That would mean an announcement for the same would be coming later today. If that weren’t enough, Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb is leaning heavily (sarcastically “guessing”) towards a Direct happening this week on the latest Game Mess. The jury is still out on whether it’s a full Direct, a mini Direct or a partner showcase.

Leaker Pyoro, who reported on Super Mario RPG Remake and Super Mario Bros. Wonder before their announcements, hinted at there being announcements for Donkey Kong and F-Zero (which would make it a full-fledged Direct). Based on a recent ESRB rating, WB Montreal’s Gotham Knights could also be announced for the Nintendo Switch. Time will tell, so stay tuned for more details.

It's going to be on the 14th.

— NateTheHate2 (@NateTheHate2) September 12, 2023

The rumoured Direct presentation will apparently feature announcements for a coupld of classic Nintendo franchises, based on hints recently dropped on Twitter by leaker Pyoro, who accurately leaked Super Mario Bros. Wonder and Super Mario RPG Remake ahead of their announcements earlier this year.

In one tweet, the leaker wrote, “Let’s just say fans of a certain MATLAB function will be happy with the upcoming Direct.”

MATLAB, a numeric and programming platform developer by MathWorks, doesn’t have a link to any of Nintendo’s franchises, but many have speculated that the tweet references MATLAB’s “fzero” function, and that Pyoro is potentially suggesting that an F-Zero game will be announced.

Meanwhile, in another (much more straightforward) tweet, the leaker included only a gif showing Donkey King from The Super Mario Bros. Movie, potentially indicating an upcoming announcement of a new Donkey Kong game.

In additional tweets, the leaker has also claimed that Nintendo will reveal new details for the upcoming Princess Peach game, and that a Game Boy Advance F-Zero title will also be announced for Nintendo Switch Online.

Of course, with a company as notoriously secretive and unpredictable as Nintendo, it’s always wise to take any and all leaks with a grain of salt- for now, at least. We’ll keep an eye out for more new details, so stay tuned for further updates.

Let's just say fans of a certain MATLAB function will be happy with the upcoming Direct

— Pyoro (@Pyoro_X) September 8, 2023

pic.twitter.com/qMW86bL92Z

— Pyoro (@Pyoro_X) September 8, 2023

yep

— Pyoro (@Pyoro_X) September 8, 2023

It will come to NSO but I'm not teasing it.

— Pyoro (@Pyoro_X) September 8, 2023

“I think it’s because Mario Kart is Nintendo’s most popular racing game, and a new F-Zero would cost a fortune,” said Imamura when asked about a franchise like Star Fox getting more attention than F-Zero. “My impression is that [Nintendo executive Shigeru Miyamoto] is very affectionate about Star Fox.”

F-Zero, originally released on the SNES back in 1990, had seen a few follow-ups. The most recent title in the franchise, however, is F-Zero: Climax on the Game Boy Advance. The most popular game in the franchise, F-Zero GX, sits on the GameCube.

Last we heard of F-Zero, Nintendo brought Nintendo 64’s F-Zero X to the Nintendo Switch Online subscription service back in 2022. Since bringing the game to the Nintendo Switch, however, Nintendo has been largely quiet about F-Zero.

The F-Zero franchise is known for its unique take on fast-paced futuristic racing. The franchise is also home to iconic characters, including Captain Falcon, who currently lives on in the roster for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Like other titles in the series, F-Zero X is all about fast-paced futuristic racing where speeding ahead of the competition and avoiding damage is key. It features 30 different racers, including updated versions of classics like Blue Falcon. Along with Grand Prix Cup, there are modes like Death Race, Versus and Time Trial to conquer on top of hidden vehicles and tracks.

Following the release of F-Zero Climax in 2004, there have been rumors of a revival for the series throughout the years but nothing concrete. Takaya Imamura, who worked as a character designer and art director on the franchise, said last year that it would be difficult to bring back “without a grand new idea.” Never say never, though.

Like many major companies that have been going on for an extended period of time, Nintendo has a lot of properties. You know the big ones, of course, the Marios and Zeldas, but there’s also plenty of games that are more in the cult status that never quite managed to hit it big. One of those was F-Zero, a racing series that began on the SNES and had some high-profile revival attempts in the Gamecube and GBA era that flopped and the series has since been on the shelf. Could it come back? Well, it’s not impossible, but it sounds like it’d need a big kickstart.

