F-Zero GP Legend

SUMMARY:
It couldn't possibly be too long before F-ZERO found its way onto Nintendo's Game Boy Advance. The idea seems fantastic - it worked with four Machines on the SNES, so surely it can work with 30-odd Machines on the Game Boy Advance? Of course - but what about the precise controls required in the F-ZERO games? Having become both accustomed to and reliant on the precise control of the Analogue Stick in both F-ZERO X and F-ZERO GX, the idea of using an almost flat Directional Pad to steer an F-ZERO Machine made me wonder - could it actually work?

Somehow, it does - and it does so to a great extent. The Vehicle Sprites are so numerous and detailed and are numerous enough to create such smooth Sprite animations that you could honestly be forgiven for making the assumption that the game uses polygons. The Courses are incredibly detailed, and the slight lack of precision turning has been compensated for with certain Courses which are actually designed for the player to hit the edge a few times. To someone such as myself who is used to programming video-games using Sprites, this truly is a work of genius.

The game offers an extremely wide variety of challenges and difficulty levels, which honestly makes you wonder why they couldn't fit it all onto the Nintendo 64 Cartridge! The intense racing action of the Grand Prix Mode is of course present, along with a Gran Turismo-style Zero Training Area, a Practice Mode allowing you to play a race on any previously completed Course as any unlocked Machine in a 1-99 Lap Race with 0-29 CPU Machines - and you can decide to the unit on all of those options! There is also, as you may expect, a Link Option, allowing up to four Players with copies of the game to play a full race against each other, and a Single-Pak Link Option which allows a basic version of the main Link Mode to be played using only one game Cartridge and up to four Game Boy Advance Systems.

The game moreover follows the Anime of the same name rather than the actual game series storyline itself. As opposed to being set hundreds of years from now, it is set in around a couple of centuries' time (which creates a time paradox in the entire story of The Skull). Mute City is the place which was once New York (whether that means New York State or New York City is unclear, but probably New York State due to the size of Mute City), Octoman, Baba and others work for Black Shadow's Dark Million Organisation and Jody Summer is a cyborg.

The A Button is logically the Accelerator, and the B Button controls the only thing which F-ZERO X appears to lack - a manual brake! The R and L Triggers cause the Machine to slide in the relevant direction slightly, making turning easier, and holding both of them at once causes the Machine to activate its Booster, giving it a brief speed boost as long as the Booster has not been disabled. A unique Booster system causes the Booster to become disabled until the player collects more energy if the Machine takes a big enough hit at a low level of Energy. Using the buttons in combination with this system can produce some fantastic driving techniques.

The Story Mode focuses initially on newcomer Rick Wheeler, a Pilot with a strong rivalry against Super Arrow's arch-nemesis Zoda, but as the Story Mode progresses, the player will be able to unlock other Character Chapters for Characters including intergalactic pop singer Jack Levin, the main F-ZERO hero Captain Falcon, crazed under-rated villain Zoda and the necessary main feminine Character of the game Jody Summer.

All in all, F-ZERO GP Legend is a game which really proves what the Game Boy Advance is capable of, and shows that the original idea of using Sprites to create an illusion of polygons can be used so well with our more modern technology. As ever, it rams, crashes and Falcon Punches Sony's shameless rip-off WipEout clean off the Course. So, as Captain Falcon famously says - "Show me your moves!"