Nintendo is set to update F-Zero 99 with more courses and modes in the near future.
First up, Nintendo’s Japanese web page for the game states that two sets of courses will be added. The first will be in late September and taken from the Queen League; the second will be mid-October and from the King League.
At present, the courses in the game are mainly taken from the Knight League, so expect some trickier races in the near future.
Yeah but it’s a 99 racer BATTLE ROYALE! Total innovation! Buy our online subscription!
Or just emulate all the original installments of the franchise that they killed 20 years ago for free.
Weirdly, I have to defend against the idea they killed F-Zero. They did exactly what they intended with it, from the get-go: they showed off new hardware with a previously-impossible sense of speed. Once for SNES planecasting, once for N64 z-buffering, once for GBA planecasting, and once for Gamecube fillrate.
Every other F-Zero game is third-party.
Nintendo is a toy company. If a product is not novel, they are not interested. That’s why every Mario Kart has some stupid gimmick. Even in the first one, splitscreen multiplayer was the stupid gimmick. They shipped F-Zero and realized the SNES had a second controller… but no two-player games. Shrinking the courses to a static tilemap required smaller scale and lower speed, hence tiny karts. Really take a moment to consider that: even by 1992, F-Zero was not fit for purpose. It no longer achieved what Nintendo makes games for. Doing it again would not be impressive. Doing it again would not be novel. And the fact it’s easy to cram endless bullshit into Mario Kart is why that franchise keeps getting releases, while F-Zero collected dust - until they picked this online clusterfuck gimmick.
But the fact this retro game-as-a-service (ptoo!) couldn’t be arsed to include even one game’s whole level set, when each track must take less space than this comment, is baffling.
You defend Nintendo’s reasoning, I defend the consumer that doesn’t buy them for them being some weird tech demo for their underperforming hardware.