A playthrough of Nintendo's 1991 racing game for the Super NES, F-Zero.
F-Zero is a classic staple of 1990s gaming, and sits right up there alongside Super Mario Kart and Top Gear as one of best driving experiences you'll find on the Super Nintendo. What makes this a particularly impressive feat is that it is also one of the oldest SNES titles - it was the only other game besides Super Mario World to be made available at the 11/1990 Japanese launch of the Super Famicom.
Here are the timecodes if you're looking for something in particular:
Expert difficulty:
1:19 Knight League w/ Golden Fox
18:13 Queen League w/Wild Goose
34:22 King League w/Blue Falcon
Master difficulty, all w/Fire Stingray:
53:18 Knight League
1:08:48 Queen League
1:23:54 King League
The year between the Japanese and American launches did little to temper the sheer impact that F-Zero had. It was designed as a top-tier showcase piece for the new 16-bit hardware, and it shows. Super Mario World made people go "ooh" and "aah" when it was new, but it couldn't touch F-Zero's wow factor.
Not only did it introduce the world to Captain Falcon and crew and such iconic tracks as Mute City and Big Blue, but it was insanely fast, full of all sorts of cool futuristic imagery, and it rocked an eye-popping pseudo-3D graphics style thanks to the SNES's vaunted "mode 7" graphics mode. This mode allowed for developers to freely rotate and scale the background layer, allowing for some never-before-seen tricks that effectively created the illusion of depth. The effect was employed in countless games over the lifetime of the SNES, but few used it as memorably or as impactfully as F-Zero did. And somehow, they crammed it all into a four megabit cartridge! Compare the game to Rad Racer 2 on the NES or Outrun on the Genesis, and you'll see that there really isn't any fair comparison to be made.
It would have just been a flash-in-the-pan novelty if it couldn't back up its stellar looks, but F-Zero is no one-trick pony. The furturistic setting provides for some amazingly colorful backdrops that fly past at wicked speeds, and the soundtrack is one of Nintendo's best on the system. F-Zero is one of those games that, even if you haven't played it in twenty years, you'll still remember every note of every song. I still find it impossible to resist humming along when I play.
The gameplay is the true hero here, though. The controls are easy to grasp but nuanced enough that you'll never feel like you're merely holding the accelerator while occasionally hitting left or right. Your car can lean into turns and drift sideways without changing direction with a simple tap of a shoulder button, which is a wholly necessary skill to master if you're going to make any progress. Different conditions and traps also change things up - some tracks have strong crosswinds that you will have to steer against, while others feature magnetic rails, land mines, and grippy patches that'll slow you to a crawl if you drive over them.
Thankfully, the handling is spot on. The later races can become downright infuriating - the track designs in the King League are designed to thoroughly test your ability to control the car, and the AI opponents in the Master difficulty level exist to make you suffer. You get a turbo boost with each lap your successfully complete, but be careful when you use these - when you're sailing along at 900+ km/h, it's all too easy to start smashing into rails or to go flying off the track. And as you would expect, if you miss the track or take too much damage, you'll go up in flames and be prompted to try again.
Overall, F-Zero is a blast to play and a real master lesson in game design. Not too shabby for a game that was intended first and foremost to be a tech showcase, wouldn't you say?
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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