Nintendo’s unreleased zero-gravity racing game released today!
Just finished playing through all three Grand Prix cups on Standard difficulty and thought I’d share some impressions.
It’s basically F-Zero, but with zero gravity, and this is made possible thanks to the Virtual Boy’s second D-Pad. You can tilt your ship to fly using the left D-Pad, but you can also do a flat turn (think strafing) by using the right D-Pad.
Courses are called ducts, and they twist and turn along both the x and y axis, there’s traps, there’s a lot of dips. There’s airflows which make you drive faster, and crucially rapid boosts, which you collect and can activate at any time, are a finite resource which are scattered around the courses, often in tricky locations.
From what I’ve played on Expert mode, you absolutely have to collect and deploy the rapid boosts efficiently in order to win, good driving isn’t enough as your opponents seem to ride faster than you at times.
Standard mode, though, mostly rewards just good driving. Due to the digital steering, making turns takes some getting used to , and I don’t think the camera is good enough for helping assist with the sharpest corners, as it has a habit of turning slower than your ship does.
Some of the course designs are really good, and the AI puts up a good fight, as do the annoying bot racers which just exist to get in your way.
I think the game is good, but not great, but you can’t accuse it of not being interesting at least. There are definitely certain limitations that come with such a fast paced racer where each ship’s turn speed is fixed. You often have to anticipate and memorise when to start cornering, and T&E Soft’s Red Alarm doesn’t run into the same problems due to its slower speed. Wipeout on Saturn/PlayStation also had floaty handling to give the player more control with a D-Pad when cornering.
Here’s some other observations:
- You seem to be able to get a boost start if you hold A just after GO.
- Rubber banding on opponents, at least on standard, is quite generous. Your biggest enemy is your ship’s health, and slowing down on the pit lane seems to result in no major penalties
- I suspect the game wasn’t 100% complete. There’s no course music, tracks have generic names, like Duct C-1, and the boot screen music is lifted from Mario Clash, presumably as a placeholder.
- There’s at least 15 courses in the game (I didn’t unlock a fourth Grand Prix after beating the first three), but the difficulty is all over the place. Duct B-4 was by far the hardest in the entire game, I had to use three continues to clear it on standard.
- The fourth machine is called Origammy, is shaped like a paper plane, and has superb acceleration. I recommend it!
Clearing Standard didn’t give me any credits, but luckily Tinarg from virtual-boy.com has already beaten the game on Expert and gotten the credits: Zero Racers (1996) Credits « Planet Virtual Boy
Finally, as predicted last week, it was indeed directed by the original director of F-Zero (Super Famicom/SNES) and F-Zero Maximum Velocity (GBA), Kazunobu Shimizu (credited as Isshin Shimizu here)
Image credit: Tinarg (virtual-boy.com)
Curious to hear your thoughts on this one!
