F-Zero GX is not a subtle game. It is faster than lightning and louder than a trainwreck. It features hovering cars racing at ridiculous speeds. Its hero wears blue tights and a silly mask. This is all OK. For what the game lacks in subtlety it makes up for in boundless enthusiasm and big noisy laffs. It is one of the best games of the year.

Fans of racing titles will recognize the F-Zero name. The idea is that sometime way off in the future, when we are all fully and completely bored with Formula One and its no-surprises-no-passing-no-racing approach to motorsports, the FIA or its worthy successor will come up with a new circuit designed to fix all F-1's problems.

This circuit, imaginatively, will be called F-Zero. Instead of high-performance cars with gasoline engines, it will feature superjets that hover above the roadway. For drivers, instead of boring Germans and Finns and Canadians, it will feature super-heroes who have names like "Captain Falcon" and "Samurai Goroh" and "Dr. Stewart," and all of whom will wear tights. They will be encouraged to ram their hovering superjets into each other whenever the mood strikes. Even if you have not already sampled an F-Zero game (on the Super Nintendo or the N64 or the Game Boy), you will agree that these are all fantastic improvements over F-1.

The good news about this new release is that it is an improvement over not just boring old 21st century car racing, but over all those other releases too. This is futuristic racing as you have never experienced it, faster and smoother and more eye-poppingly gorgeous than you have ever imagined possible. You will play for hours and hours and hours, only stopping when the furious speed gets oppressive and you find yourself pale and trembly and weak with carsickness. You will be impressed. No, awed.

Like most racers, F-Zero GX asks you to complete in several Grand Prix series. If you place well you will earn a lot of points, and if you are the overall points champion at the end of a series, you win a Cup, and possibly also some of the game's unlockable treats. Hidden tracks and hidden Cups and hidden drivers all serve as race-bait, urging you to take just one more spin, to run just a couple more laps.

By this point you are no doubt terribly excited and eager to put down this review and pick up a controller. You should know a few things first, however.

First, while it is easy to go fast in F-Zero GX, it is not so easy to go fast accurately. You will go flying off the road and blow up your hoverjet many times before you memorize these tracks and learn their sweet spots, and you will accordingly endure a lot of carsickness. You will find playing through a Gravol fog challenging indeed, but worth the effort.

Second, the game's much-ballyhooed "Story" mode is really kind of an embarrassment. As we complete the mode's challenges (all races of one sort or another, but some with obstacle-course elements), we learn all about Captain Falcon, the masked hero in blue tights who serves as the Michael Schumacher of F-Zero, and we also learn about the rogues and villains and good(-ish) guys who make up the rest of the driver list.

The Story racing is high-speed and excellent, true, but the video sequences that provide the narrative... Herm. They are just a little too overwrought for their own good. They take a game already teetering on the edge of camp and shove it well into anim魧eek terrain.

That is too bad, really, because the anim頧eeks already have plenty of games to call their own.