Vidjama Gmaes Work

That stands for Fix It Again Tony.

To say that I’m enjoying F-Zero 99 would be an overstatement. More accurately I go a while without getting completely pissed off at the game and it’s not just because I got bested by Toesukr69. I know that bastard cheated.

Judging F-Zero 99 on its merits as a game I have a hard time getting too invested in it. Maybe it’s because with 99 players blowing through the map at mach speed, the game feels like less of a test of skill and more of a gauge of patience and luck. I’ve played plenty of battle royales in my time, and while there is an aspect of luck in finding good loot, you can reasonably tie your performance to your skill on the field. Here it rarely feels the case.

F-Zero 99 is exactly what it sounds like, it’s a version of F-Zero on the SNES that throws 99 players into the ring and lets them duke it out over first place. It’s actually pretty fun under the right circumstances. As with F-Zero titles, players in the back rank out as the match goes on and on harder maps your goal a lot of times is less about your rank and more about not dying.

The base 99 player mode is a single race with 99 players. There is a rotating cast of special modes that get you faster progress to tickets, including team modes and one where it’s simply harder maps all the time. Everyone votes for goddamn Port Town II. The tickets you want to collect to spend on entering into the Grand Prix mod, and more on that later.

What really puts the game forward are the things you do during the match rather than the outcome. It’s pretty satisfying knocking another player into the side barrier to see that big KO splash pop up knowing they’ve been knocked out of the race. Every match gives you a set of rivals to try and beat, and I found more enjoyment in targeting my rivals to KO and trying to rank them out as opposed to the other 95 players in the match.

The Grand Prix is where the game tends to get intense. There are five rounds where the qualification threshold dips by another 20 players. Not that it matters because every match knocks out more players than the threshold allows for, at least the first two or three rounds is often the case. You do want to place higher in these because once the five rounds end your performance (if you’re still in the game) is tied to your accumulated points. It does feel really satisfying when you come in first in Grand Prix.

F-Zero is intelligently designed and remixed for this game. As players hit each other they drop sparks that can be picked up and accumulate to put you temporarily on a speed track up above everyone else. So the players in the back tend to get hold of a lot more sparks allowing them to catch up to the players in front who have far fewer available to them. If you get knocked out you have a chance of coming back as a ship whose job is to knock other ships off for extra points.

I give it about a week before I stop playing entirely.