GAME CLEAR No. 208 -- F-Zero AX

F-Zero AX (2003, Arcade)

Developer: Amusement Vision
Publisher: SEGA
Clear Version: Deluxe cabinet
Clear Date: 1/25/25

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Why should I care?
F-Zero AX is the coolest racing game ever made.

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All right! First place!

There has been perhaps no GAME CLEAR post that has brought me greater joy to write than this one. As gaming white whales go, there was none more elusive to me than F-Zero AX prior to my first MAGFest in 2019. I wrote at length about my hunt for it for my beloved This Old Neon, but the piece isn’t available right now (and unfortunately, the Wayback Machine doesn’t seem to have ever captured it). Because the joy of beating it is all the greater for the joy of having found it in the first place, I’ll recap in brief again here.

Basically, in 2003, Nintendo released the high-speed hovercraft racer F-Zero GX for the GameCube. I got the game not long after that, and it made a lifelong F-Zero fan of me. I was also extremely drawn to the arcade counterpart advertised on the game’s box, F-Zero AX. The manual showed a game that featured a pilot’s seat that tracked the movement of your vehicle and blasted the game’s sound directly into your ears from speakers in the seat. It also purported to feature a memory card reader that would unlock exclusive tracks and racers if you plugged in your GX save data. Wow! Sign me the fuck up!

By the mid-2000s, of course, arcades were already in really rough shape in the United States, but I wasn’t cognizant of that at the time. Whenever I did happen to enter one (or a movie theater or bar or some other such establishment that might have arcade games), I’d always take a thorough look to see if by chance there was an AX cabinet. That day never came in my youth, and in hindsight, I think it’s unlikely there was ever a machine within several hundred miles of my childhood home in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Indeed, the game is pretty rare stateside these days, and its evident I’m not the only person interested in tracking it down, as there is a frequently-updated map of known locations maintained by the community. After writing my piece for This Old Neon, I was actually contacted by one of its owners to confirm that a machine ostensibly in South Carolina was no longer there. I take the current state of things as evidence that the game simply wasn’t all that widely distributed here. The intervening time has also obviously taken its toll and winnowed down the number of surviving machines.

Fewer in number still are operational instances of the full-motion version of the game with the rotating pilot’s seat, as some of the cabinets were stationary models. Of those that do exist and work well enough, even fewer have that critical functionality: a working memory card reader. The result is a game that, in a fully-functional state, is just vanishingly rare within any reasonable distance of my house (although a glance at that map shows that one has seemingly cropped up in Tallahassee!).

We are thus fortunate that, as alluded to earlier, a fully-operational F-Zero AX Deluxe cabinet has been a mainstay at MAGFest for as long as I’ve been going. If memory serves, it had a sticker on it for a business called “Outer Banks Amusements” or something of that nature, but a quick Google of that name isn’t turning up anything meaningful. In any case, whoever owns and maintains this machine has done an incredible job. It’s in outstanding shape and dutifully endures three and a half days of ‘round-the-clock operation by congoers of varying levels of reverence for what they’re engaging with, to say nothing of their varying levels of sobriety. Whoever keeps it in such terrific shape has my utmost respect and admiration.

But there’s no way to know how long that machine will soldier on. Eventually, after all, its cathode-ray tube will burn out. That’s theoretically replaceable, but it’s no easy surgery. With that in mind, as much as it thrilled me to finally just play the game in 2019, it brought with it another mission: one of these days I’d have to beat the fuckin’ thing.

Watch your back!

That day finally came at this year’s MAGFest, and it was so greatly delayed by four factors.

First, MAGFest is still the only place I’ve found an AX cabinet with functional controls and a functional memory card slot. For that matter, the only unit I’ve ever seen outside MAGFEST was at Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield, Illinois. As cool as that place is, it had a unit that was in pretty rough shape when I was there to the point of being unplayable. I hope they’ve fixed it since!

Second, on the subject of memory cards, I fucking forgot mine all but two of the years I’ve been at MAGFest because I am an idiot. This didn’t stop me from playing it, of course, but the FOMO certainly reduced my incentive.

Third, because the game is rare and cool, it almost always has a substantial queue at MAGFest. Combine that with the fact that races take several minutes, and a line as small as four or five could mean you’re losing a half hour of a con where awesome things are constantly happening just for one shot at a round of F-Zero AX. Obviously I’ve made that sacrifice a number of times, but there’s a limit to how much I’m willing to miss even for a game this great.

