It’s fair to say F-Zero 99 on the Nintendo Switch is an addiction for us. When we first played it in September 2023 we thought it was brilliant, but presumed we’d tire of it soon enough.

Quite the opposite has happened and we’re more enthralled with it than ever, logging our in-game wins and status up and revelling in the incredible challenge it provides. With 800 hours of racing (as of October 2025), we feel well placed to hand over some tips to get you started.

When You’re an F-Zero 99 Addict and Pushing for Glory

Yes, then, this is on the Nintendo Switch and you’ll need the subscription Online Membership to access it (and all the other virtual console goodies). Totally worth it just for this one game alone!

Nintendo has a habit of making these unbelievably addictive, brilliant fun racing games.

The amount of hours we’ve thumped into Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (and the Wii U original) totals a fair old whack. As we’ve played that one so much, the arrival of F-Zero 99 was a welcome change in gaming routine. We usually give it a whirl for an hour or so each evening to enjoy the intense racing action.

The difference between Nintendo’s two main racing series? The element of luck is vastly different across the two, with Mario Kart a clear party game and free-for-all. Great fun as it is, if you want more pure racing action then head elsewhere.

F-Zero 99 is all about skill and a highly refined, precise driving style. It’s a magnificent game so this feature is part tribute, part guide, for anyone looking to get started or improve your skills.

F-Zero 99 Guide: The Subtle Complexity is What Makes it Special

The remarkable thing about F-Zero 99 is its complexity. The little intricacies of driving the best way that all add up to make you a competitive front-runner.

However, when you first play the game you’ll be more interested in simply surviving.

You have a power boost bar for a speed hike, but overdo it and your craft will have no energy left and you’ll explode in a ball of flames. This means each race is a carefully structured, strategic effort to be as fast as possible, but to survive. You do see some new players flooring it with the boost, getting way ahead, then exploding with two laps left as they’ve overdone it.

Our advice? Well, it’s a very competitive game and you’ll need plenty of practice to get anywhere. The most immediate goals:

• Choose your preferred ship to pilot
  • All four have a different style that may/may not suit you
• Learn the tracks
  • There’s a specific practice mode for this—use it!
• Master your strategic use of energy management
• Feather the engine (tapping A around corners)
• USE THE SHOULDER BUTTONS! Really helps with sharp turning
• Take risks and learn from mistakes

New players will find themselves using the game’s Skyway regularly, which you get after collecting yellow Super Sparks (these fall off other drivers).

This launches you onto a special above-track roadway. It can really launch you back up the order.

If you become a consistent front-runner, it becomes quite rare to get the Skyway at all. You just don’t get as many Super Sparks. But it’s a handy tactic if you make a stupid mistake at some point, as the Skyway can launch you back into the action quickly.

Really, though, you need to get a grasp on the basic mechanics.

The little things, such as holding down when your ship lands (otherwise you’ll lose speed) and spin attacking at the right moment. It takes practice! But as it comes together you’ll start to bag wins and revel in the competition.

How to Deal With F-Zero 99’s Bumpers

From lap 2 of any race F-Zero 99 starts introducing grey bumper vehicles. These block the track and you have to manoeuvre around them, with the need to predict their patterns around corners. These things have ruined many a race.

Hit a red bumper and it’ll explode, depleting a huge wodge of your energy. On the final lap the game mercilessly hurls many of these onto the circuit, making it an almost literal minefield. The result is the final lap can be a manic experience as you try to navigate the red bumpers, whilst maintaining speed and pushing for positions.

Key to success here is confidence and experience. You need to be able to stay cool, calm, and collected as you dice between the bumpers with millimetric precision.

Keep in mind everyone gets in wrong. It gets crazy. People blow up and you can never quite tell what’ll happen. There’s no shame in blowing up in a ball of flames.

As frustrating as the things can be… we wouldn’t want it any other way. They have to be there as they add this thrilling, unnerving quality as the laps tick by. You never can rest up easy as you can be in the lead, then suddenly you’ve got several red, grey, and blue (player controlled) bumpers veering at you.

Getting Started: Choose Your F-Zero 99 Ship!

This is super important as every race you have to sling your vehicle around. Each one offers something different—in a good and bad way. The four crafts are (with their pros and cons):

Blue Falcon

Great handling and a good speedy boost, the Blue Falcon is a fantastic all-rounder and a solid option to get started with. So, great for beginners! Also great for skilled players who can eek the most out of its full potential.

Golden Fox

Super fast acceleration! Constant boosting! Very quick energy generation, too, when you’re powering back up. The Golden Fox is our ship of choice as it’s a thrill to drive, just be wary of its greater capacity to explode as you’re on the limit all the time. Hit one red bumper and your race is pretty much run. One for risk takers.

Wild Goose

Good old sturdy high speed running! The Wild Goose is a trusty craft, with a big top speed, and solid handling. The downside is its stunningly slow boost regeneration, meaning you’ll need to craft a tanking KO tactic alongside strategic power usage.

Fire Stingray

Immense top speed, major boosting capacity, and clever feathering with the Stingray can make it almost invincible. But! Its acceleration is abysmal. Make an error and you lose masses of momentum, ruining progress and dropping you down the order. Tricky to master, but (in our opinion) the best ship if you can tie it all together.

