Genre: Racing
Year: 2003
Developed by: Amusement Vision
Published by: Nintendo
Platforms: GameCube
#40
Feeling Like: Phil Leotardo
Twenty years.
It’s been twenty fucking years
I’m going to have to chug coffee mixed with Red Bull if I’m going to properly convey how awesome F-Zero GX is, and it’s all based on speed. Fast. FAST. No, faster than that. There you go.
F-Zero GX is an impossible game, it should not look this good on the GameCube. Scratch that, it may look like it’s from 2003 but it sure as hell shouldn’t have a 60 frames per second framerate on hardware this old. And it doesn’t drop the ball, or lag. Ever. You can be doing four player split-screen (and you should!) on the most elaborate course in the game and it doesn’t chug for a single second. How in the hell did Amusement Vision do this?
More importantly, WHERE IS MY NEXT F-ZERO GAME, Nintendo?!?
I know the fact that a car going over 1,000 km/h and not immediately blowing up or being able to turn efficiently is far fetched, even for a video game, but once you get going you really do believe you’re going that fast. One of the biggest challenges for me was keeping track of my car, the track and my competitors as I see insanely detailed, colorful, interesting and mesmerizing scenery all around me. There is no room to pause, there’s barely enough time to apply the brakes. If you don’t memorize the track, the areas to power up your shields and every turn required to get 1st place, you’re going to either lose or be destroyed. F-Zero GX does a lot of things, but fuck around is not one of them.
WHOOOOO GODDAMN I love F-Zero GX. I can’t remember a single game that gave me a greater adrenaline boost. There is no dipping your toe in the waters, Amusement Vision pushes you into the deep end with an engine capable of melting faces and a challenge that is more cliff than curve. The campaign is filled with satanic expectations. You will fail, and fail often. But when you finally pass the finish line, or survive an onslaught of mines, or blast your opponent off the track, or zip ahead of the pack, you will exhale so hard you might pass out.
The courses are simply beyond words. They’re phenomenal. They mix up whether it’s day, or night, or some third futuristic option I wasn’t aware of. There’s metallic tracks, tracks with greenery and trees overgrowing all around you. There’s a halfpipe, set against a backdrop of a lightning storm. There’s a full pipe, where you can literally go on any axis and if you’re at all suspectable to motion sickness, this is the one to make you queasy. You’ve been warned. There are tracks in the desert, on the ocean, and in space. Some seem to be from outside our reality. Some, like the Trident, are devious beyond compare. This isn’t even in the same ballpark as Yoshi Valley in Mario Kart 64, unless it somehow mated with Rainbow Road and the Karts all of a sudden had access to an 800 CC class. There are zero barriers on the Trident, and if you think you were white-knuckling previous races, tell me how you feel after going for 3 minutes of heart-pounding careening only to fall off with a quarter lap to go. Heartbreak doesn’t even begin to cover it.
It’s a stellar collection of levels. Whenever I saw four or more stars on the Difficulty rating, I knew I was in for a battle. But I always wanted to replay them. Except Ordeal, I hated that one. If only I could race like this guy.
The soundtrack is home to every kind of electric guitar riff and pounding drums and synthetic beats, as you’d expect, but it was a particular Overclocked Remix that really caught my ear.
It’s simply called “Dr. Stewart” and it might be my favorite ditty from that illustrious site. It mixes in revving from real cars and just gets me pumped up more than any pre-game speech I’ve ever heard. It has a nonsensible, yet dope sounding robot voice. It has the melody from the game. It has a permanent home on my playlist and every time I hear it, I start yelling at the skies for another F-Zero game. So, so good.
I guess the graphics aren’t quite as good as I remembered them, but you really do have to see F-Zero GX in motion to believe it and recognize what an incredible job Amusement Vision did. Soaring through flames, leaping across chasms, bashing your rivals and finding ludicrous shortcuts is all part of the F-Zero magic and here is where the formula works best. This is what we imagined the first time we booted up F-Zero on the Super Nintendo for the first time. Here’s hoping that F-Zero 99 is a precursor for a brand new iteration in the series. That would be a day one purchase for me, and I’m confident that I’ll be worse than ever. Reaction time, turns out, gets worse as you get older. If I can’t handle hitting a ball in cricket, what hope do I have at controlling the White Cat at 1,5000 km/h while boosting around a corner?
Give it to me. I want to go fast, stupidly fast. I want bizarre tracks and techno metal music and a wacky bunch of alien characters with backstories that never get addressed in the gameplay. I want a coat of paint that blinds me with how bright it is. I want a sequel to F-Zero GX that isn’t Mario Kart 8 which, admittedly, is borderline flawless. But it’s not the same.
The 500 