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This is actually one of a very small handful of games I’ve physically owned longer than I’ve lived in Japan. I bought this game around a year or so before I ended up moving out here, and it’s the one American N64 game I kept when I moved. It wasn’t only because I hadn’t yet beaten it, but also because what I’d played of it was SO fun that I knew I’d want it for more play in the future (even if I could never ultimately beat it x3). After playing through all the other N64 racing games I’ve got, I figured it only made sense to finally see this one through to the credits as well. I think all I actually had to do to see the credits was to beat the Joker Cup on expert, but I didn’t realize that until too late, so whatever XD. It took me about 13.5 hours to beat all four standard cups on expert difficulty as well as the first two difficulties of the X Cup, and I did it on the American version of the game on real hardware.

As is the case with most racing games of the time, there’s no story here other than just being the best. There are a lot of hopefuls giving it their all to try and win an F-Zero grand prix in the far flung future, and you can be one of them! With four cups of six races each and 30 different races to choose from over four difficulty modes, this has one of the most robust amounts of content for any racing game of the console generation. If all that wasn’t enough for you, the game even has the X Cup unlocked after beating the Joker Cup on expert mode, and instead of pre-designed tracks, it’s a grand prix of six *procedurally generated* courses for you to race against! Due to the hardware limitations of the time, they’re generally pretty standard in their designs (lacking any jumps or such like the properly designed tracks have), but the sheer fact a feature like this exists at all is absolutely mind blowing for a game of this age (even if it leads to some pretty hilariously mean tracks at times XD).

As stated earlier, you’ve got 30 different racers to choose from with their own unique cars in tow. You’ve only got six racers unlocked at the start, but every 3 X’s you get in the grand prix mode will unlock you another six, and an X is earned for beating a particular cup on a new difficulty for the first time. This means that you won’t actually have all 30 to race as until you’ve beaten the four cups on their hardest default difficulties, but that doesn’t mean that the game has some crazy level of power creep or anything. A lot of the racers I used as my favorites ended up being in the first batch of six, and my personal favorite of Octoman is in the very first batch of unlocks. Trying out new racers as you unlock them to see if they work to your style is a really fun aspect of winning more races, but it thankfully doesn’t mean that you’ve got some impossible to overcome handicap until you’ve unlocked those later racers.

While you can adjust your desired ratio of max speed to acceleration before every race, these racers all have very meaningfully different aspects to them as well beyond just speed against acceleration. Every car has three letter grades representing their innate durability, boost power, and grip stats as well as a given weight. You’ll find a fair few cars with identical sets of letter grades, but it’s their weights that really set them apart beyond that. Lighter cars boast better acceleration, grip, boost power, and turning than their heavier counterparts, but not only can heavier cars reach a higher max speed (an essential win factor at high level play), but they can also bash their lighter opponents around far more easily. That said, even though the pro strats all revolve around using the heaviest cars to pull off really ridiculous techniques, lighter cars are still super viable for the single-player content, and most of my favorites were all the lightweights with high boost power (even if it meant I’d die a fair bit X3).

Heavier cars may seem like they’re getting the short end of the stick given all the benefits that lighter cars get over them, but that is far from the case. Bashing your opponents around is good in most racing games, of course, but it’s extra important in F-Zero. Unlike in something like Mario Kart where a helpful Lakitu will lift you back onto the track should you fall, F-Zero has no such helpers available. If you blow up or fly off the track, you lose a life/retry, and you have progressively less retries available to you on higher difficulties. For the human players in most other racing games, this would just mean that you need to play carefully and not fall off if you want to win, but F-Zero X has more up its sleeve than just that to encourage play that’s both fast *and* dangerous.