Our Preference: Why We Golden Fox It One

Our preferred ship is the Golden Fox. It blasts off the line, allows for loads of boosts consistently around each circuit, and that nippiness means you can get at the front and then push on to stay there.

We stuck with the Wild Goose for our first 500+ races and only won six races. Then we went off to learn the tracks thoroughly in Practice Mode, improve our driving, and naturally found the Golden Fox to be our ship of choice.

We’ve since won 3,000 races with this ship (as of October 2025).

That stat isn’t to show off, more to highlight to new players what you can achieve here with perseverance. It’s massively rewarding when you hone your skills and win races against some of the best players.

Now, the Fox is our favourite but there are downsides. It’s tricky to control (slippery), you’ll get baffed around a lot, top speed is low, and you have to take some serious risks to win. You’ll blow up more often with this ship, but it provides the best opportunity to make a break for it at the start.

And it’s a real challenge on the longer pro-tracks. For some of them, such as Silence, it’s poor on them. But for the super fast tracks it’s a beast.

It’s our favourite as it’s a thrill to get the thing around circuits, just with that constant risk of blowing up hanging over you.

Keep An Eye on F-Zero 99’s Best Players

For new players, aside from hitting Practice Mode, one of the best things you can do is watch the top players. Learn from their driving styles and apply to what you’re doing, that way you can gradually get faster and faster.

In fact, one of the enjoyable things about the game has been watching familiar names appearing in races and Grand Prix. We’ve become used to a lot of names out there and there are some phenomenal drivers with advanced skillsets.

The Legend That is F-Zero 99’s Susan

When you play the game you get to see people’s  usernames. Over time, you get used to seeing familiar faces and spotting who the top-tier players are (we’re not one of them!).

We’ve consistently seen someone called Susan in F-Zero 99. She’s a better player than us and when we’re up against her in races and get close… we know we’ve done a great job!

It’s always fun to see her there in the races now and we kind of have a reverence to the Susan legend. We don’t spin attack into her and treat her with respect! And to be fair, she’s a great competitor to race against.

Some players have this obnoxious habit of veering across the track to spin attack you. It’s very annoying and overly aggressive.

Susan is proof that’s not necessary. Although, to be fair, she doesn’t have to be aggressive as she’s often just way out front being very fast indeed.

She also uses the Golden Fox craft with a similar decal design to us (yellow and black), which she’s able to wring more speed out of us than us, too. But we’re always chuffed on the rare occasion we beat her. Or, more often than not, at least run her very close. All hail, Susan!

And Misa is F-Zero 99’s Version of Max Verstappen

There’s another player who regularly kicks our butt called Misa. Turns out he’s got a YouTube channel documenting his antics and a Twitch stream. He uses the Golden Fox, too, but in a cool shade of blue.

You can see how bloody fast he is above.

The game is all about these little micro-adjustments to find you time here and there. That and the capacity to limit mistakes over a full-race run.

As with Susan, Misa is a top-tier player with three-stars (an in-game sign he’s one of the best—we have one star next to our name, for example).

The Joy of Those F-Zero 99 Tracks

There are some immense tracks on this game. It launched with 15, then a mirror mode came in earlier this year. So there are 30 tracks and some of them are absolute bangers.

We wouldn’t say there’s a dud one, although White Land II (Mirror Mode) still leaves us cold (not least as it’s an ice level).

Whereas we adore both versions of White Land I, favouring the mirror track. Although you can watch the dude below on the normal layout and the range of tactics you can use to win.

Sand Ocean is another favourite of ours. Below is a good example of the Fire Stingray’s limitations and incredible perks. We’ve found it’s easily the fastest ship to use on this track, at least a second faster than all others.

However, you just have to overcome that super slow start.

This does highlight why it’s essential to master the tracks. There’s no good going into them without a clear map of what’s ahead in your memory bank.

To do well, you must know every nook and cranny, every competitive edge is essential in this game.

That’s why it’s so awesome! Although there’s an element of luck and unfairness in there, it’s a title where the best players can eek out a second or two on the rest. All through slightly refined driving styles.

Study the art of F-Zero 99 and you can be a master!

Or you can be like us, an above average player who can occasionally cut it  with the very best. The rest of the time just revelling in the game’s madness. It’s a modern masterpiece and we think a greatly underrated gem.

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Final Bit! Two Years on From F-Zero 99’s Launch

Two years flew by, so I’m (Mr. Wapojif) adding a note on my progress. As one of my proudest gaming achievements is the S50 (!!!) rating I finally scraped over the line for. It took 800 hours to get there.

At the start of 2025 I was stuck on S38 for ages, still making stupid mistakes and the like. Then something clicked and I honed down my skillset, cut out (some) of the costly errors, got a bit faster, and boom!

I was on S49 for a chunk of time wondering whether I deserved to be an S50. It felt a bit wrong as the game caps out at S50 and I’m not a top-tier racer. Quite close to it (ish), but not on the level of Misa, Bobby, Susan etc. Those guys are in a different league, really, so hopefully Nintendo will add new stats to flag that these are the top players

But once I hit the S50 mark I felt chuffed, so, there we go! Huzzah etc.

The other side of this is I’m just not getting bored of the game. The rush of the races is always a mega draw and I can see myself playing this one for years to come. Even if the arrival of the Switch 2 and Mario Kart World means many gamers will have flocked off there, there still appears to be a dedicated F-Zer0 99 fanbase.