That One Level / F-Zero

F-Zero is a series with dozens of courses across its history of six games^note Or ten, if you count expansions and AX, which is the arcade counterpart to GX, as separate games. As such, several of those courses are bound to give players some good old road rage at 1,000 km/h.

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F-Zero (1990):

• Both Death Wind courses, thanks to said wind blowing you around. Death Wind 2 takes it further and throws in 90 degree turns. There are boost arrows on the course...which not only shoot your machine up to a whopping 999 km/h (more than what a manual boost can achieve; for reference, vehicles in this game top out anywhere between 438-478 km/h without boost), but also make it nigh-unsteerable and in Death Wind 2, some of them are placed right before turns, making them prime Schmuck Bait. In the original SNES game, Death Wind 1 on Master difficulty is extraordinarily hard when playing as the Golden Fox. For many years (i.e., until the late 2010s), no one ever provably attained 1st place on it without cheating or tool assistance.
• Silence is the last course in the Knight League, and it's a considerable step up from the previous courses, featuring many 90-degree turns on narrow roads, including an S-curve consisting of two hairpin turns in quick succession. Expect to bounce off the barriers a lot here. There's also a part where the road forks in two: Take the longer route and you stand to lose position, but take the shorter route and you have to carefully slip through a grid of mines and be able to hit the jump pad as you make a sharp left, or else end up in the dirt zone and lose time (or use a boost).
• White Land 2. While the hairpin turns were slightly problematic, the jump at the end is what gets most people. This is because it requires you to hold down to make it across. At no other point in the game do you need to do that. Granted, the instruction manual DOES tell you that on the controls page, but still.
• Fire Field throws all sorts of horrible turns at you and has the pit zone on a detour that could make you lose standing.

F-Zero X:

Original game

• Mute City 2: Technique, thanks to the weird straightaway that greatly narrows to one side of the track and another.
• Red Canyon 2: Slim Line is very narrow track that, thanks to the tall walls, makes it difficult to gauge where to go.
• Space Plant: Cylinder & High Jump is a standard narrow track that, right before said high jump, gives you two very slim strips for the Pit Zone that's split by a turn that's mostly Slip Plate. Getting any boost for Lap 3 is a pain.
• Sand Ocean 2: Wave Panic lives up to its name, with a heavily undulating track with sharp turns. Build up any speed and you'll fall off all too easy.
• Big Hand: Deadly Curves is a track shaped like a hand, so you get some seriously sharp turns to deal with. But that's not the worst part, the worst is that most of the first half of the track has no rails and has icy ground to slip on. Trying to keep up with the A.I. racers is a nightmare on this track because of it.

Expansion Kit

• Silence 3: Inverted Loop has two downward loops that force you to keep off the boost for risk of going too fast and flying off the track into the abyss.
• Big Foot: Very Deadly Curves takes everything that made Big Hand hard and multiplies it, with even tighter turns in much quicker succession.

F-Zero: Maximum Velocity:

• The second course of the Queen Cup, Tenth Zone East: Plummet Circuit. It's full of jumps across crooked gaps, and due to the somewhat short draw distance, you need to react fast to maneuver correctly. One lapse in concentration and it's off to the "YOU LOST" screen you go!

F-Zero GX and AX:

Courses

• Big Blue: Drift Highway is a simple level at first glance, with wide turns and enough space to take most of them, and just one tricky chicane near the end. But much like Phantom Road below, the A.I. racers play so well on this course compared to other tracks that in the higher difficulties, nothing short of a perfect race will give the player the chance of a good ranking, let alone winning the race. The last stretch also has multiple boost pads alongside the only pit zones (and a jump), forcing the player to balance the energy recharge with boosts to keep ahead (as the A.I. likes to go all out at this part). Its only saving grace is that it's the first track in the second cup, which can also qualify as a Difficulty Spike. Somehow the five-star (read: highest difficulty) rated Ordeal circuit (the other race at Big Blue in GX) manages to be substantially less demanding than the two-star Drift Highway.
• Mute City: Serial Gaps is a track with a lot of jumps, not enough railings, sharp turns and is surprisingly short. Combine that with a general lack of pit zones and the last jump having a tough to make shortcut that you have to make in order to place and you get the most hated track in the game. Seeing as both this and Drift Highway are in the same cup (Sapphire) you need to prepare accordingly to possibly squander both of these races just to make it out and collect your major points towards first rank in the middle three circuits, none of which present nearly as much challenge to place in as the bookending races.
• Lightning: Half Pipe. The entire track is a half-pipe where veering too close to its edges will instantly throw you off course. There are also many sharp corners which can throw your craft off-balance if taken too tightly. Finally, the last section of the track features laser beams that sap some of your energy, and it's really tough to see them coming at the high speeds you normally traverse. Did we mention that there is just one pit area in the entire track as well?
• Fire Field: Undulation. It's got a wavy track with no railings, a very bumpy track when there are railings and home stretch through a very narrow piece of track that'll make those make-or-break moments with little health all the more nerve wracking.
• Cosmo Terminal: Trident. To elaborate, it's a long track with intermittent splits but absolutely no rail guards. While high speed racers can take advantage of the straightaways, careful piloting is required so they don't fall off the track. Oh, and it's the first track of the Diamond Cup.
• Phantom Road: Slim-Line Slits. The track is almost never straight and it gets very narrow in the latter half, where the track will start throwing in icy ground and pit zones right before gaps in the track where it suddenly narrows again. If that's not bad enough, then the sudden, blind, and sharp last turn will more likely than not ruin you. This is probably the only five-star difficulty track that actually earns its rating.
• On a lesser note, Lightning: Thunder Road & Green Plant: Spiral (the only other five-star difficulty circuits in GX). They're easier to survive on than the GX courses, but they're also longer than the other courses.