Takaya Imamura worked at Nintendo from 1989 to 2021, and was the Art Director and Character Designer on the F-Zero franchise. He spoke with IGN about his long career at the video game giant. He reflected on a lot of things, but when it came to F-Zero, he surprisingly said he didn’t think the series was actually dead, though did say it would take a lot for it to revive. Specifically, he said, “Of course, I’ve thought about it many times, but without a grand new idea, it’s hard to bring it back.”

While the series lives on with Captain Falcon being playable in Super Smash Bros., the last game in the series to be released was in 2004. While stranger things have happened, I wouldn’t put a lot of money on that one getting much of a grand idea for a revival.

It seems uncovering hidden Twitter accounts is what we have to turn to to get news on Nintendo these days. Recently, a locked Twitter account for the rumoured Super Mario 35th anniversary announcements was discovered, and now, another one has been emerged- and this one comes out of the blue.

The account here is for F-Zero, with the handle @FZeroJP, and a placeholder name that is identical to the aforementioned Super Mario 35th account. Meanwhile, it seems that the verification email address linked to this Twitter account is the same as the one Nintendo uses for this purpose for various other Twitter pages, including the likes of Super Smash Bros. and Splatoon (via VGC).

It goes without saying, but a Twitter account by itself doesn’t prove that there are any announcements coming in the future (companies often secure social media handles as standard practice), and given how long F-Zero has been dormant, any unverified reports of something hinting at a revival are inherently hard to believe. Then again, Nintendo is a notoriously unpredictable company, so you never know. Either way, we’ll keep you updated, so stay tuned.

GOLDENEYE 007

As far as its legacy is concerned GoldenEye 007 on the N64 – as one of the first good shooters on a console – will always remained untouched, but in terms of sheer quality, the game hasn’t aged very well. Aiming and controls are a bit of a nightmare by modern standards, owing to the N64 controller’s limitations, and it’s something that obviously affects the whole experience. Meanwhile, much like many other games from the N64/PS1 era – many of which will be on this list – GoldenEye’s visuals don’t hold up very well either, and the mucky quality of draw distances and textures also often gets in the way of the action.

]]> https://gamingbolt.com/14-video-game-classics-that-havent-aged-well/feed 0 422770 https://gamingbolt.com/nintendo-tapped-criterion-for-f-zero-wii-u-report https://gamingbolt.com/nintendo-tapped-criterion-for-f-zero-wii-u-report#comments Tue, 23 Jun 2015 12:50:43 +0000 http://gamingbolt.com/?p=235829

According to an unnamed source that spoke to Nintendo Life, Nintendo asked Criterion Games – known for Burnout and Need for Speed – to develop a demo for F-Zero that would be showcased at E3 2011. Unfortunately, due to Criterion developing several versions of Need for Speed Most Wanted at the time, it was unable to commit to working on F-Zero.

Though the source is unknown, the information was confirmed by Criterion Games creative director Alex Ward. It seems Nintendo of Europe did indeed speak to Criterion at the time. Nintendo was apparently quite “hard pressed for time” with the demo. It’s also strange that all these years later and we’re yet to hear about a new F-Zero for the Wii U.

Nintendo has been frequently reaching out to third party developers in the past few years to work on its IPs. Prominent examples include Team Ninja working on Metroid: Other M for the Wii, Omega Force for Hyrule Warriors and Platinum Games for the upcoming Star Fox Zero.

Nintendo has a gold mine of classic, old franchises that haven’t been used in a while, that fans are dying for. In the last few years, we have seen so many of these revived- Metroid, Star Fox, Punch Out!!, Donkey Kong Country, Yoshi- but of course, the elephant in the room remains F-Zero, Nintendo’s stylish high speed futuristic racer franchise that was the precursor to the entire genre (including Sony’s own WipEout), and which fans have been clamoring for now, for over ten years.

Miyamoto has famously spoken out against the idea of the franchise ever returning in the past, saying that he sees no meaningful evolution for the games beyond what was achieved with GX on Gamecube; that said, the number of F-Zero easter eggs that Nintendo is dropping has been increasing in recent years, with an entire F-Zero themed Nintendo Land minigame, and Mario Kart 8 and its DLC paying homage to the franchise.

It appears Miyamoto may be warming up to the idea of a new F-Zero himself, as he discussed what a new game in the franchise might have in an interview with YouTuber Smosh- “We see a lot of other designers who are kind of making more traditional racing style of games,” he began. “So, we’ve tried to focus on something that feels a little bit more game-y. So, maybe if we create a new type of controller interface, and we find a controller interface that’s particularly suited for F-Zero, then maybe we’ll do something with it in the future.”

The good news, then, is, that a new F-Zero is not off the table. The bad news is, it’s not happening any time soon.