🚨 ALERT: I actually talk about the game here instead of my personal journey or whatever. 🚨

Finally, it took me awhile to beat F-Zero AX because it’s pretty hard!

For the uninitiated, F-Zero is a high-speed hovercraft racing game set in the distant future. Its protagonist and most decorated racer is Captain Falcon, who is probably more famous these days for his appearances in the Super Smash Bros. games. In the lore, the world of F-Zero racing is pretty cutthroat and dangerous, drawing participants from both sides of the law and, of course, the attention of gamblers galaxy-wide. Thus, the games are designed to impress that supersonic, high-stakes feeling upon its players through tight controls, up-tempo soundtracks, and challenging gameplay.

The first two games, F-Zero for SNES and F-Zero X for N64 are tough but manageable, especially on lower difficulties. They demand a lot to win on their toughest difficulties and courses, but they control so well that they said demand feels fair. X is the harder of the two by virtue of having brought the series to full 3D, but it still remains sane overall.

When Amusement Vision (now Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, famous for Yakuza/Like a Dragon) was given the responsibility of making GX and AX, it’s clear they wanted to make a hyper-technical, hyper-performant successor to X, where most of their ideas originated. X was somewhat hamstrung in its ambition by the limits of the Nintendo 64. With the GameCube and Triforce arcade board, Amusement Vision was able to execute the vision of X to its fullest and created, in my opinion, the tightest-controlling and fastest-feeling pair of games ever made.

As a result, I suppose they felt emboldened to demand the most of the player of any of the games in the series. After all, a game so deep should reward mastery, no? While the Grand Prix cups aren’t too tough on easy or normal difficulties, expert is tough as nails, and master is diabolical. I adore the game and still have only finished one of the its GPs on master. Meanwhile, the story of GX is notoriously difficulty even on the base difficulty (for beating each chapter, you are then rewarded with the opportunity to spend in-game credits on even harder difficulties for the respective chapters!).

The difficulty of AX doesn’t seem to be tuned quite so brutally in terms of how insanely good the AI opponents are (at least with the settings in use by the MAGFest machine), but it’s still no walk in the park. The most significant confounding factor is the hardware at play. As awesome and immersive and fun as the rotating pilot’s seat, pedals, steering wheel, and tiltable yoke are, they simply aren’t as precise as a nice GameCube controller — and that matters in a game that uses the full range of analog stick motion in a way very few games do. While experience with GX is definitely transferable (and indeed invaluable) to AX, it’s still a very different thing to get used to.

The good news is it’s as fun as a game can be. Even if it’s certainly more unwieldy, playing a game as tightly-tuned as F-Zero GX while experiencing all of its curves and bumps and feeling like you’re actually piloting the machine is among my all-time favorite video game experiences. Even friends of mine that don’t care about F-Zero at all have come away impressed by the bells and whistles of AX.

But the unfamiliar territory doesn’t end at the game’s controls. All six of the AX tracks are also exclusive to the machine — no practicing at home. Finishing first on each track unlocks them for home use in GX for resourceful memory card havers like me, but that’s as much a fun trophy to have as anything once you’ve managed it on the AX machine.

⚠️ ALL CLEAR: I am going to talk about my personal journey again. ⚠️

When I first played the game, the first few tracks were easy enough to win on for a series veteran like me, but some of the later ones were more significantly tougher. Combine that with long lines limiting my playtime and memory card forgetfulness some years, and I just never did quite finish ’em all.

Yeah! The final lap!

Anyway, for Super MAGFest 2025, I decided enough was enough and concocted a plan to finish the game and unlock the god damn AX Cup on my GameCube once and for all.

It was a plan of two steps:

1. Remember my memory card
2. Seek out the AX cabinet at insane hours

Needless to say, the plan worked! At around 5AM on Saturday, January 25th, 2025, I got over an hour of uninterrupted time on the AX cabinet as the crowd in the arcade thinned to only the most dedicated night owls. No one queued behind me at all during the 5 o’ clock hour, and I was able to practice the final, most difficult track over and over. After a series of frustrating second- and third-place finishes, it finally clicked, and I won Green Plant Spiral going away, as if it never should have been hard at all.

With still no other interested players in sight, I set to the task of unlocking some of the exclusive pilots I had not bothered to get before (preferring to use Captain Falcon usually). Like most of the large F-Zero cast, they are forgettable. Nevertheless, they exist. I gotta get ’em.

I intentionally left a couple out, though. I guess I don’t quite want the hunt to end. I’ll see you next year, F-Zero AX, memory card in hand.