Story Mode

• Chapter 3 can be insanely hard for an early mission. All other racers have superior, seemingly infinite boosts just like in Chapter 7, and the track is merciless, requiring one to master cornering, jump landing and boost managing in order to stand a chance.
• Chapter 6 (where you basically reenact Speed with an F-Zero racer) is frequently cited as this as well. It's made significantly easier if you move the Acceleration/Max Speed slider all the way to the Acceleration side, which gives you better handling. The trade-off, of course, is that your Max Speed goes way down, to the point of resting just above the speed limit on Very Hard, so you're not allowed to make even a single mistake.
• Chapter 7 is infamous for its bullshit difficulty. Aside from the difficulty and the pacing necessary to persevere (three laps on Normal, four laps on Hard, five laps on Very Hard), Chapter 7's biggest challenge is that it's one big Luck-Based Mission. If you manage to retire Black Shadow at the very beginning of the race (as in, right after the 3-count start) or somehow catch up to him so that you can ram him, the race becomes much more manageable (Blood Falcon—usually second behind Black Shadow—and a few other racers such as Dr. Stewart and Mrs. Arrow tend to zip into the Top 6, but they don't seem to be running on the same engine as Black Shadow). However, there's a good chance that some overly-aggressive racer will spin into you, knocking the Blue Falcon off-course. Conversely, there's also a chance that the A.I. will cause other characters (or even Black Shadow and Blood Falcon themselves) to push Black Shadow off of the track. It's half luck, half skill. It's so bad that there's an infamous NSFW rant about GX's Chapter 7 on the Something Awful forums.

F-Zero: GP Legend

Courses

• Port Town: Forked Road requires you to hit a jump at an odd angle to make it onto the shorter "fork". If you can't make it, you'll have to take the longer route, which means you'll end up losing standing.
• Illusion: Abyss Drop is a mildly technical track with no rails. Good luck hitting two consecutive hairpins.

F-Zero Climax

Courses

• Lightning: G Trace. The faster route requires huge jumps onto what are basically islands, with jump strips at weird angles. Without memorization and practice, taking that route will just send you crashing, whether due to losing track of the course or overshooting.
• Lightning: Loss Landing. The track branches off in four ways. Trying to take the short route is almost suicidal.
• Mist Flow: Puzzle Ring gives you some tough turns and ends with a helix with a jump in the middle. All in an environment with poor visibility.
• Both versions of Fire Field: Burn Out. While the track is rather wide, most of it is littered with hazards. One wrong move and you'll end up bouncing off of one bomb after another.
• Illusion: Lost Way is a basic track with no rails. That already is difficult. With 2 and 3 the track gets more complicated, with 3 throwing so many 90 degree turns and a straighaway that's only two "tiles" long it's silly.
• Big Blue: Big Billow is a Marathon Level with many sharp corners, icy sections, and sharp corners ON icy sections.

Survival

• All of the Illusion: Brake Link stages. You need to time your braking so that you stop on the checkered floor and not overshoot into the pit. However, the game's Type 1 controls, which are the default, don't have a brake button. Since most players never use the brakes, they may not think to add a brake function for Survival, meaning clever use of Side Attack is needed instead to win, which is even more difficult.

