Before the Nintendo 64 was even released, Nintendo planned an expansion for the platform called the “Nintendo 64DD”. The “DD” stood for “disk drive”, since games for the add-on would come in the form of “magneto-optical discs” which resembled floppy disks. Like the Sega CD, this add-on would function much like a separate console. There would be games released exclusively for the add-on, and it would also be able to provide new content for standard Nintendo 64 games. The 64DD had promise, but numerous delays killed its chances of success. When its development was finally completed in 1999, Nintendo decided to release it to salvage what they could from this botched project. Only nine titles were released for it during its short-lived history. One of those nine makes me very, very happy that the 64DD wasn’t scrapped entirely. I present to you the F-Zero X Expansion Kit.
As you might guess from the name, the F-Zero X Expansion Kit isn’t a standalone game. You can’t play it without having a Japanese copy of F-Zero X sitting in the regular cartridge slot of the N64. Think of it as offline DLC. Buying the original game may sound like an unnecessary hassle put upon us by Nintendo, but because of this, the developers were able to use all the space on the 64DD disk for the new content.
There are five major additions introduced in this expansion. For players who love time trial mode, ghost memory is greatly expanded in the Expansion Kit. The original F-Zero X allowed you to save 2 time trial ghosts on the cartridge. With the Expansion Kit, you can save three ghosts per track. Secondly, two new cups are available which introduce a total of twelve new tracks. These tracks are more challenging than those in the previous grand prix cups, and are very well-designed. Thirdly, new music has been added to the game, including several new songs which play on the new DD tracks. There’s also a remix of the Rainbow Road theme from Mario Kart 64. Remember how F-Zero X had a Rainbow Road track? Now it has the music it should have had in the first place! Also, the tunes for Red Canyon and White Land were lengthened slightly, but it’s not all that noticeable.
Contrary to what you may think, F-Zero GX was not the first game in the series to have a vehicle creator. The Expansion Kit introduced a similar, more simplistic feature. In this machine-maker, everything’s available from the start, and there aren’t as many options to customize your vehicle as there are in GX. After creating one, you can save it and choose one of the existing 30 vehicles to replace it with. The computer will use your custom vehicles, so you could make 29 lousy machines and see if you could lap some of them in a grand prix race! There are 3 new optional alternate vehicles for Captain Falcon, Samurai Goroh, and Jody Summer which are accessible from the machine creator: the “Super Falcon”, “Super Stingray”, and “Super Cat”. They have excellent stats, and they are definitely better than the normal vehicles in the game. The machine creator isn’t spectacular, but it is a nice little addition.
Without a doubt, the most noteworthy addition to the game is the course editor. This game doesn’t follow the traditional formula of giving you a bunch of pre-created pieces to drag & drop as you please. To make your own course, you can set up to 64 “points” on which the track will follow. The points are on a three-dimensional plane, so in addition to placing or moving them wherever you want to, you can also raise them up so your track won’t be flat. At any given point on your course, you can do whatever you want to the part of the track around that point. You can widen it, shrink it, and twist it to your liking. Also at your disposal are hazards, boost points, and pit (recovery) areas to place on your track. Basically, you can do anything with your track that the developers did with the tracks that are already in the game, and more!
Once you’ve designed the track you want, you can change the “theme” of the track to make it look like Mute City, Fire Field, or whichever style you like. No matter which theme is chosen, you can pick any background music present in the game for your course. Various buildings and props can be added outside the track just for show. Once you’re finished with it, you can enter it and up to five other custom courses into the “Edit Cup” and use them in any mode. Even if you swap out any of your six tracks entered into the Edit Cup, your best times and ghost data on each one will still be preserved for when you enter them back in again. Up to 100 custom tracks can be saved, and if you know someone in real life who has the game, you can copy any of them onto their disk.
Another nifty feature of the course editor is the ability to load any of the pre-made courses to use as a starting template! This can be used simply to save a little time, or you can tweak some tracks that you think could be a little more fun or challenging. Also, if your six favorite pre-made courses are scattered across a few different cups, you can save all six of them to the Edit Cup to make your ideal grand prix!
This game’s course editor is the best I’ve ever seen in a racing game, but it’s not beyond my criticism. While the possibilities it creates are close to limitless, I feel that they could have been even moreso. For example, you can only place up to 8 mine patches on any given track. You can’t alter the size of boost panels; their size is directly related to the width of the track on which they lie. Another complain I have lies with the limitations of the AI. If you have jumps, hazards, and areas without walls which are close to a turn, the chances are very high that all 29 of your computer opponents will not be able to survive three laps on your track in Grand Prix Mode. That’s a shame, because I feel that those types of tracks are the most challenging and fun. Lastly, an expected downside to the course editor is the fact that it’s very time-consuming if you want to get the best out of it. Making a quality track is harder than it sounds, and it requires a lot of little adjustments. For example, turns cannot be too sharp, or else the game will not be able to generate the track. Making a track full of twists and turns takes a lot of patience because of this issue.
The saddest part about the F-Zero X Expansion Kit is the fact that it’s still a 64DD exclusive. Are you interested in buying it? I hope you have a deep wallet, because if you’re patient, you’ll be lucky to get everything needed to run it for $400. It’s hard to believe that Nintendo has gone 11 years without porting this expansion onto another platform. It’s also surprising to me that F-Zero GX didn’t have a track editor at all. Nintendo, it’s about time you brought back F-Zero! Either re-release the F-Zero X Expansion Kit somehow, or make us an all new game with online play and some new features! North American gamers have been deprived of a fresh F-Zero experience for long enough.
Jay Zawrotny
Steve Gallant
William Carpenter
Robert Russell