N64 racer F-Zero X is Europe’s 100th Wii Virtual Console release (AKA where is my 64DD Expansion Kit?)

15 June 2007

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Posted by:Ferry

On June 4th the American Wii Virtual Console received its 100th title, that being Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

Today it’s Europe’s time to celebrate, retro-style, with the release of the 100th Virtual Console game: F-Zero X!

This Nintendo 64 classic, along with comedy platformer J.J. & Jeff, joins the catalogue of 99 other golden oldies that you can download and play on Wii, taken from the archives of NES, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Sega Mega Drive and Turbografx. Australia/New Zealand only got F-Zero X today, which they didn’t mind.

The Virtual Console library includes some of the greatest Nintendo games of all time, such as Super Mario Bros., Super Mario World, Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

Plus, there’s a huge selection of third-party titles to choose from, too, including such classics as Sonic the Hedgehog, Street Fighter II, Gunstar Heroes and Gradius; and Turbografx titles (all of which never previously saw an official release in Europe) including R-Type, Bonk’s Adventure, Soldier Blade and many others.

Not to sound ungrateful, but I think Nintendo is missing opportunities by only releasing an emulation of the original. They should have translated and added the Japanese N64′s 64DD add-on F-Zero X Expansion Kit to this N64 release, because it has two new tough-as-nails Championship Cups named Cup DD & Cup DD-2 (I played them and died a lot) and to allow you to create and save custom courses (an entire six-track cup) and custom cars (with your name, etc.)

But I believe the issue lies precisely with that, saving doesn’t work on Wii with bigger than tiny files, since you can’t even save a Mario Kart 64 ghost rider, which originally was done to a Memory Pack (or in this game three ghost racers on each course). So the chance of getting the 38MBs of writable space (on a virtual 64DD game disk of 64MB so-to-speak) were slim to begin with despite the 500MB internal memory the Wii has.

Here’s how the F-Zero X Car Editor would’ve looked:

Here’s how the F-Zero X Track Editor would’ve looked:

Editing continued here:

And here’s what a Custom Track would look like:

Looks great doesn’t it? Well, at least there’s the random track generator included at the end of F-Zero X.