When F-Zero was birthed, it was created to give the Super Nintendo a racing title that showed off the full extent of the Super Nintendo's power. This was during the old Console Cold War with Sega, as I like to call it, when the Genesis and its "blast processing" in Sonic the Hedgehog was touted as the new standard. However, Nintendo's EAD team, led by Shigeru Miyamoto, created more than that: they created a fun racing experience that was easily translatable across any future Nintendo console.

Eventually, that was the case. But what keeps me coming back to the F-Zero monster is its difficulty. Its sadistic, wicked, depraved, diabolical, tormenting and agonizing difficulty and my quest to overcome it.

The whole thing started, of course, with the original F-Zero on the Super Nintendo. Released in 1991, made use of Mode 7 graphics, brought us the entire genre of futuristic racing games, and gave us the first glimpse to a dark, twisted side of Shigeru Miyamoto and his EAD crew. F-Zero was nothing we'd ever seen before, in terms of graphics, genre and course design. Silence's testing right turns. Piloting Death Wind II's left-right chicanes amid howling winds that shoved your racer into the wall. Port Town's magnets that pulled you into the wall. Red Canyon II's "super jump". White Land I and II's grip-free zones that felt like ice. F-Zero was a game that threw its very best at you, things you'd never seen before and were expected to fall to. However, if you were good enough, none of these insane obstacles could get in your way.

That was... until you reached Fire Field.



Perhaps the most heinous race course ever created in the history of mankind, Fire Field was the final course in the original F-Zero game, designed with one goal in mind: to make the game utterly unbeatable. More than a twisting mass of hairpins and sharply angled corners, Fire Field threw everything the game had at you. From the mine-layered front stretch to a double hairpin switchback you could only get through at high speed by bouncing off the walls, Fire Field was a savage beast. It was created by Nintendo's EAD unit simply so they could laugh at your failure and taste the bitter tears of your total defeat. Most of all, it helped set the standard for every F-Zero game that came after it: no free rides.

As if the last course was not insane enough, F-Zero had a second trick up its sleeve to keep you from victory: the ranking system. Each lap, the little rank counter on your HUD ticked downwards, indicating the lowest you could finish each lap. If you failed to finish at that spot or higher, you lost your machine and had to go all the way back to the beginning of the race. This ensured that if you struggled on a course because it was "too hard," you would probably never get past that course. That is exactly what it did to me on Fire Field when I was younger and what it does to me today. I did eventually get revenge on Fire Field in F-Zero Climax, but by then, the ranking system had been done away with and I finished in 8th place on the course. I have never beaten the original, and I'm starting to doubt I ever will.



F-Zero X seemed different from the outside. More racers, a slightly easier learning curve... it didn't feel like an F-Zero game. That was, until you dug in to find the sick surprises EAD placed in the game. White Land II, for example, had gone from being slip-sliding around on sharp corners to slip-sliding around at 700 mph inside of a greased-up halfpipe. It wasn't uncommon to watch half the computer racers drop out on this course, even on the highest difficulty. Or how about Big Hand's lack of rails along the thinnest parts of the track? Or the fact that the X Cup featured randomly-generated tracks that sometimes had sharp turns over jumps, causing you to fly off the track completely? Oh, and if you went too fast, the game ripped your F-Zero racer off the track and slammed it into the ground below, just to be a dick about it. It may not have been as devilishly difficult as the original, but F-Zero X was still a terrible pain in the ass. This time around, I managed to beat F-Zero X completely.



Having learned from their mistake in F-Zero X, EAD and Sega's Amusement Vision team conspired to pay the loyal Nintendo racing fan back. The demon spawn born of this marriage is my favorite racing game of all time, F-Zero GX. While I love the game's graphics and sense of speed, I detest the difficulty it throws at me in its Story Mode. This is, without a doubt, what anyone speaks of when they complain about this game being difficult. Not the twisting, chaotic design of Slim-Line Slits. Not the ruthless A.I. in Grand Prix Mode's higher difficulties. This is the one part of GX I have not finished, and the one part I'm beginning to doubt I will ever conquer.

To begin with, the game's lowest difficulty is normal. There is no easy mode for your pansy little ass. However, for your masochist side, there are hard and very hard difficulties, where the slightest slip up forces you to start all over again. Perfection is demanded, perhaps because this is the only way to unlock the bonus drivers without hunting down a F-Zero AX machine and playing it 10 times to get every machine. I have, to date, fully beaten five of the ten challenges, which range from trying to run a fast lap while collecting capsules on the track or navigating a large vent, complete with pillars and closing blast doors that leave no room for error. The temptation to unlock the other five racers makes me want to keep pressing onward, but the difficulty of taking down these challenges on very hard has me stopped in my tracks.

While other racing games like Mario Kart, Gran Turismo, GRID and Forza have come and gone as I have beaten them, F-Zero lives on as the one racing series I love because it is the one racing series I cannot seem to beat. I think of it as mutual respect between both sides; Nintendo recognizing my desire for a challenge, and me recognizing that Nintendo has delivered on that challenge. It's fully likely that by the time the challenge goes away from the current crop of F-Zero games, a new one will be out, ready to torture my poor gaming soul all over again.

And I can't wait for it to happen.