O.K. This game is fast. And I mean REAL fast! The breakneck speeds remain constant, thanks to the high fps, eye popping high resolution, and graphical techniques used to trick the player into seeing fast speeds. The scenery burns by you like a blur, giving you the sense of god-speed, which really gets your adrenaline pumping. Even though the tracks are simplistic in detail, they are intricately designed, with an awesome sense of variation of the track designs. Gone are the days of the limitations of 2-D graphics, and in are the 3-D days, which allows the developers to create sick tracks that actually vary greatly, and are easily distinguishable between one another. Yet, some of the tracks are nearly identical in looks with others, but it is not abused like other games tend to do. Anyway, the multitude of twists, turns, jumps, loops, spirals, ramps, ups, and downs is simply astounding, which greatly increases the experience. What could be more fun than flying off of a ramp, going mach 2, and steering your racer like a plane, and eventually landing on the bottom strip of road, which lies a couple of thousand of feet below the jump itself. You can even pull the car nose up to increase air friction, causing you to remain in the air longer and lose speed, or you could go for a near-total nose dive, and speed up tremendously and cut through the air like a knife through hot butter! Or you can go into tunnels and race at high speeds on the roof of it, or perhaps you want to go to a course which is completely straight, and you can actually gain enough speed on the course to actually defy the laws of gravity and fly directly straight off of it. THIS...is what I'M...talking about!!!

This game tends to sport a more heavy metal/hard rock sorta sound track, without singing of course. Although some of the music sounds cheap, due to the fact of the sound hardware the N64 packs, it is mostly good music. Some of the music is simply spirit lifting and keeps your heart into the race, determining you to try and beat all of the other competitors. Some of the music is flawless remakes from the original, which is superbly enhanced and sounds much better since the 16 bit days. Personally, I love the Big Blue stage and Silence stage music, along with a few others, and I hope they bring it back in the sequel to F-Zero X.

The sound effects of the cars' engines are not very diversified, and sound the same pretty much for every car. There really isn't that many sound effects to notice in this game, which is seemingly an in-important factor in most games of today, except for the survival horror series of games, which rely on that to scare the gamer and create a sense of dread. Therefore, it is not much noticed in this game.

This game was one of the better titles of 1998, providing the gamers with a new twist on racing. Never before have I seen a game with such mind-bending features as F-Zero X, and I'm talking about the whole package this game includes, from the blinding speed, the cool camera views, the dynamic presentation, ingenious stage design, inventive concept of speed, inspiring musical performance, and classical gameplay. This game seems to have it all, and if you could get a hold of one of those N64DD, you can design your own levels of churning mayhem with the expansion cartridge. This futuristic racer won't fail you, if you are a fanatic of sleek speed.

Overall: 8.2