#1: F-Zero

Realistic hoverjet racing!

F-Zero was one of the launch titles for the SNES and I believe it was the first game we bought for the system when I was a kid. It's a pretty typical racing game. You start off by choosing your car, your circuit, and your difficulty level. Then you play through each track on the circuit in turn. Finish in the top 3 to advance. Fall out of the top 3 and you lose a life. Run out of lives and it's game over. You can also lose lives by taking too much damage to your car or by falling off the track.


The four cars are the average one, the one with awesome acceleration but terrible traction and top speed, the average one with a lot of health, and the one with terrible acceleration but awesome traction and top speed. The red car was, at least in our house, thought to be the best by far. I can remember eventually playing a LOT with the yellow car in an attempt to steal a top time record from the red car. The game kept track of the 10 best total times and the best single lap for each track so there were things to try to beat.

Top acceleration means you can lead from the start.

There are jumps on some of the tracks and I remember there were a few spots in the game where you could use a super speed boost off a ramp, cut hard to the side, and actually skip a good chunk of the course. My brother and I used to spend hours and hours searching for cheaty jumps! Here's a picture of me trying to remember one of them and failing miserably.

Uh, where'd the track go?

The graphics in the game weren't great as far as the backgrounds went (What is that I'm jumping over? A circuit board?) but the tracks were well designed and the game seemed to play relatively fair. (Well, once you got into first place it didn't matter how well you did. One slip up and that yellow car would pass you!) The music was great! As soon as I started the second track of the first circuit (Big Blue) I started dancing in my chair.

I played around with three of the four cars (I always hated the blue car so I skipped it) and made sure to beat the first circuit on expert. (I used the red car.) I'm sure 13 year old Nick would kick my butt at the game, but even 21 years after the game was released and probably 18 years since I'd last really played the game I still have some skills. My hands even had muscle memory to do turns properly by tapping the accelerator to keep aligned in a reasonable direction!

The game is missing some things we'd take for granted in a racing game in this day and age. You couldn't see the other cars on the mini-map. You couldn't play multiplayer. There's no gear shifting. There are no weapons. But even now, as someone who doesn't like racing games very much, I enjoyed popping this game in and playing around with it. For the time it was awesome!

Rating: A