Tweet
How wonderful it is to have F-Zero back. There's plenty of fan service in the first DLC pack for Mario Kart 8, but none of it hits quite as hard as the once-forgotten series' slight return, its anti-grav track winding blissfully through Nintendo's hyper-clean vision of the future. The newly introduced race through Hyrule Castle might hit some high notes, sure, but we get to walk between these parapets every other year. The steel-blue metropolis of Mute City has been lost to home consoles for well over a decade. The series lived on, of course, in Mario Kart 8's newfound passion for the vertiginous, and for the ludicrous twists and switchbacks that defined F-Zero 64 before they were cut brilliantly loose in F-Zero GX. That game's director, Toshihiro Nagoshi, once likened the design of its tracks to writing a song (something he perhaps picked up from his mentor Yu Suzuki, who designed the breezy sweep of OutRun's jaunt with the soundtrack always in mind) - and so GX's courses were full of dazzling solo stretches that hammered the player with searing twists before building up to climaxes of impossible speed.
Mario Kart 8's Mute City isn't quite the measure of the likes of GX's Intersection or Ordeal, but it's a neat deepening of the link between Nintendo's flagship series and one of its fading stars. Mute City contains explicit nods to F-Zero - boost pads are replaced by that distinctive yellow chevron, and coins are usurped by energy strips around the course - as well as that crunchy guitar theme, enlivened in Mario Kart 8 style by hyperactive brass punches.
Read more…
More...