BS F-Zero Grand Prix

BS F-Zero Grand Prix is the official and widely forgotten sequel to Nintendo's 1990 futuristic racer, F-Zero. It was released as a Japanese exclusive for the Satellaview, Nintendo's peripheral that it joint produced with radio broadcasting subsidiary St. GIGA. It's noted that this sequel would have been canceled had it not been for this unique add-on to the Super Famicom, which saw an opportunity to put a major Nintendo IP onto its platform that mostly consisted of bite-sized board games and magazines. BS F-Zero Grand Prix feels less like a true sequel to the original F-Zero and more like a technical display of what the Satellaview was capable of, remixing the best parts of the original game into a broadcast aiming for players to play alongside others in real time.The game came out in four different waves, with each wave featuring a different league. Each league would consist of five courses; four of these courses would be recycled from the original F-Zero, and the final course would be brand new to the Satellaview version.

Satellaview allowed a satellite broadcast to communicate with Super Famicom systems, allowing users to download data and display it on their consoles. Broadcasting typically included digital magazines to view, games to play, and high-quality voice/audio data that could be streamed simultaneously with the game you were playing or magazine you were reading (this feature was called SoundLink). SoundLink features were limited to certain time slots in the day, just like how certain TV shows are broadcast to channels at certain times in the day. Data for games and magazines could be physically downloaded to the chip through the broadcasting system, which is how we have access to the BS F-Zero roms today. Booting up the Satellaview would greet the player with an RPG-looking BIOS called BS-X: The Town Whose Name Was Stolen. The player could earn and spend in-came currency, talk to NPCs about current and upcoming Satellaview events, and within the weeks of December 29th, 1996 to January 24th, 1997, board a big ass floating vehicle resembling the Blue Thunder, one of the in-came cars.

Through the gift of ROM dumping and a dedicated Satellaview community, it's possible to play BS F-Zero Grand Prix through any modern SNES emulator – just add a community-made patch to the game to bypass the title screen that would otherwise lock you in, and you're free to play the game in its entirety. The SoundLink audio features are unfortunately not available, but every track has functional in-game audio and sound effects (the same tracks as the original F-Zero). All four leagues with SoundLink have also been captured on video and uploaded to YouTube, so if you're interested in hearing the higher quality track audio (ripped from the F-Zero jazz arrangements album) as well as the eccentric commentary from Japanese voice actors Bucky Koba, Tsutomu Tareki, and Seiichi Hirai, it has thankfully been preserved.

In regards to its story, BS F-Zero Grand Prix seems to be an exact retelling of the original game. This game came with no additional cutscenes or comic books, but as the game loaded up each week, the announcer would give a brief elevator pitch for the game's premise (the year is 2560, billionaires wanted to create an exciting league, winning the Grand Prix is one of the most prestigious titles in the galaxy, etc). There are four new playable vehicles in this game, replacing the four originals, and although each week featured a vehicle in its opening segment (its pros and cons, as well as which stages to use it in), there's no additional lore here – the names of the drivers aren't even presented. Perhaps a bit of a missed opportunity, but if this really was a canceled formal sequel to F-Zero, maybe the development team just didn't get to adding new story elements, and they shipped it out to the Satellaview as-is.

Each league comes out to about 59 minutes in length; in that time, the player would get an introductory block from the announcers briefly overviewing each stage (such as obstacles and turns to look out for). From there, the player gets three minutes to practice each stage (with unlimited Super Jets) before getting a staggering six minutes to race each course in its entirety. This time was clearly stretched out so the game would fit an hour-long block, but considering courses in the original game took a third of that time to finish, I get how it could feel like a slog to play through. However, this actually turns out to be BS F-Zero's best feature. To make the SoundLink component of the game playable, players can race with infinite lives and restarts for those six minutes – if you crash out or rank out, the race will simply start over. The only meaningful metric this time around is your fastest lap; after you've raced all five courses, your fastest lap for each course will be added up, and you'll get your summed league time. At this point, players had the option to submit this time, along with their opinions on the game, to St. GIGA for a chance to have ghost data in the game's follow-up, BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2. With all of this, I found the most enjoyable way to play BS F-Zero was to spend time setting each course up so I'd be able to have as perfect of a single lap as possible. This meant I could spend the first couple minutes of each race intentionally driving into mines and stacking up my Super Jets so when the time came, I could unleash 3 boosts in a single lap with no obstacles. If you ranked out your progress would start over (you'd come back with no Super Jets, and all of the mines would be restored). I had a great time trying to set myself up for the fastest lap I could manage, and that one lap I'd get with three boosts was badass.

The original F-Zero is infamous for its slippery, pinball-esque mechanics, and BS F-Zero seems to double down on them in its vehicle selection for some reason. To start, the Blue Thunder sucks. It takes so long to accelerate (giving me flashbacks of the original game's Fire Stingray), but I honestly couldn't find anything this car does better than the others to compensate for that. It certainly didn't have the insane top speed that the Stingray is known for. The Luna Bomber is terrible too. I originally thought this would be my go-to because the turning is almost as tight as the Stingray’s, but the drifting is insanely slippery and it barely has any health. The Fire Scorpion’s turning is better than the other two options, but like its original counterpart it's not very good at accelerating. The turning is just slippery enough to make driving this thing annoying, making this a dollar store Fire Stingray to me. For a measly 13km/h faster than the Amazone at its top screen, there’s no instance where this thing really comes out on top. The Green Amazone was my go to racer for this game. It’s got the crazy fast acceleration and recovery like the Golden Fox but seems to handle the best out of all of the vehicles too. Its downside is it’s super light and gets knocked all over the place if hit, but every car has its weakness. It’s also got the lowest top speed out of the 4, capping out at 450. This is clearly the best of the four racers in this game, and after using this for Fire Field, I'd consider the Amazone my favorite F-Zero SNES car in general.

BS F-Zero Grand Prix by no means advanced the series to new heights, but I still really enjoy that we got to see a remixed version of the original game. Playing this game with no stress from the CPU is honestly a nice breather from the original game (I still have nightmares about master mode on the original). Now that we have F-Zero 99, this game's existence is more important than ever as it was the series' first stab at making an online competition – the technology just wasn't there yet in the 90's. I had honestly considered ranking this game higher than the original considering how much I enjoyed playing with the Green Amazone, but the game has even less content than the first – there's no practice mode outside of the baked-in, required three minute races at the beginning of each Grand Prix league. In that regard this game's kind of like a water slide - you have to ride it all the way through the way the developers intended. This game is fun and important in its on right, but I just don't see it sitting above the SNES original.