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FAST Racing Neo

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So i've been looking to find F-Zero's replacement goldfish for a long, long time, and this might be the closest i've ever come to having a satisfactory one.

 

Here, have a trailer:

 

 

So it's worth pointing out that this game is actually a sequel to another racing game Shin'en made for the Wii. The thing is, i played that game, and i did not like that game. I thought it controlled poorly, had a relatively unimpressive sense of speed, and overly busy courses that felt like they belonged in one of those vehicular autorunners.

 

I think Shin'en has seriously stepped their shit up here, and though i still have a few issues with it, i'm just going to get it out of the way: If you have twenty bucks to throw around and enjoy having your ass kicked by well-made arcade racers, you should probably play this.

 

The physics feel like they're occupying a mid point between F-Zero and Wipeout, without the immediate responsiveness of the former or the excessively loose traction of the latter. I'd say it feels like an F-Zero that has bigger, heavier vehicles. The game definitely leans towards F-Zero in nearly everything it does, and though it touts a central mechanic of polarity switching where you have to make sure you're properly aligned with jump plates and boost strips, it feels like dressing on what is fundamentally a solidly built F-Zero clone. Here, the runway strips on the track give you boost, while collectible pellets fill up your boost meter. There's no power = health mechanic here like in F-Zero, and running off course resets you like it would in Wipeout. There's also no explicit mechanisms for attack, though you can attack. If a boosting vehicle collides with one that is not boosting, the recipient of that collision spins out. As a result, your metered boost still ends up serving several different functions. There's also a lean mechanic on the triggers as you would probably expect there to be in a racing game like this, and you can rock back and forth in the air to control your angle of descent off of a jump. Pretty basic tech, though i haven't yet discerned if there's anything more than those tricks.

 

Barring any stealthy unlocks, the game has sixteen courses across four cups, and four difficulty levels. (The last difficulty mode makes the game play even more like F-Zero.) There's also four player splitscreen and online play, though the buzz is that the online might be a bit borked. It's a pretty spartan package, but there's more here than i was expecting in a 20 dollar Wii U game. The game is also gorgeous and runs at a solid 60fps, has a great techno ost that includes remixes from some of Shin'en's past games, and they even hired F-Zero GX's announcer for this damn game.

 

I do have a few issues with it though, mainly that the AI seems to aggressively rubberband. (Though while holding first place can be very tough, getting enough points to win the cup is actually not, especially if you take care to be aggressive to your points rival. The game would actually really benefit from an F-Zero style "rival" marker. As it is, you just have to pay attention on your own terms.)

 

I also have some concerns with the level of difficulty. I've gone all golds in the first difficulty setting, but i'm not so sure about the second difficulty setting quite yet, i was getting pretty thoroughly destroyed. It seemed to me that the courses had been slightly remixed? I don't know if i was imagining it, but something was throwing me way off and i felt like i was learning the game again from scratch. I hope that's all it is, i would be supremely bummed out to hit an early ceiling with this game.

 

Also, even though i'm couching almost every comment about this game in how it relates to F-Zero, it's also kind of not F-Zero... But that's only because it's kind of also Wipeout, just minus the weapons. As noted above, it sort of sits somewhere in the middle, pulling bits and pieces from each as a game that clearly has a great deal of reverence for both franchises. To the point though, there's much smaller racer counts than F-Zero, and it's built around narrow courses that feel more akin to those in Wipeout. Visually, it's also obviously much more in love with the Wipeout aesthetic.

 

I like it a lot, on the whole, even if i'm a little concerned about that rubberband AI and how it may end up interacting with the steep difficulty curve.

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I bought this game a couple of days ago, and so far I've just finished the first two cups on subsonic. You're definitely right about the rubber-banding! However, whereas in Mario Kart, any given race will have 2-3 "good" AIs that rotate around the top 3 spots and you're essentially competing with only them, this game seems to randomly choose which AIs will take which spots in a race. The points distribution is pretty similar to how it works in Mario Kart, so this means that the points spread between the AI racers throughout the cup stays relatively low, such that me coming 1st once, 2nd a couple of times and something awful like 8th in the last race put me solidly ahead of the rest of the pack with something like 10 points separating me and the 2nd place AI.

 

I've yet to play online, but I think once I beat the rest of the subsonic cups so I familiarise myself with more tracks, I'll give it a go.

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So right now i'm sitting at all golds on subsonic, and two silvers on supersonic. Still feeling kind of salty at how ruthless the AI is, especially on supersonic where a single mistake can bone an entire run. Kinda wish the game had F-Zero style retries or something. (Hell, off-track deaths instantly ending a run would also be preferable to the game expecting me to keep playing when the run is obviously wrecked.) Also, I had asserted that i thought the tracks were remixed a bit between subsonic and supersonic, but upon closer inspection, that assertion is incorrect. Supersonic is just much more difficult.

