| F-Zero Climax review |
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“There’s another racer on your tail!” the omni-annoying announcer blurts as the tiny hover ship boosts straight into a wall and six beautifully rendered ships zip past at over a thousand km/h. Certainly one of F-Zero Climax's more frustrating moments and one which can't be wholly attributed to a little thumb trouble.
Climax is the third outing for Nintendo’s futuristic racing franchise on the GameBoy Advance, which is at odds with the normal drip-feed of updates and improvements associated with Nintendo and the franchise. Why a third game? Perhaps the answer lies in the F-Zero anime from which this and the second GBA game borrow their art style and story elements. Or perhaps Climax is trying to follow the success of Sega’s arcade and GameCube interpretations. Whatever Nintendo’s intention, the end result is a Paula Radcliffe of a game that has winning potential but fails to deliver.
That’s not to say the racing in Climax is poor - far from it; the AI is impressively aggressive and the courses sufficiently complex to provide a really meaty challenge. The now familiar slide and spin attacks are carried over from previous F-Zero’s, which will please budding Dick Dastardlys. One subtle change is that boost pads now increase speed by only a fixed amount instead of accelerating the racer to a maximum velocity. The problem is that the combat elements and the change to the boost pads don’t sit comfortably with the tight twisty circuits found in Climax. and whilst pilot error nurtures practice and improvement, the hollow feeling of being nudged into a wall by an opponent resulting in five seconds of bouncing around the track whilst a quarter of the field flash past only nurtures frustration and an urge to switch to the comprehensive time trial mode.
As with all racing games handling and control are critical factors and in this regard Climax is a resounding success. Offering a number of cornering techniques to the player using a combination of boost, slide, drift and turning, Climax lets the player figure out just how to use these to negotiate the sweeping bends and chicanes with the various handling characteristics of the ships adding a further dimension. Sadly the ship-edit feature has been dropped from this version, meaning players will have to get used to the preset handling models on offer. However all the handling subtlety in the world can’t save the game from its biggest faults: the very limited draw distance and the absence of any trackside objects to act as markers. It’s nearly impossible to hit the ideal line relying solely on visual information and courses need to be played repeatedly to get their rhythm memorised. It would have been better if the admittedly impressive graphics had been toned down a little to allow the peppy GBA processor to give a better view of the track.
Assuming the draw distance, frustrating combat elements and the god-awful commentator don’t deter prospective buyers, there is one final reason to think twice before investing in Climax; the spectre of the aptly named survival mode. It is perhaps the ultimate test of will power and patience, featuring what seems like a never-ending sequence of challenges in what must be one of the most stillborn game modes of all time. What’s worse is it’s a mode which can’t be ignored, as completing a series of challenges in survival mode unlocks storyboards, character profiles and crucially extra characters and ships that can be used in the rest of the game. Survival ‘challenges’ (if that is the right word to use) consist of short races, braking tests, slalom sections, drag races and a number of other quirky little objectives which are fun to play once or twice. The killer is; Climax forces the player to complete the same challenge series in the same order using every available character. It’s just mind-numbingly dull.
Now just for one moment, pretend that all of this is just a horrible nightmare, a figment of the imagination that never actually happened. It’s a good job then that Climax has one very neat trick to shut out all its wretchedness and silence the naysayers. In fact it’s a trick that is so neat it’s an F-Zero fan's wet dream. Climax features a fully functional course editor… any readers still on the brink after this orgasmic news better get the Kleenex at the ready, because not only does it allow players to design their own sick and twisted tracks, but up to thirty of them can be saved to the cart, raced against friends via linkup and better still, shared through a password system. A quick search of the internet reveals a number of F-Zero sites that have embraced this feature and already the warped creations of ardent fans are available for sampling.
The course-edit feature is enough to save the game from its faults, but only just. Its inclusion is a masterstroke and one which fans will be insisting on for the next F-Zero instalment. Hopefully Nintendo can atone for the sins committed in Climax and win back those who feel betrayed by what must be the last F-Zero game on the GameBoy Advance platform. |
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System: Nintendo GameBoy Advance
Genre: Racing
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Players: 1-4
Version: Japan
Reviewed: Jan 2005
Writer: Trevor Bradbury
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Pros:
- Course editor is a brilliant inclusion
- Good A.I.
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Cons:
- Pathetically weak survival mode
- Combat elements don’t work well on the narrow GBA tracks
- Lack of draw distance and trackside detail makes judging turns more a test of rhythm and memory than skill
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