LogFAQs > #961740712

1. F-Zero X (N64, 1998)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/9/1/AAN44mAACzln.jpg

This being my #1 was the worst-kept secret on my list. While everyone probably figured that Snowboard Kids 2, Bully, and MVP Baseball 2005 would rank near the top of my list, everyone who has known me for a long time had to have expected this as my #1. Im actually going to talk about the game this time I swear, but oh geez, where do I even begin?

I guess talking about actual driving is a good place. With this being in the era where 3D gaming was a work-in-progress, there were plenty of growing pains in the development phase for virtually every game. Released roughly two years after the N64 hit the shelves, F-Zero X had already seemingly mastered the hardware. This game is smooth as silk. It ran at 60 FPS with 30 vehicles on the track, which had to have been unprecedented. It looks and feels gorgeous in motion. Something that I find underrated about the game is camera positioning. They always have it at the right angle so that you can tell where the track is heading to prevent cheap deaths while maintaining a high sense of speed.

I had played the original F-Zero prior to this, and what stood out to me with that game was the Mode 7 graphics. I had played many racing games that utilized it (F-Zero, Al Unser Jr.s Road to the Top, Street Racer, and Super Mario Kart) and it really made the tracks and backgrounds stand out. F-Zero X seemed to take inspiration from those games by having backgrounds be thematically congruent with the planet/track they were on but sparsely detailed in a way that really drives home the sense of scale and sheer height that these tracks reach.

The game has standard racing modes like cups and vs races, but they introduced a peculiar mode called Death Race. It is a short, basic course where your goal is to destroy the other 29 vehicles as quickly as possible. My best time was 59 seconds, and I didnt want to give this away in my Snowboard Kids 2 writeup, but I play this at least once a year as part of the annual N64 racing game marathon. I do Death Race as a warm up, and Im no longer the 10-ish year-old boy who was a stud at this game, but it feels great to still be able to get sub-90 second marks. Death Race is also a neat way to test out other vehicles and even mess with their top speed/acceleration slider. Vehicles are graded on three things (body, boost, and grip), and they all play wildly different. I personally believe the game to be very unbalanced with grip being king (just try using Night Thunder), so this is a cool way to test out your and each vehicle's strengths and weaknesses.

The first four cups contain a total of 24 designed tracks. They have a fifth cup called X-Cup though that was interesting now and definitely for its time for being entirely composed of procedurally generated tracks. The procedural generation draws from a more basic set of components, so the vast majority of the time you will be racing on relatively basic tracks. Its still very neat to always be on your toes as you go through a first lap not knowing what to expect. However, and this is very rare, you will come across a track that has some ridiculous segment that wipes out most or all of the other racers (and to be honest probably you too at first). I dubbed these death tracks, and I cherished each time I was lucky to come across one. The game has a life system, and if you fall off the track or explode because your vehicle's body took too much damage, you would get as many retries as lives remaining. Normally the first time I would come across such a course, I would die from obviously not knowing the death trap that awaits me, and I would use a retry. I would often risk it and die on purpose just to experience that track because in addition to these death tracks being so rare, I would probably never get to race on this particular track ever again. The way the on-screen display is set up shows the top six racers and their headshots on the left. Theres something very cool about there not being enough racers to fill all the spots, and even better when there is no other headshot than your own. I wish there was a way to save a track or have some agency on what kind of tracks show up, but I will accept these existing at all.

This is a very bizarre reason for why a game is my favorite of all-time, but I love the way the AI is set up. I have always been fascinated by AI in racing games. I have mentioned this several times over my time here but not in this topic series since the game wasnt ranked, but Super Mario Kart had a fixed AI system based on the character you chose, and I often took it upon myself to disrupt it the best I could. F-Zero X has a deeper system that I had to discover on my own.

At the beginning of each cup, you will see two characters in front of yours (you begin in the rear, 30th place). Those will be your rivals. While they have some peculiar variance that I wont get into, they should largely follow your lead. If you bring up the rear, they will stay back with you. If you always go for the win (which describes everyone who isnt me), then they will be breathing down your neck. If you awkwardly sit in the middle, well, they usually stick near you. So independent of the three wild cards of you and your rivals, you have numerous tiers of other characters that are randomly generated each cup. The characters will almost always stick to placements within those tiers. Now within each of the four cups with fixed tracks are two certain tracks where they mostly flip those tiers. The highest two tiers are actually impervious to the change, but all the others perform the opposite as normal. Sometimes there were unpredictable wrinkles like when a character crashed the previous race. Would they fall into their tier for the next race, or would they disregard the tier system and place among the second tier before reverting back to their normal tier the following race? Im going to stop going into details there because Im sure that this is something that is hard to follow, but let me assure you I found this totally riveting.

I basically discovered this through intensively looking over the post-race point distribution and standing updates. Once I had a great grasp of the situation, my imagination ran wild. I would come up with narratives for each character during cups based on the tiers they were assigned. Sometimes, I would even create teams prior to starting the cup by literally using a hat and pieces of paper. I would even create stories for these made up teams. What would normally be a 20 minute cup I could extend to more than an hour as I could be so enveloped with my imagination.

In addition to its merits as a top-tier racing game, the games distinctive AI system had such an unparalleled impact on me that nothing may ever top F-Zero X for me in spite of the explosion of creativity and overall quality gaming has seen since then.