Three Blissful Minutes of Insanity in F-Zero 99
Sometimes a fresh coat of paint is all it takes.
My first license was a moped license. I took a 40 question test at the Secretary of State and passed, answering the minimum number of questions correctly to earn it. My first “car” was a 2003 Yamaha Vino. It was olive green with chrome accents and a tanned seat. A car is a room you drive around in, but on two wheels, you’re just another animal in the road.
My Vino had a 49cc engine. If the wind was right, I could push the orange dial past the 40mph marker and into the empty creme-colored space on the speedometer. On any long stretch of road with a speed limit greater than 35mph, I was in a stressful situation. Traffic would stack up behind me. People would pass me at any cost, putting me in a situation where I had to make a split-second choice of what to do when the car passing me was about to smoke the car coming in the other direction. Take a long drive on the highway, and slowing down to 55mph feels like crawling. Going 45mph on a scooter feels like re-entering the earths atmosphere and bursting into flames.
Red lights and stop signs were my friends. What I lacked in top speed, I made up in acceleration. A red light would buy me a 20 second lead before another Ford Fiesta attempted to enter my ass. I incorporated parking lots, back alleys, side roads, and neighborhoods into my route whenever I could. Every turn, every lean, was pure joy. My routes were fluid and fun and made-up. When it’s not mortifying, it’s a great feeling to be on two wheels.
I love driving games, and I love “arcade” racing games. Simulations, usually, are not for me. A simulation-style game may contain that feeling of intuitive mechanical bliss, but behind a big time commitment. Give me something short and sweet and fast, however, and I’ll say “just one more time” until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. This is how I put 100 hours into F-Zero 99 within two weeks.
I have been suckered by every “99” game that Nintendo has put on the Switch. I’ve been playing Tetris 99 off and on since it came out. Pac Man 99 hit my soft spot in a hard way—so much so that I paid for all the other Namco skins—but it didn’t hold me for long. Super Mario 35 didn’t really grab me much. F-Zero 99 caught me by surprise.
I’m not a longstanding F-Zero fan. When I took my kids to see The Super Marios Bros Movie, the theater steadily hummed with grunts of recognition from the audience. When the Blue Falcon appeared on a poster in the background, I heard some kids slur out “falcon!….falcon carrr…..” which I thought was funny. I’ve touched the original F-Zero a few times over the years, and maybe I once rented F-Zero GX, but that’s it. Like those kids at the movies, I also have my strongest connection to F-Zero via Captain Falcon in the Smash Bros games.
F-Zero 99 grabbed me immediately. I spent my first 20 hours in the Blue Falcon, being led into race-after-race by a chance to level up, earn a new color or decal, or even win. F-Zero 99 may be the only racing game I’ve ever played where losing can feel like a victory. Just like in Mario Kart, there are no promises. A spot of good or bad luck can make all the difference. I can risk death by repeatedly boosting to front-run in the first lap, but that’s all. By the second lap I’m on my own, fighting for my life in the phalanx of other racers. In F-Zero 99, if you don’t crash into someone, someone is going to crash into you, and the sum of those crashes is sprayed onto the track in the form of golden specks. By driving over these, you collect them into a meter that briefly lets you ascend to a high-speed skyway above the track, keeping you out of the fray and letting you climb into a higher position without trouble.
The game is well-balanced, with all four machines representing a slightly different approach. Fire Stingray is fragile, lightweight, and doesn’t have much energy to spare for boosting. If you can cut through the madness, other machines will be hard-pressed to close the gap without putting themselves in danger. Golden Fox—not unlike my old scooter—is small and weak and made for acceleration and boosting. It has the highest recovery stat, meaning you can recklessly drain your machine of energy and recover almost all of it at the beginning of each lap. Wild Goose—my personal favorite—is a high speed tank. It’s fairly slow to build up speed and it doesn’t handle that well, but given that the more feeble machines simply bounce off of it, I never enter a corner fearfully. The Blue Falcon is the all-rounder—and totally viable—but in my opinion, requires the biggest dose of good luck to consistently do well with.
Every other racer is out to get you. The rewards for smacking someone else out of the way are immense. Worst case scenario, you whip someone into a wall before a corner and leave them in the dust. Best case scenario, you get the drop on some smoking shitheap and blow them up—filling and slightly expanding your energy bar. This system sets up some amazing situations. Here I come, just about to get into the final lap. I need energy badly. My machine is in rough shape. Someone is in front of me, also out of energy, limping toward the pit. I suicide boost to catch them, spin-attack, blow them up, and now have the green light for a now-or-never final lap where I spend every single drop of fresh energy to piece the win together.
The flip side is that sometimes you’re the asshole. For every instance that you savagely destroy someone else mere feet from the finish line, YOU become the smoking hole in the ground instead. Sometimes I would get so caught up battling for first that I would forget what lap I was on, squeaking and smoking over the finish just to realize that it was only Lap 3. Then somebody blows me up.
It’s hard to win in F-Zero 99, but the game does an excellent job of keeping the pack together. I have to admit, too, that I get a lot of validating joy out of an old game being assimilated into a fresh, new, and alive-feeling online template. The final Grand Prix has been added now, so I’m not sure what comes next. I would suspect nothing. But what a thrill it was. Even if this game is offline in six months, F-Zero is back on the map and back in peoples minds in a way that it hasn’t been in 20 years. As someone who deeply loves Burnout, FlatOut, Wipeout, OutRun—it’s a feather in my cap for a type of game that has been dormant for too long. F-Zero 99 came out of nowhere to be my game of the season.