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I've spent the last two days with the Japanese build of F-Zero GX and loved every minute of it. Well, on second thought that's something of a lie or at the very least an exaggeration. There have been moments, I freely admit, in which I've wanted to put my GameCube controller down and instead slam my fists into something nearby. Yesterday I found myself stuck on the game's second Story Mode chapter for almost an hour -- and this is after having finally figured it out at Nintendo's Gamers' Summit a few weeks back. Eventually I became convinced that I was playing on 'hard' difficulty so I flipped out of the stage and looked. Nope -- it was on normal. So I changed it hard for a second just to try it out and that's when I came to the realization that I would probably never be able to beat the level on that difficulty setting, regardless of training or practice -- it was and will forever be beyond me, no doubt. I've stressed it before and I'll do so again: GX is a difficult racer through and through, but it's also a rewarding one. It's true, you're going to lose a lot of races before you figure out the track designs, master the shortcuts and eventually succeed, and it's also true that there will be some serious frustration along the way, but you'll be sucked into each race because of the challenge as opposed to turned off by it.
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The tracks themselves are insane. It's going to be interesting to see how Acclaim's futuristic racer XGRA ultimately compares. You can race in either third or first-person modes and the latter seems to heighten the speed of the already-frantic-paced game. I'm partial to third-person -- I just like to see my ship. Each world theme is stunning, from the foliage-filled Green Plant track to course-dropping Aeropolis, in which you'll actually have to 360-spin your craft (Z button) just to make it around some sharp corners. There are loops. There are dips. There are bumps. There are jumps. There are pipes. There are dead-ends. There are shortcuts. They all fly directly in your face at 1500 KPH until you can barely keep up. These are awesome things.