 

I also put some time in with the online, and while it's definitely wonky in a lot of small ways, it's largely playable, i've been having a good deal of fun with it. Strangely though, while there seems to be a fair number of people playing, the game doesn't really seem like it wants to maximize player counts in individual lobbies. If you back out of the matchmaking hopper, you'll find yourself being put into different lobbies each time you enter back in, but they're all around 3-5 people. I have not once seen a full lobby. I've also had the online error out twice and actually even hardlock my Wii U once.

 

It also only supports the subsonic speed, and the netcode is pretty borked. It's a pretty laggy prediction model with lots of cars exploding into obstacles and instantly appearing unharmed afterwards as the game syncs back up. I've also found the game pretty inconsistent on the boost hits, properly registering maybe a little over half of them on the target, the other half visibly spinning out and not slowing or showing no visible affect at all. I've heard the game kind of throws up its hand and gives everybody 1st place if people cross finish near-simultaneously. (I have also seen game completely collapse in on itself with a care just sort of glitching all over the place, but that... That was probably just that one individual on a spectacularly bad connection.) Your own vehicle handling is clearly client side though, and for that reason it's basically playable and fun, and so i'm probably going to end up spending some more time with it. Racing games aren't especially demanding of low latency netcode after all, the wobbly online performance doesn't take away from you going faster than the other guy.

 

Also, the Spaarc is the best racer. BEST.

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 (Hell, off-track deaths instantly ending a run would also be preferable to the game expecting me to keep playing when the run is obviously wrecked.) 

I had the same thought. I sometimes also feel like the conditions to trigger a wreck are pretty harsh, like Wipeout would have let me sort of fudge my landing a bit with its wonky physics, and this just has like a zone of death.

 

Really digging the game, though. I think they did an excellent job with it.

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Beat it. Sort of. Four golds in subsonic, two golds and two silvers in supersonic, and three golds and one silver in hypersonic. Unlocked the music jukebox. Will probably go and try to get the rest of those golds.

Weird thing is, once i got into hypersonic, the game got way easier again. Those three golds all came on the first try. (Fuck the titanium cup.) Supersonic was by far the most difficult stretch. I mean, and on some of my silvers i am apparently in the top 100 championship times for the game. If i can't land first place finishes when i'm up that high on the leaderboard times, it seems to me like the game has some difficulty tuning problems. I mean, i used to be able to snag reliable first place master class finishes on every course in F-Zero's GX Grand Prix mode.

 

Hypersonic is wild though, it is SO fast. You're going so fast that there's a few spots where boosting at the right time can play hell with the game's physics, just lauching you way into the air.

 

I didn't realize it until playing on hypersonic, but holding the lean while turning is actually kind of counter-productive, it makes you lose grip and go into a larger slide than just turning would on its own. If you repeatedly tap the lean input while in that turn though, you don't slide and still turn tighter. It's kind of like the blast turning trick from the early F-Zero games.

 

Some other things:

Save your metered boosts to accelerate out of any particularly rough landings on tracks with jumps. (Or to attack other racers, if you're a dick, because being a dick is fun.)

At race start, hold your accelerator down when the two is about half counted to do a boost start. (This is such a common mechanic that i assumed it would be common knowledge, but i've seen virtually nobody else do it online.) 

Also, I'm still not totally clear on it because i haven't really been able to bring myself to pay attention to the speedometer, but i don't think metered boosts and pad boosts stack, so i've just been spacing them apart.

 

This game is just terrific though, might be my favorite arcade racer since... Shit, Wipeout Pure, maybe? Maybe even since F-Zero GX itself.

I hope Shin'en fixes up some of the issues with the online and maybe retunes a few things.

 

Also, Digital Foundry had an interesting piece on the game: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-vs-fast-racing-neo

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That 640x720 resolution is particularly apparent to me when they're doing the stage introductions, but after that it all ceases to matter. The game has pretty impressive effects that look great and mask any sort of technical shortcomings. I'm on holiday at the moment and didn't bring my Wii U, so unfortunately I won't be able to play this game for a few weeks =(

 

I struggled with Titanium cup on subsonic; this is definitely a pretty hard game. I wanted to play online but the game struggled finding more than 3 other players to match me up with =/

 

Hoping I can add some of you to my friend list so we can play together after I come back from my holiday? NNID is eRonin

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I'd be open to play some multiplayer if something gets organized at a reasonable west coast hour.

 

Weird--this is made in Germany?

 

Why is that weird?

 

Also: Patch confirmed for January. Sounds like they'll be fixing the occasional soft lock/crash issues in the multiplayer, on top of adding "online tags" and a track mini-map.

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