Your AI opponents can blow up too, and while you’ll lose a life when you die, they don’t get that benefit. A death for an AI means they get an automatic 0 points for that race, and that means that making sure your most skilled opponents simply don’t survive to the finish line can be just as viable and valuable a strategy as getting to the finish line before them. There were several clutch victories on higher difficulties that I only managed due to a skillful early elimination of an opponent far ahead of me in points, and few things feel better than seeing a racer doing better than you plumet in the rankings due to your skillful aggression. The game even has a “Death Race” mode where you race a simple loop against the 29 other racers and can practice how fast you can crash all of them without you yourself crashing X3. Mastering the ramming and spin attacks is very likely something you’ll find just as necessary as learning to drift and boost properly as you practice the various tracks (with the game’s very well put together practice and time attack modes).

Frankly, one of my favorite things about this game is that the other racers really felt like other racers, which is something I’ve found to be quite uncommon in this console generation. Even in contemporary anti-gravity racer Wipeout XL, I’ve found so many racing games of this era have your opponents act more like glorified speed bumps than actual characters. F-Zero X blasts this standard out of the water with opponents that vary a lot from prix to prix and race to race. You really do feel like you’re racing against 29 other racers in each race, and nothing else on the console compares. The excitement you get when you look at the end of race rankings and see that one of your main rivals (the person in first place standings is helpfully pointed out with “RIVAL” during races so you know whom is best to rough up at any given moment) managed to get messed up by other racers enough to crash without you even being a part of it just cannot be matched. The same thing goes for how fun it is to see the total amount of racers suddenly plumet mid-race due to a big pile-up on a thin section with no walls that you thankfully managed to survive. Managing to both stay on the track and stay in first is a type of game design familiar to basically any racing game, but F-Zero X takes this fundamental practice and refines it into an art form.

Like the original F-Zero, X has a shield mechanic where bumping into other racers or grinding against walls will drain your shields. Running out of shield means you’re gonna blow up, so running over the pink recharge pads each lap is essential to your vehicle’s health. However, X introduces a manual boost mechanic on top of that where you can press B to sacrifice shield power for a big boost of speed. When used in combination with how drifting and attacking other racers works in this game, it means the break button (which does technically exist, I was surprised to learn) is going to see very little use for most players. It also means that finding the right balance of durability and boost power is just as important as learning the track well, as a track where you’re losing less health to the walls means you’ve got that much more power to boost with!

This all led to a gameplay loop I found incredibly addicting. The sense of speed this game gives is so excellent, and this being one of the few N64 games that can boast 60 FPS gameplay on real hardware is a great boon to that as well. Cars handle phenomenally, and I spent a fair bit of time even after reaching the credits racing around on the procedurally generated courses just to revel in how fast this lets you go. The pre-built tracks are all great too, with each one offering a unique type of challenge in progressively more difficult ways (including a fairly close F-Zero recreation of Mario Kart 64’s Rainbow Road track). While most other racing games would struggle to actually provide polish alongside such a bevy of content, F-Zero X proves that it’s far from a universal rule that you’ve got to sacrifice quality for quantity.

The game is aesthetically very good as well. Being a futuristic racing game with hovering cars zooming around on tracks floating in mid-air, F-Zero X uses its conceit to actually reach that so often contemporarily missed 60 FPS gameplay. Aside from the skybox, there’s not much environment aside from the relatively simple tracks themselves and the other racers. It may be able to brag about texture detail or modeling work as snazzy as something like Ridge Racer Type 4, but the aesthetic is nonetheless managed for a great visual experience regardless. The simplicity of the graphics was honestly something I never even noticed until a friend pointed it out to me, and I chalk a lot of that up to just how well the game makes an aesthetic of the racers, the flying tracks, and the sense of speed. While you’ll get the rare brief frame dip here and there, the framerate is generally very consistent, and it makes the game feel that much better to play.

This also has one of the best soundtracks on the system, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t just mean good music either, but a truly great soundtrack because it just compliments the action so perfectly. The music in F-Zero X just feels incomplete to me without the sounds of the race alongside it, and I’m so convinced with that because any version of the OST I’ve listened to outside of the game has just never felt right no matter what I do. The music complements the gameplay perfectly, and I couldn’t imagine the game sounding any other way just like I couldn’t imagine it playing any other way.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. I’ve always loved this game, but the week I spent playing through it rocked it up from one of my favorite racing games to just one of my favorite games, full stop. The sense of speed, the music, the graphics, the other racers, the tracks: Everything adds up to an experience I have a hard time calling anything but perfect for me. A lot like Star Fox 64, I don’t really see the need to even try making any more games in this series because we already hit as perfect as we’re going to get back in the 90’s. I don’t think I ever expected to find an action game, let alone a racing game, in my adult life that gave me such a raw, unadulterated surge of fun like this game does. While I’m not going to guarantee that you’ll get the same amount of fun from this game as I did, I can still heartily recommend you try this game out if you’re a fan of racing games. You don’t even need to worry about a save battery going dead and ruining your unlock progress, because there’s a simple code you can input on the main menu to just unlock everything from the start if you want! Even if it won’t be a new all time favorite for you like it was for me, I bet you’ll still have a pretty damn awesome time regardless~.

After playing through so many FPS games of this console generation over the past few months in an effort to see how bad they got, there was no way I could just pass over one this infamous. It took me a while to find a copy, which is why I played it so long after the other ones, but I “thankfully” eventually did! XD. It took me around 4.5 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on normal mode on real hardware looking fairly actively for collectibles (for reasons beyond mere achievement hunting that I’ll get more into later on XD).

Homefront is the story of Jacobs, a former pilot in the US military. In the far flung future of 2027 (this game came out in 2011), America is a very dire place. The dollar has been made near worthless, and the American military is a shadow of its former strength after more than a decade of misfortune, conflict, and rebalancing of world powers. The peak beneficiary of all of this has been North Korea, who has become a global superpower in the midst of all of this thanks to the clever maneuvering of their new premier, Kim Jong-Un. Several years earlier, the North Koreans set off an EMP over the US and invaded. The United States is currently split in half at the Mississippi River with the American government barely holding on to the eastern states and the western half all under occupation of the Korean People’s Republic. Broken out of a prison camp and pulled into a resistance movement, Jacobs and his fellow freedom fighters work to turn the tide against the invaders and cast them back to where they came from.

You’re likely already at least relatively familiar with this game by reputation alone, but I doubt that you, prospective reader, have much trouble seeing the potentially problematic elements of a story with this kind of setup XD. A lot of modern military shooters of the PS3/360 era have an issue with being varying levels of pro-military and/or pro-western/American hegemony propaganda, but I don’t think any other comes close to being nearly this explicit about it. Those collectibles I hunted for so much are newspaper clippings detailing various headlines from the previous 20 years of history of the game’s world. They were so invaluable in seeing deeper and deeper into the psyche of the writers of this game that I just couldn’t pass up any opportunity to potentially find another. Even though I only found a little over half of them (33 out of 61), that was more than enough to be jaw-dropping XD

The game’s actual narrative is already pretty astounding in the boldness with which it makes its various assertions. Jacobs is a silent protagonist and, for all intents and purposes, more of a cameraman than a real character. The real main characters are Rianna and Conner, the two who rope you into the resistance in the first place. Rianna’s job, narratively speaking, is to be an emotional woman voicing opposition to the awful things the men and such in the story do. Any opposition to killing fellow Americans, war crimes the resistance does, carelessness for human life in general, that stuff is all voiced by her first and foremost.

Conner’s job, as a result, is to shoot down and explain away all of her concerns. He is the macho, Asian-hating white man who we get to see be unquestionably right no matter how awful the things he does are. He spits racist one-liners, he shouts the North Korean-specific created racial slur of the setting, and he explains why the horrid war crime of dropping white phosphorous on KPR soldiers is apparently totally unproblematic (because they were going to use them on the Americans in the first place, so doing the war crime first ourselves apparently absolves us of any wrongdoing in the logic of the game).

Your actions throughout the game combined with the game’s backstory and those newspaper clippings paint a rightwing worldview unusual even for the time in just how brazenly racist it is. We are repeatedly shown and even explicitly told that the United States military’s efforts to digitize, it’s endeavors to leave defense to local allies instead of actively being the world police, and even pulling out of the middle east (which at the time of the game’s publishing was still nowhere close to happening) are all negative things that have led directly to the awful state of the world we currently find ourselves in.

It paints a picture of America as a place the world, particularly Asia, is hatefully jealous of to the point of nigh everything the North Koreans doing seems to have been done in service of taking America down. From peacefully uniting the Korean peninsula, to a violent conquest of Japan to strong-arming most of Southeast Asia into a federated military economic alliance with itself at the top, everything Kim Jong-Un exists to do, seemingly, is to make the Americans suffer. Leaving out how incredibly laughable that it is that neither America nor China are included in the diplomatic end to the Korean War in this setting, it’s even more hilarious that China is never even mentioned a single time in this game’s narrative (no doubt due to the fact that China was the original antagonist of the game and the authors just Control-Replaced “China” with “North Korea” when putting together the game’s final script).

Truly, the authors of this game can imagine no other reason for any world power, no matter how big or small, to hate America other than “They hate us for our freedom”. It’s a level of delusional about the state of the world and how it operates that it’s difficult to even begin building a counterargument against it because they are just so fundamentally wrong that you don’t know where or how to start. I’ll admit that this is not completely unique in being so incredible pro-military/western hegemony among FPS games from this era (games like Killzone are similarly brazen with their worldbuilding and storytelling as well as with slinging around their created racial slur, for example), but just how little subtlety this game has with it is really worth remarking upon. As pro-America and racist as games like Call of Duty: Black Ops or Modern Warfare 2 are, they’d blush in the face of just how downright Homefront is of its commitment to American supremacy.

In a wild twist of irony, in terms of being a game to play, this is far from the worst FPS game of this time that I’ve played through (at least for how their PS3 ports are concerned). The mechanics are very straightforwardly a Call of Duty clone. From how lying prone works to the control layout and even the way your aim snaps to enemies when you tap the button to aim down sights, this is a pretty well done recreation of how Infinity Ward usually did their CoD games in this era. It even has near-future stuff and vehicle set-pieces that feel like they were torn right from some undiscovered, mediocre Call of Duty game of the time. Compared to some 2011 contemporary like Battlefield 3, I’d much prefer the way this game plays and is balanced. The level design is nothing to write home about, but it all plays solidly enough to provide decent fun. I’m also not sure if it’s just how the game is balanced on normal difficulty, but, my gods, it was so satisfying to have a game where an LMG actually *felt* like it had the stopping power an LMG should have XD

That’s the design, at least. In terms of the actual performance on the PS3, this game is totally unacceptable despite being at the end of its support lifespan, so I shudder to imagine how bad it was at launch. This game is pretty darn short with only 7 20~30-ish missions, and that’s even with me dying a decent bit in the earlier parts of the game due to not being careful. That said, at least one hour of that 4.5-hour completion time is down to the FIVE times the game just froze up and crashed out of nowhere. It seems like the game has a bug where it’ll visibly hitch when new enemies/things are being loaded in, and sometimes it just doesn’t escape those hitches and freezes instead.

I’m certainly glad that it didn’t crash the console as hard as CoD: Black Ops 2 did where the PS3 had to do a system check after each time, but this is still an absurd crash rate for a game on set hardware specs like a console. This is about the same amount the infamously poorly optimized Kane & Lynch 2 crashed when I played through it a couple years back, and that at least had the excuse of being a PC game I was playing in online co-op. Regardless, this game’s performance is absolutely dreadful. The framerate hitches constantly and it’s pretty low in general, and it makes the whole experience way worse to play than it already is with the atrocious story. All that said, I’d *still* say this is not the worst running and playing PS3 FPS game I’ve played (Battlefield 3 and 4 played pretty bad and had some pretty awful bugs too), but that’s nothing but damning with faint praise.

