of view outlined in the OP. I loved 2D games as they seemed to provide something distinct from the 3D games that dominated the mid to late nineties, but, as far as I could see, F-Zero was neither 2D nor 3D. I considered it pseudo-3D and it was therefore, ultimately, rendered redundant by X and GX.
Having put a substantial amount of time into F-Zero over the past decade, I can safely say I was wrong. How exactly has my perspective changed? This quote from @Tchiko is a good starting point:
The video game industry is largely preoccupied with technology. With no two games is this more evident than with F-Zero and F-Zero X. The former’s visuals are constructed from pixels and the latter’s from polygons. F-Zero merely exhibits a ‘3D effect’, whereas X is the real deal — it features ‘true 3D’ graphics. At least, that’s what we are told. Let’s take a step back for a moment… we play these games on the same television set. The entire image sits on a plane (yes, on a CRT this plane is not necessarily totally flat but it is still two dimensional for all intents and purposes). The graphics of X are just as much an illusion as those of the OG.
In the art world, it’s widely accepted that painting pre-cubism (think classic attempts at creating a realistic image) is based on optical illusion. The history of painting up until this point is the refinement of techniques intended to convince us we were seeing something other than what was really there (paint on a canvas). The emergence of photography triggered a paradigm shift in painting — ‘realism’ would never be coveted in the same way again as a camera could do it better. Hence radically different art from that point onwards.
What does this have to do with F-Zero? Simply put, there was never such a paradigm shift in gaming. The shift from pixels to polygons is a technical one of great importance but the goal of game design remains the same — to create an illusion of 3D imagery. After all, a TV screen is flat like a canvas.
I believe that if you see these games in this light, it’s possible to appreciate F-Zero more deeply. I certainly have over the years. Now I consider it equal to its sequel. If I had to split them, I would say X is slightly superior from a gameplay point of view, not because of analogue controls but because the boost is tied to the energy meter. For me, the excitement of X does not come from its course design, but from the strategy involved in managing your boost/energy. The intertwined nature of this mechanic makes the game that bit more dynamic than the OG. There are just so many more possible ways to navigate a race. Also, the importance of combat i.e. knocking your rival off the track, adds a whole extra dimension to the gameplay of X, especially at the higher difficulties.
As much as I love the look and feel of X, especially the minimalistic graphics and the metal soundtrack, the OG has a timeless aesthetic. The colour scheme, leaning heavily into greens and purples, is truly cosmic. The soundtrack, although significantly milder than its sequel’s, is special. Its ambient vibe is stripped down to the bare minimum on the records screen — a loop of a few seconds so mellow in its melody, I could listen to it forever.
In the end, it comes down to imagination. When you read a book or look at a painting, your imagination fills in the gaps. When I was a kid, F-Zero seemed outmoded compared to X. Now that both games are firmly in the past, it is easier to see them for what they are — two unique ways of transporting a player into space.
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I can finally stop my daily prayers for a new F-Zero!
F-ZERO 99
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Turned on my Switch to play a few rounds of Tetris 99 and saw this…
Thought I was hallucinating!
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I can’t download them to see for myself, right now, so apologies for the dumb question… Are these Tetris and F-Zero 99 online-only experiences?
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Yes
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Tetris has offline modes that are paid ‘dlc’ but the core of it, and all of f-zero 99 as of now, are very much focused on 99 players online.
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It’s… alright. I really love the presentation and menus. They are surprisingly high quality.
But the actual gameplay is a bit slow for an f-zero game. And the amount of bumping into other vehicles makes for a bit of a luck-determinative sort of experience rather than a pure skill one.
It’s fun as an entry in the “99” series, and I’ll likely play it for a few months, but I really do still want a full new single player F-Zero game too.
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Thank you. I may give it a try, even though that doesn’t sound like something I’d want to spend time on.
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