F-Zero AX

Woo! Played FZero AX today. Pretty good. I only played it 3 times so far (Y200 a pop) but plan on playing a lot more soon. The game is housed in one of those sit down machines that move around. Pretty neat.... reminds me of Afterburner II.

Anyway, the machines have a card system kinda like Initial D. I haven't gotten a card yet, but I will the next time (Y100 for card). You can also use your GC memory card, but that option isn't turned on. I assume it'll magically turn itself on when the GC ver comes out.

The controls are pretty standard with a few extras. You get a steering "wheel" with two boost buttons on it. One directly in the middle (a big glowing blue button) and one off to the upper right of the middle button. There's also two "shifting" levers behind the wheel. It's the same as Daytona and those other driving games for shifting, but in FZero it functions as the "sharp turning" lever... forgot what it was called. It's the same as the shoulder buttons in SNES and GBA vers. It's also possible to rotate the wheel toward and away from you. I think that might be for jumps, but I don't know yet. Then there's the accelerator and brake. You also get the 4 buttons that select the 4 points of view just like all Sega racers since Virtua Racing.

Once you put in your money and press start, you have the option of using a card (insert card now) or get a new card. After that, you can choose between normal mode and Time Attack mode. I've only played the normal mode (forgot what the game calls it) so far.

After choosing the game mode, you get to choose your vehicle. There are around 10 to 12 different vehicles. Each vehicle is rated between A-E for Boost, Grip, and Body. Once you choose the vehicle, you get to choose its acceleration curve. Basically you're presented with the vehicle's performance curve where you can adjust it between higher max acceleration vs higher max speed. After that, you get to choose a track.

There are 3 levels (beginner, medium, expert) with 2 tracks each. Not sure if there are more but there better be. Perhaps having a card opens up new tracks. I played the 2nd beginner track all 3 times. The first beginner track is just a big oval, so that didn't seem to interesting to me.

Now onto the race! First of all, the graphics are very good. That's all I'll say about that. On the track I played, you go 6 laps against 29 other opponents. The track seems to be crowded at all times. On the first lap you just drive. You can pump the gas to get a little boost of speed I think... at least that what it seemed like. Now, after the first lap is where things get exciting. The game prominently announces that you have booster power. Just like in the old SNES ver, you can use boost. The difference here is that you pretty much have unlimited number of boosts. Remember those two boost buttons I mentioned above? Well, the upper right button acts like the SNES ver of FZero. It gives you a big boost for a few seconds. Now the big blue glowing button in the middle lets you use your energy to boost. It automatically cuts itself off if you're almost out of energy so you can't kill yourself by boosting. It'll stop at about 20% of energy left. When you drive over the recharging areas on the track, you pretty much can recover 100% if you stay on the strip the whole way. They aren't even that long either. I'm not sure how the other SNES-style boost works since everytime I pushed it I got boost, so maybe it recharges instead of getting one per lap.

One thing I don't understand is that you only get to play one track per game so not sure if there are other tracks on the same circuit you can choose if you don't use a card. I'll have to figure out what the card system does other than for storing your race times and name.

Well, that's about it. I hope I didn't miss anything. I'm definitely going to pick up the Gamecube version.