Game review: F-Zero

I played this game, and managed to beat it when I was a kid. My bro had a SNES which I could play it on. On those days tube tv’s was still in use and no such thing as flat existed. The first thing you hear when playing this game is the epic main menu 16-bit music theme. Now why is this game great? You get to choose a futuristic racing car and see its stats on a chart. The chart animates the cars top speed as well as acceleration on it. Science on an old-school racing game, wow.

The game itself is fun to play with both varying maps as well as music. Some games even today insist on playing the same melody over and over, but already back then they understood the importance of music in games. The game levels gradually increase in difficulty as you beat them. This provides you with a challenge that you can beat. Personally, I don’t like no-challenge games. If a game is not challenging it is usually not good. Something that the game sort of requires unless you go with the car with the highest top-speed is that you must on a level use a “boost” to fly over an obstacle to beat the track. You only have a certain amount of lives and if they run out you loose and have to re-play everything. This “boost” is not easy to know about and you must discover how to use it yourself unless you are able to have and read a manual, in English, while not being English or maybe not even able to read to begin with. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Since I didn’t know about the “booster” thingy until some time, I had no option but to beat the game with the only ship that could jump over the super long obstacle without using a boost. However, this pink ship also has a low acceleration speed, but really, the top-speed makes up for that anyways. In my opinion the low acceleration super top-speed pink ship might be the best ship anyways. My first favorite space ship was the yellow one though, maybe because of its many “rockets” on its back. It also has the highest acceleration which is cool.

The levels in the game are well planned and made, the AI is the AI (it works), the game is challenging (many obstacles that can damage you, even bumping into enemy AI can damage you). Different race tracks with in-racing line options while racing (different paths to take). Cool animations and sound effects. I am planning to make a game like F-Zero, maybe not as good music-wise, but, probably good fun-wise.

And if you wonder how a SNES looks like, here it is: