"I just died and went to racing heaven"

This is a little belated as far as news goes, but Monster Games, the team that made Excite Truck, is “nearly complete” on their next Wii game. Apparently it’s been in the works for about 2 years already. Their new project is under quite the “hush hush”, as they are dimming their monitors down when the water guy comes to drop off his latest batch of life juice. The obvious answer would be Excite Truck 2, but would that really require such secrecy? Seeing as how the company only seems to have racing games under its belt, speculation (and another year old rumor) points to Monster possibly working on a new F-Zero game.

As my bio page shows, F-Zero GX is my favorite racing game of all time. Also, I’m a huge fan of the series as a whole. In fact, the only F-Zero game I haven’t played is the add-on for the 64DD. I have even played F-Zero AX (Arcade), F-Zero 2 (Satellaview SNES add-on) and F-Zero Climax (Japan Only GBA). Because I hold the series in such high regard, the development possibly being in Monster’s hands, despite actually really liking Excite Truck, leaves me with some mixed feelings.

Though I don’t give numerical scores in my reviews, if I did I would definitely give F-Zero GX a “perfect 10″. Not the kind of score I ever see attributed to racing games, but it’s just that good. The amount of polish this game has is simply incredible. Graphically, its one of the best looking GameCube games out there.

Nintendo handed the development over to Sega, or more specifically Amusement Vision, for the next entry in the beloved futuristic racer series. This marked the first time in history Nintendo and Sega worked together on a project. The results were fantastic. Sega brought a lot of great things to the table. They were able to expand on the physics engine of their Super Monkey Ball series to make a really great feeling racer. Also, a large portion of the soundtrack was made by Sega’s Hidenori Shoji, who I often refer to as “The Freakin’ Man.” In other words, I love this guy’s stuff. Using a high energy Rock/Electronica hybrid style, I don’t think I could ask for a more appropriate soundtrack to accompany the gameplay. And there is so much of it, coming out at a whopping 82 tracks, all of which have very high production values.

This game is bursting with content. The standard Grand Prix mode has 26 unique tracks spanning 4 difficulty levels. Sure, some of the tracks are on the same planet, but unlike games like Need for Speed, every one of these tracks are built from the ground up; no re-used turns. There are over 30 different crafts to pilot. If you aren’t satisfied with that, you can use parts and actually build your own as well. You can even draw emblems and put them on the various parts of your custom craft. There’s also a story mode (with 3 difficulty levels) and, though the actual story is laughable, each of the levels in it are a unique track (not part of the other 26) made specifically for that mission with a special objective. It’s a lot of fun and a real challenge (even harder than Grand Prix mode).

But all that would be nothing without that sweet, sweet core gameplay. F-Zero GX is the most fair racing game I have ever played. One of my biggest pet peeves with this genre is when playing Grand Prix. There are so many games where, if you don’t get first place, that same guy always will. This is not the case in GX. There are 30 crafts on the track at the start, each have their AI setup and ANYTHING can happen. The CPU isn’t afraid to actually destroy the crafts of other CPU. Unlike Mario Kart, every time I have lost in F-Zero GX, I knew it was my own fault for simply not driving well enough.

Now, back to Monster Games. Let me start by saying I bought Excite Truck with my Wii and still throw it in once in awhile. It’s a really good launch game. The turning can be a bit hard to handle sometimes, but the wide open tracks more than make up for it. The game itself is loads of fun. However, it seems to lack polish. I attribute a lot of that to the fact that it is a launch game. I’m sure if they had more time to work on it before releasing it, they could have made it even better. But Monster Games is only made of about 20 people. Amusement Vision is made of about 60, 3 times that of Monster. F-Zero GX left very large shoes to fill for a sequel, and I’m just not sure that Monster Games would be up to it. Takaya Imamura, who worked on the F-Zero series both past and present, even stated, “Having worked on the F-Zero series, and seeing the results of the collaboration with Sega, I found myself at something of a loss as to how we can take the franchise further past F-Zero GX and AX.”

I consider this to be “The Ocarina of Time of racers.” How do you actually surpass this game in a sequel, with a team a third the size of its predecessor? I’m just not sure it can be done. I really want a new F-Zero (obviously), but I also want it to be done right. It will be interesting to see whether or not Monster Games’ new Wii project is in fact F-Zero, Excite Truck 2, or something entirely different altogether.

Tags: Amusement Vision, f-zero, f-zero gx, gamecube, Monster Games, Nintendo, racing, Sega, Wii

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.