The Witcher III, Overwatch, Skyrim and others can all run fairly well on the little devil. To be fair to the Switch, it can pull off some impressive games. A casual, ‘F-Zero for everyone’ would be missing the point. ![]() If we’re being honest, it’s hard to imagine an F-Zero with that same universal factor. Animal Crossing can be played by any age, any demographic, and the same goes with Zelda, Mario et al. Everyone in the family wants to play the Nintendo Switch, or so the theory goes. Instead, Nintendo have aimed for a kind of universality. But Nintendo have stopped trying to compete with Sony and Microsoft on those terms a long while ago. It’s unique selling points are its blistering speed and 3D tracks, all of which need a console with raw horsepower to pull off. With that in mind, F-Zero is a bit of an odd kitty. Put that down to Virtual Boy or other failures in that area, but Nintendo have forged their own path, and that’s been driven by consumer value rather than where WIRED says the future is going. They’re nothing like Sony, whose vision is to pioneer with graphical fidelity, raw power, VR and other frontier developments. Nintendo aren’t the type to chase the pot of gold at the end of the technological rainbow. So, why did Nintendo wait seven whole years to properly capitalise on F-Zero with a sequel? To understand that, we reckon you need to understand how Nintendo works. F-Zero X landed on the Nintendo 64 quite a ways into the console’s life, and while it’s a bonafide classic, it didn’t budge Wipeout, which had already gone onto release Wipeout 2097 and its own N64 challenger, Wipeout 64, in the intervening period. Nintendo could have chucked down the gauntlet and come at Wipeout with both engines overclocked, but it took them a lackadaisical three years from Wipeout’s release to reply. F-Zero doesn’t fit Nintendo’s vision (or demographic) Wipeout was the F-Zero of 1995, the tech demo that showed off its system, and there’s a strong argument that the players went with it. Suddenly, F-Zero was no longer the best or most innovative 3D science-fiction hover-car game with realistic physics and a banging soundtrack (a pretty narrow genre to suddenly be second place in). And a year after the PS1 launched, Sony had their own technical marvel, Wipeout. ![]() Before it launched, it was seen as a kind of technical demo, a proof of concept for Super Nintendo’s future, and no one expected it to be, you know, good.Ĭan you believe that the Sony PlayStation launched just three years later than F-Zero? It seems like they were separated by decades, but the releases were relatively close. ![]() It was at the forefront of the Mode 7 games along with Starfox, simulating 3D worlds that far outstripped other games out there. When F-Zero launched in North America in 1991 (1990 in Japan) on the Best System Ever (Xboxes not included, of course), the Super Nintendo, it was a technical marvel.
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