Old Computer Games Are Well Good #2

I'm sick of driving around in normal cars. Everyone does it. Brum brum brum - let's go to the supermarket. I don't want to do it in my vital nanoseconds of nonworkdom. Fortunately, the 1990s had it sussed. They didn't want silly more-realistic-than-life Ford Escort-a-thons; oh no, they wanted ridiculous things. No brooding sub-plots and no aspirational speedster bollocks. No, the 1990s was invented for stupid hyper-age fantasies, and wildly exciting they are, too.

The best example of this is F-Zero X on the N64. Slightly less neon than its SNES counterpart (which is relentlessly dazzling, like Shane MacGowan spanking you on the face with a diamond baseball bat), the 64-bit equivalent is whippet-slick and super-space-age. Also, you get to fly around at speeds over 700km/h, which the last time I checked, was enough to wipe your face off.



An integral part of the game is the rather odd and physics-mocking track layouts, which involve a comparably orthodox pipe and half-pipe, but also a more mind-boggling cylinder which involves being magnetically attached to a big worm, which involves getting flung around like an glistening bead of jet-propelled debris. There's 29 other chumps, trying in vain to debunk you in every race as well, which brings a certain pleasure in carving your neon line through the swathes of chaff. And in the classic twist of Road Rash, you get a rival who you can endeavour to pummel the pants off especially. Because you're a citizen of the future, see. You don't have to work, because robots do all that palaver nowadays, and nuclear energy has solved all our problems, so we don't even have to pay any bills. Great, isn't it?

Witness yourself getting whipped upside down and inside out and you'll soon realise that too much F-Zero X is bad for your neck. This too is the genius, as the eccentric curvature of these space landscapes is so convincing that it seems, for a split-second, perfectly feasible to be zapping across these inverted corkscrews and whatnot. In fact, slingshot yourself over 1 of the high-altitude crests and you'll feel your googlies go all googly. It's well Pepsi Max Big One.



Add to that a soundtrack not dissimilar to Mad Capsule Markets having a Prozac party and a commentator that sounds like Sparky the Magic Piano and wham: welcome to the best bit of 1998. Okay, so you can't buy into the F-Zero X lifestyle. But when it's so frenzied, and so pick-up-and-put-downable as this, you shouldn't really want to. And if you do, you're stupid. Because they're space cars AND NOBODY DRIVES SPACE CARS YET.

Download N64 Emulator
Download F Zero X ROM