Prints
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Episode
134
 Lifeguard Opportunity at Bayview Beach |
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Rastafarian
Homer
 Pass the Dutchie on the left side, mon. |
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Star
Whores
 Looks like Han is sleeping solo tonight |
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Episode
128
 Dexter takes a cheap shot at Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney |
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Episode 127
 Mary & Dexter discuss the American flag |
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Episode 126
 Dexter & Marley go shopping for female hygiene products |
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Episode 124
 Marley goes Easter shopping |
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The
controls are simple and easy to pick up. A accelerates, B slows
you down (why would you want to do that?), Y gives you a speed boost,
the L and R buttons allow you to powerslide around tight corners,
and the X and Z buttons allow you to attack other racers. Every
race has 3 laps and during the first lap, your speed boost is disabled.
It's just as well because you should use the first lap to take note
of where the boost strips (give you a burst of speed when you run
over them), hazards (holes in parts of the track, landmines, or
sheets of ice that make you lose your grip on the road), repair
strips (refills your vehicle's shield energy) and tight corners
are on the racetrack. After the first lap, it's a balance of shield
power and speed because using speed boosts uses up your vehicle's
shield power, and if you use the speed boost too many times without
going over a repair strip, it'll take nothing more than a slight
bump from an opponent's car or the track wall to make your vehicle
explode and forcing you to retire. Luckily, you have some attacks
that will hopefully send your opponents to that fate and you closer
to first place. 
Since
you're sharing the road with 29 other cars, it's always good to
know a bit of self defense. If you get right next to another vehicle
and press X, your car will ram your opponent, sending him out of
control and preferably off the track. If you press the Z button,
your vehicle will spin for a few seconds, violently hitting any
cars unlucky enough to make contact with you. Doing the spin attack
while speed boosting through a crowd of cars is a good way to clear
out the competition. On the more difficult circuits, some races
can only be won by memorizing exactly where the repair strips, hairpin
turns and hazards are. The average top speed I've reached was over
1,500 km/h, so timing is everything because if you blink, you might
crash. 
A
year or so ago, a few screenshots were beginning to be released
and the graphics on this game are 3 times better than even the most
recent screenshot. Even though you are supposed to be going very
fast, if you stop in the middle of the track and look around, there
is no blurring and everything is as sharp and clear as it was while
moving. A lot of detail was put in the backgrounds, from the giant
sand monsters on a desert-like planet to the rainy, lightning-filled
sky above a massive city. You can change the camera angles to suit
your racing style, which means you can race in 1st person view and
know what it would be like going 1,635 km/h strapped to the hood
of Falcon's car.
The
music is always fast and loud to keep with the pace of the game. Most
of the songs sound like a mixture of Nu-metal and Dance music, which
suits the futuristic style of the game. Every crash and explosion
during a race comes in crystal clear. The sound of the wind rushing
by your car actually changes depending on the speed that you're going.
The only weak point of the sound was the voice acting. It sounds very
monotone and unexciting when a character is talking, so you can tell
they spent less time on that part of the game's production.
If
you've played racing games before, the controls are what you'd expect
them to be, so they're easy to learn. Other than the voice acting
which plays a minor role in the game anyway, the sound is great
and the music isn't generic racing music, so you can tell they put
some thought into it. This is the fastest racing game to date, so
framerate is superb (a constant 60 frames per second) and the graphics
are very sharp from the burst of flame that flies out the back of
your vehicle when you do a speed boost, to the shiny, futuristic
buildings that you race by. 
A
nice feature that I like on this version of F-Zero is that you can
be put back on the track when you fall off in VS mode. Nothing worse
than being in first place on the last lap, flying off the track and
crashing, then you have to wait for your friends to finish the race
before you can play again. So far, I've only played the Grand Prix
mode and VS mode (up to 3 human players can join you), but on top
of that there is a Story mode, Time Attack, Practice mode and the
Garage where you can customize a car, along with the decals that are
put onto it and buy new parts. You start with 15 tracks, but there
are unlockable ones, so with all of this in one package, there is
a lot of replay value.
