Forget Call of Duty, Real Men Need the Retro Love: F-Zero

It's always amusing to see how the future was envisioned in the past. And by amusing, we mean effing depressing. If certain science fiction writers are to be believed, our teleports and hover boards and teleporting hover boards are way overdue.

As such, when you take a look at a video game from the Nineties bringing us racetastic set in the year 2560, you've got to be prepared for all kinds of crazy-ass. Step forward, F-Zero.

The game was released for the SNES in 1990, and introduced the world to the alarmingly tight hey-look-at-my-gonads spandex stylings of Captain Falcon. Along with his fellow pilots, Dr. Stewart, Samurai Goroh and Pico, he's a racer in perhaps the most badass sport the world will ever see.

In this future-tastic world, the multi-billionaires crave some fancy new entertainment. Rolling in huge piles of dollar bills and ‘business meetings' with supermodel prostitutes gets tiresome, after all. So they funded a series of gravity-defying races of badassery, and that's as good an excuse for a racer as any.

F-Zero is a kind of Formula One-y series of Grand Prix races. This being over five hundred years in the effing future, they're now driving some rather spangly anti-grav vehicles; hovering a foot above the track and hauling ass at speeds exceeding 500 km/h. Sexy looking beasts they are too, whether it's the main man's Blue Falcon or... the rather camp looking pink one. We've got five centuries to save up and get our pre-orders in before these mofos are for sale.

Anywho, yes. This was two years before the first Mario Kart. We weren't dicking around with shells and mushrooms and other such items yet. F-Zero is a raw, pure, manly man-sport for manly men. You travel at shit-your-pants speeds, jostle each other in a dudely way, and have only a meager health bar between life and death. And we're serious about the death part, too many collisions and your shit will explode.

F-Zero made great use of the console's much ballyhooed Mode 7 effect. This half-assed attempt at the illusion of 3D looked great 24 years ago, and was almost as futuristic and brain-melty as the game's setting itself. It's a particularly fast-paced and skill-based retro racer, with some great presentation, and its style influenced the Wipeout series among others.

For top-notch decrepit speedtacular, you probably couldn't do any better than this. Unless you wanted multiplayer (which you did), because that's not happening.

Source of images: Gamefaqs.