The game is aesthetically fine if not uninspired. It’s a modern military shooter from 2011, so the color palette is largely drab greys and browns. It may’ve looked alright at the time, but a “realistic” approach to graphics like this has just not aged well, and the poor framerate and texture pop-in isn’t doing it any favors either. The technical problems are a far greater sin than any chunky graphics in this day and age. The one pretty solid spot I’ll point out is the music. There are some pretty good parts of the OST that play during combat sometimes. The licensed music tracks are kinda profoundly distasteful (like the one that plays at the white phosphorous bit), but at least the guy putting together the original songs was earning their paycheck well, for whatever that’s worth <w>

Verdict: Not Recommended. I’m not sure what more I need to say at this point if you’re somehow surprised by this verdict at the end here XD. This game plays alright, I guess, but there is no small amount of CoD games that play better, run better, and are very importantly written far better than this that you can go back and play through the campaign of these days. This game has a horrific reputation, and it absolutely deserves it. While I haven’t played enough games from this era to comfortably say it’s *the* worst FPS game of the console generation, it’s at the very least near the top of that list. I’d say it’s almost worth picking up for a buck like I did if you just have the perverse curiosity to see what it’s like, as was the case with me, but with how badly it runs and how often it crashes, I’d say you’re probably better off just watching a longplay instead so you can view the tedium from a safe distance XP

I’m a huge fan of the original Ape Escape trilogy. Especially in regards to the PS2 entries, they’re easily some of the best platformers of that console generation. The spin-offs, however, are pretty hit and miss. I played through most of the other console ones a few years back, and I found the Japan-exclusive Piposaru 2001 to be decidedly lacking in terms of polish compared to any of the other console games I’d played. Million Monkeys, however, was a delightfully wacky and super hype game that felt like a combo of EDF, Ape Escape, and Red Alert between the weird gameplay and live action cutscenes for the story. This game, as it so happens, was a game I’d written off a long time ago because I’d heard it was just some mini-game collection and nothing like the proper numbered Ape Escape titles on the PS2. However, after I enjoyed the heck out of Million Monkeys and learned that this was its direct mechanical predecessor, I just had to finally track this down and play it. It took me a few years to actually get around to sitting down and finishing the thing, but now I finally have XD. It took me around 3.5 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on normal difficulty with the Saru Team on real hardware.

The story of the game is pretty light and only told over the course of a few cutscenes between events. A big digital world has been opened up by a close friend of the Professor, and he’s taken Natsumi and Kakeru (and even the digital computer girl Charu) inside of it to check it out! There’s also a big tournament on with a big trophy prize waiting for the one who can win the most events, and Kakeru & Co. are eager to enter themselves and test their mettle. It’s not just them, however. There’s also the returning champion of last tournament, Haruka, as well as Specter’s mischievous monkeys and the mysterious Pipotrons all gunning for the top spot too. It’s up to you to pick a character/team and go for the gold (and maybe just save the world while you’re at it :b).

It's a bit long in tooth for what it is, but it’s a perfectly fine setup for the action at hand. The Japanese voice acting is great as usual, and the whole thing just makes me wish this were a more fleshed out experience rather than a console version of an arcade game (which Million Monkeys effectively is, in a sense). The real reason to check the story mode out (or look up the cutscenes online, at least) are the live action cutscenes that some characters get. There are a couple “Intermission” videos that will play between some of the early events in the story mode.

Most characters get in-game ones of varying types, but a few characters like the Piposaru and Saru Team (a dedicated team of 5 different members of Specter’s monkeys) get quite long vignettes of the monkeys just messing around in real life locations (trying to learn sword fighting or some kind of dance). They’re really well produced and delightfully campy fun. They have a real Super Sentai level of silliness to the exaggerated expressions and the giant costumes the “monkeys” in them wear, and I was honestly really bummed there were only two of them in the playthrough I did.

