Why GX is the greatest racing game for game runners

So what makes F-Zero GX so great that I am still playing it to this day? Well first let me quickly go over the racing games that I played and truly enjoyed before GX.

In my pre-teen days I decided to ask for a Playstation over an N64 which was likely influenced due to my older cousins owning a PS themselves, letting me play their games and demos. Gran Turismo was the first amazing racing game that I played a ton due to its long campaign,  the great track designs and killer soundtrack. The other racing game I put in a ton of hours into is Crash Team Racing which deserves its own spotlight for sure. CTR for me is the GX of kart racing games in terms of its depth due to its power sliding and boost mechanic. And it has a fun aerial component too. So as you can see I was quite spoiled with amazing racing games from the get go.
Once I started playing GX shortly after its release, other than Mario Kart DS I never really bothered with time trialing any of those games for more than a few hours mainly because it was not very exciting. And I guess before I explain the design details and mechanics that makes me prefer GX, a big reason why I love GX is because it is simply cool, fast and stylish. I played some of the Need for Speed Underground games where nitrous boost was cool and I suppose edgy back then, so GX with its boost system was just my kind of thing. I liked watching racing series so driving at super high speeds with the ability to also be very precise in GX was gratifying and a huge rush for me.

I guess there are 3 main things about GX’s gameplay that makes it so great – The degree of control you have, its boost+energy mechanic and the limitless skill cap+rewarding you for getting better

In GX, not only you can do simple turns and drifts, you can strafe as well. That alone is huge, but its physics brought about a bunch of turning tech. Quick turn makes it possible to take nearly any corner at full speed. MTS let’s you go blazing fast through turns and can help with taking turns incredibly quickly and sharply too. When it comes to drift turns there’s nothing like performing a well-executed MTS with the king of MTSs, Quick Star G4. In GX you don’t need to slow down for most turns, it’s a matter of learning to speed through them without crashing. And while good racing lines do matter, it is not a requirement to do the same racing line to not lose out on time. There are several ways you can perform a turn and as long you don’t crash or take a super wide line, you’re good.

GX controls are super sensitive, many of the machines are incredibly responsive and turn sharply. And they lose its grip if you’re not careful while boosting. Hell some machines can lose grip easily even without boosting. It takes a while to get to grips with simply keeping your high-powered machine under control unless you use an easy to handle machine. But the game gives you the tools to make it possible to control such beasts even at full speed – Strafe prevents your machine from losing grip (as long you hold it down before you turn). Quick turning is the key technique for machine control, letting you take several smaller turns in a longer gradual turn once you’re proficient with it, giving you more control and a much less likelihood of unexpectedly losing grip. And if you do lose grip unexpectedly, simply release and re-hold the accelerator to quickly regain grip or simply counter steer and strafe.

Once you can handle your machine, you can navigate the course real fast. But its not as simple as only mashing the boost button. You only have 10 seconds of boost with a full energy meter. You have to keep your machine in the energy refill zone to regain energy, usually while boosting through it too. To set fast times you have to plan out how you will use your boost and execute. And you gotta not hit the wall too hard with little to no energy or you’re dead. You won’t always recover all of your energy on a refill zone (unless you’re going way too slow) and if you’re going fast you’ll recover less of it. Is that worth the trade off or is it better to recover more energy to get more boost? Or will the various tech such as shift boosts, MTS, MTS chaining, side attacks would let you get away with recovering less energy?

I can keep going, but this should be enough to give you an idea of how much the boost system in the F-Zero series adds to the depth and complexity of figuring out your strategy for the course. And as you get better you have more options open up with how you use your boost and how much energy you need to recover.

And this leads nicely to the last main point. Boosting in this game becomes more and more beneficial to you as you improve. And a quick note, your boosts and hitting dash plates stacks, meaning if you time your boosts well, you’ll be going faster as opposed to simply mashing it without MTing between each boost – yet another thing that contributes to the game’s sky high skill ceiling. Every time you improve, that will show in your lap times, when racing against your ghost and in your speedometer (which has a cap of 9999 that top players can surpass briefly, which unfortunately stops the machine). And there is so much to optimize in this game. When boosting, the more precisely you MT boost, the faster you’ll be going. Momentum Throttling is one of the few things you can optimize down to a few frames from being perfect, but it’s a very gradual process to get to that point. As your control improves you’ll be hitting the edge of the dash plate more often, taking better lines, performing skips that requires high speed, executing jumps faster. And then there’s still executing jumps/dives well, shift boosting, railslides, MTS chaining, utilizing side attacks both while airborne and on the ground… There is so much to learn that if you enjoy improving and noticing your progress every time you play, if you keep at it you will keep on improving for several years, even for over a decade. As the number 7 max speed player in the world, I have a lot of room left to improve still.

If you want to get a better idea of how much there is to the game, here's my 50+ page guide for just the max speed category of GX: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yy1bv_G-eI2f7a8whAHOhhULii9DPPtTzrBExWm5sFk/

The game is incredibly punishing too. The walls are no joke, hit the wall the wrong while you’re upside down or in a banked part of the track and you’ll fall to your death. It’s unforgiving and while it does sometimes feel unfair, it’s ultimately still fair because you can learn to avoid it. But at least the game can give you breaks with unexpected shift boosts. There’s a term for getting more speed than usual from a shift boost called double or triple shift boosts or super shift boosts. They usually cannot be gotten consistently but for some WRs its required to get enough of them. While the seemingly random variability and inconsistency of such shift boosts is off-putting, a skilled enough player has a chance of taking that lucky speed boost and converting it to a strong run or even a WR that would be very tough to beat. And if you’re the one who put in the hundreds and thousands of hours to become great at the game and to have good odds of pulling off a difficult strategy, and you pull off a great run with the <1% chance occurrence of that double SB or a suicide finish with that success rate, the relief and elation you’ll feel will likely be like nothing else you’ve ever experienced in your life.