The worse news is that Nintendo doesn’t get that just a literal HD remaster of GX with online support will probably be enough for so many people.

With the advent of next generation consoles i.e. the PS4 and Xbox One, almost every hardcore gamer is expecting that the next wave of games will run at a golden standard of 1080P/60 fps. However, it takes a lot for a piece of software to be able to run at 30 or 60 frames a second consistently, and with so much stress being put on the console or PC’s hardware, is it really worth it to push past the 30 fps barrier? The human eye doesn’t recognize a frame rate increase once it goes above a preset value, so why do developers bother with it?

Most games for the soon-to-be last generation of consoles run games at both 30 and 60fps as it is and these games are pretty much at height of the hardware’s life cycle. Games like The Last of Us  are all locked at 30 frames per second and it looks gorgeous. Not only do plenty of games get locked at this frame rate, they look good at it. This is great option for the PS3 and Xbox 360. Other, more fast-paced games like Call of Duty however are locked in at around 60 frames a second. Games that have a faster pace and depend more heavily on quick reactions and split section decisions seem to have a higher frame rate, which is understandable. This isn’t a new feature in gaming by any means either, developers and consoles have been able to pull 60 frames a second for quite a few years, although with a few compromises.

As far back as the Nintendo 64 developers were running games at 60 fps. One such popular racing game for example, F-Zero X could run at 60 frames a second with about 30 vehicles on the screen at any given time. The problem that the developers ran into was that sacrifices had to be made to keep the game running at a steady 60 frames. Things like polygon count and textures had to be greatly reduced to get everything on the screen at once without any performance drops and that means thinning the game down a bit. F-Zero X most likely could have been playable at 30 frames a second, but it wouldn’t have looked as good. This fast-paced racer would have been choppy and somewhat “jerky” looking at 30.

Pacing of a game has a lot to do with what the frame rates are set at. On the flip side of this though, PC gamers don’t really have to worry about locking their frame rates into anything lower than 60 with the current hardware and game engines available today. Most games, even cross-platform titles give them the ability to easily tweak graphical settings, frames per second and a variety of other options that either directly or indirectly affect the games’ performance.

Let’s take a look at Borderlands 2, the default for this game is 60FPS for PCs. It’s a fast-paced, brightly lit game that has a whole lot of background processing, especially if you decide to leverage Nvidia’s PhysX engine. While it looks great, it puts a massive load on the system and can really bog things down. The PhysX feature wasn’t available for consoles, and it’s not like this feature really added anything to the game that console players were missing out on, a bit of eye candy and some extra effects from specialized weapons, but that’s about it. With that said, it’s obviously awesome to have, but it comes at a price.

When you’re running a game at 60 frames a second with all the graphical goodies turned all the way up it’s fairly likely that you’re going to see a hiccup every now and again. Even going from 30 to 60 frames you’re still going to notice if the system is running smoothly, then suddenly drops down to say, 45 or 35 frames only to spike back up, specially in PC games. In this sense, console gamers don’t have to worry about it as much. While you may see a drop every once in awhile, the software has been optimized to run as efficiently as possible. While this has also been done with the PC versions of the games, the wide array of hardware and software configurations certainly makes it a more challenging task.

Games that are locked in at 30 frames a second certainly leave more room for visual styles, and background processes, but doing this can also make the game look choppy, and unpolished. A good example of this is Sleeping Dogs. Playing this game at 60 frames a second vs. 30 frames has a relatively noticeable impact on the game. In side-by-side comparisons you can see fairly easily that the video running at 30 fps is choppy, almost like there is missing data in between frames. While the player may not necessarily directly notice the lower frame rate, they will most likely notice the game appearing to almost skip to the next frame, almost like it could be struggling to render the images, even though the hardware is running at optimal performance levels.

Can people play games at 30FPS with little to no problem? Absolutely, but with the leap in display technology, PC hardware and soon-to-be available PS4 and Xbox One that are incredibly powerful, there is very little reason to lock a game’s frames at 30FPS, even the current generation hardware that is soon to be outdated doesn’t seem to have a problem with most games running at over 30 frames a second. While you can still game at lower frames there really is no doubt that 60FPS is better than 30.

So yes, 60 fps in video games matter but are we going to see it become the standard anytime soon? Nope. Just like with any console cycle, developers will need more time to get themselves acquainted with the new hardware. However certain games like Titanfall [I can’t imagine this game being played at 30fps], the next Halo and even launch games like DriveClub are targeting 60 FPS. It is only a matter of time before we see games pushing the barrier, game developers finding intelligent ways to write optimized code to attain the much wanted golden standard in video games.