Strap on your seatbelts and get ready for futuristic racing with Nintendo’s vision of futuristic death racing in F-Zero X on the Nintendo N64 console gaming machine.

This game is a sequel to F-Zero on the Super Nintendo, which in my opinion was an okay but pretty average racer from the early days of the Super Nintendo, thankfully the Nintendo's N64 game is a lot more fun, with 30 cars, twists, loops, jumps and boosts.

The obvious comparison is with Wipeout by Sony -Psygnosis’ foray into the world of futuristic racing. Or should that be Sony - Psygnosis’ foray into the world of getting the homing missiles and blasting people into oblivion. Sure, it’s a lot prettier graphically, but as I sat down with Wipeout 2097 and unlocked everything in 2 hours using a combination of missiles, missiles and more missiles I became bored with it. With F-Zero’s tricky corners, however, you have to be actually (shock horror) good at moving the joystick from left to right, control wise alone therefore this game wipes the floor with Sony’s offering.
Anyway, this is not about Wipeout, it’s about F-Zero. There are four trophies and 3 difficulty levels, all of which have to be completed to unlock all 30 racers, an extra difficulty level, and “The X Cup”, which is randomly generated tracks of ovals or with unworkable corners that eliminate everybody from the course. Providing you don’t crash and run out of energy, you progress to the next race with points and grid position based on your previous race. Whoever has the most point at the end of the six races wins. Simple.

Surprisingly, the multiplayer isn’t bad either. The cars are reduced to 4, and any car eliminated gets control of a slot machine, that can affect the other drivers still in the race. I know they have to reduce the racers due to memory constraints so the slot machine is an interesting feature.

The single player game, however, unlike in Mario Kart, outshines the multiplayer. Thirty cars who jostle and weave past each other vying for the number one spot on some of the most impressive tracks ever seen. It’s supremely fun and you’ll come back to it again and again, but you’ll have to as later difficulty levels are so hard you will have to wear a metallic pair of underpants to stop the arse kicking you’ll repeatedly receive.
That’s a pain though, as it seems that later levels revert to a classic “lets make all other cars faster than you rather than better than you” Nintendo Trick seen in the likes of Mario Kart also, so much so that the only way to win is to brutally run your rival off the track so they get zero points and you get a decent amount.

However, like Mario Kart on the N64, this can be forgiven like any great game. It’s fun, it’s fast, it’s dirty, and well worth playing by anybody who wants a decent futuristic racer.