The gameplay is a bit weird to describe, but it’s the kind of thing that makes immediate sense once you actually play it. This is a sort of multiplayer mini-game collection where you have a series of 3 or 4 events and you get a certain amount of points for winning, and each section of the tournament has a point quota you need to hit to pass to the next round. There are various events (tank fights, boat races, coin-collecting contests, foot-races, and even just battles to the death) that utilize various machines or gadgets from Ape Escape, and it plays more or less exactly how those machines and tools work in Ape Escape 2. There aren’t quite as many tools for the non-vehicle based ones as there are in Ape Escape 2, mercifully, with only the bat, RC car, helicopter, super hoop, and slingshot appearing here, but you get to pick which 4 of the 5 (not a very heavy choice) you want to take into any given mission and then use them as you see fit.

A fairly cool thing is that each character actually has different versions of each of these tools and they play very differently as a result. Kakeru has the bat, hoop, and everything just like he does in the game, but a lot of characters play super differently due to just how different their weapons operate, such as the Saru Team having a short-range but quick attacking boxing glove instead of a bat). It also seemed like each character/team had different attack, defense, and speed stats, but I couldn’t confirm that in the manual. All I could confirm is that each character/team’s particular tank, boat, or general vehicle has different stats to one another. At the very least, it certainly felt like my monkeys took a lot more damage than everyone else, so it very much felt like I picked one of the worst teams with how quickly we died and how slow we were XD.

I say “character/team” as well because there are various teams in addition to the characters. The Pipotrons, for example, have different strengths between the three of them, and the Saru Team’s five monkeys do as well (such as the sunglasses monkey having a much better gun than the rest, just like he does in the normal Ape Escape games). The game admittedly doesn’t feel terribly balanced, and I’d be very unsurprised to learn that there’s a truly optimal best character or team. Thankfully, though, the AI on the CPUs for normal mode aren’t too aggressive, so you shouldn’t have a terrible amount of trouble on even the 1 v 2 matches they start throwing you into on the later parts of the game.

As short as the game is and as neat as the design aspects are, however, I still found things getting terribly monotonous even by the halfway point. There aren’t many event types, and the different courses and difficulties just aren’t enough to keep things fresh, and that’s especially true with how often you’re going back to the same stages over and over again. The foot-races/obstacle courses are the most dull with a lot of later ones lasting over 5 minutes (with some of those being auto-scrollers, so you couldn’t hurry it up even if you wanted to), but it’s a problem no event is totally free from.

The last man standing battles are close to the most fun, as it’s neat switching so quickly between bat, speed hoop, and gun for bashing each other until your health runs out, but the controls for these sections just kinda suck. Ape Escape’s controls just do not really suit themselves for this kind of gameplay, and keeping the camera in a place you can see it is very frustratingly difficult given the awkward way aiming your gun and weapons work in Ape Escape. Sure, there are some cool boss fights after every couple of parts of the tournament, but they’re so bogged down by the awkward controls that they don’t really help things out that much. It’s overall a solid enough game, but it’s probably better used as a party game rather than something to buy solely for the single-player experience (which makes sense for something like this that began life as an arcade game, I suppose).

Aesthetically, the game is quite nice. The music isn’t quite on the level of the normal Ape Escape games for me (sans the incredible vocal tracks some of the live action videos have), but it’s still good for what it is. The graphics also go for an almost-chibi-fied cell-shaded look that really sets these apart from the more pastel-styled normal Ape Escape games. It’s a nice look, but it’s definitely not my favorite for the series to look compared to something even crazier like Million Monkeys or even just how Ape Escape 2 or 3 look.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This game isn’t really bad, but it’s more a case of “who is this really for?”. It’s a novel enough idea, but I think “action-party game that borrows the mechanics of Ape Escape exactly” is ultimately a bit too niche an idea for most people to really care about it. On top of that, the amount of content on offer isn’t poorly produced, sure, but it’s also a bit too repetitive and light to offer much of a recommendable single-player experience either. If you’re a big fan of Ape Escape then this might be worth checking out for you, but if you’ve ever felt hesitation about trying this one out (as I did), then my time with the game has mostly just proven that that hesitation was entirely justified ^^;