F-Zero 99

This game uses the original F-Zero as a base, so many of the existing examples from those games apply. But the 99-player format can make some courses even more challenging:

• Death Wind I is a rather annoying track for being one of the regular mode courses. The track's gimmick is wind that constantly pushes you eastward, which would normally be a mild inconvenience but becomes a much more challenging obstacle when you're sharing the road with 98 other players. It also makes Red Bumpers much more aggravating to be around since it becomes much easier to make a mistake and accidentally collide with one, causing a cavalcade of problems if you mess up. To up its frustration factor even further, it is also the penultimate race of the Knight Grand Prix, with many a player being gatekept out of unlocking Silence because of Death Wind I knocking them around until they are eliminated from the Prix. Its basic shape also means that any screw-up is a death-spell for the top 3, as at that point the leader is practically guaranteed the win, making it boring to frontrun and frustratingly chaotic to place high in. It's even been derisively called "Baby Park with a wind gimmick", with its one concession being that while it has booster arrows on the track like its SNES original, the speed boost is nerfed and they don't make your machine into an unsteerable rocket during the boost period anymore.
  • And let's not forget, Death Wind II adds about a half-dozen or so 90-degree turns to the second half of the track. And while the speed boosters might no longer ensure that you're going to lose control and smash into a wall, you're still quite liable to do so - and because it's "safer" to take a bunch of sharp turns at merely 700 KPH rather than 999 KPH, you're now all but expected to hit every single one of the boosters if you want any hope of winning. Try not to Crash Out.
• Silence is a track already infamous for its incredibly difficult hairpin turns; now mix that in with the chaos of having to dodge exploding Red Bumpers on every other turn as you approach the finish line and it verges onto sheer madness. The upshot is that it only appears in the final race of the Knight Grand Prix, so if you've been prudent at taking kills in previous races you can go in with a large Power advantage. In addition, the land mines disappear completely after exploding rather than turning into lava pits. Furthermore, at this point only at most 20 contenders remain, so it's much less chaotic than the previous rounds; but this also comes at a price, since the fewer instances of inter-vehicle contact means super sparks and thus Super Boosts are much less frequent, if you can even get one in during this race.
• White Land II caps off the Queen League. The good news: The infamous "hold down to make it across" jump has been shortened, making it much more reasonable for a first-timer. The bad news: This means that those who know the original game like the back of their hand and expected that jump to be left untouched aren't going to be watching 19 opponents plunge into the abyss. Furthermore, the rest of the course is still as difficult as it was in the SNES version, featuring consecutive hairpins that will cut deeply into your speed. If you were relying on the Fire Stingray's high top speed to carry you through the previous four races, that advantage becomes moot here. Oh, and cutting across the extra-thick barriers on the hairpins at the expense of your energy is even riskier here since unlike in the SNES original, boost comes out of your energy meter instead of being stocks you gain after every lap, so you're forced to naturally recover your speed after this section, or use a boost and risk turning into yet another crater on the road from a barrier collision or being bonked by an opponent before you can race back to the pit. And just as with Silence, you're up against 19 racers max, so you MIGHT be able to use the Skyway to bypass the difficult bits once, MAYBE twice.
• Fire Field is the finale to the King League and it's just as bad as it was in the SNES version. Landmines appear right after the starting line and you will have players who will try to ram you into them. There are also several tight 180 turns with some of them happening back to back, making it quite difficult to get through them without hitting the barriers at least once. The length of the track is quite long and if you hadn't been extending your energy meter in the previous tracks, you might not have enough energy to stay ahead or even survive the race - and the game still forces you to choose between the one pit lane on the map, or a slight shortcut. Lastly, the Bumpers will make the already hard course even harder due to how far you're sent flying from hitting one and the track itself being quite narrow. With all of this put together, combined with how nearly every track hazard you've encountered to this point is present and accounted for, good luck figuring out the best place to use the Skyway... which again, you'll be lucky if you can use more than once.
  • Even in Practice mode, Fire Field manages to be this, as the time to beat to get the level's backdrop for your Pilot Card is much stricter than the other tracks. Knowing how to hit the barriers to maneuver around tight turns and corners is all but mandatory if you want a shot at obtaining it.
• January 2024 introduced the first ??? track. See the above mentioned White Land II and Death Wind I? Slap those together in an unholy Frankenstein's monster of a track and you get this track. Dealing with the worst parts of White Land II (including tight turns and awkward jumps) is already hard enough; try doing it with Death Wind's wind gimmick pushing you around at the same time, not to mention still having to avoid getting completely screwed over by Death Wind I's straightaways.
• Silence is already considered difficult by many players, but the mirror version cranks it up to eleven. Along with fighting against muscle memory when it comes to playing a mirrored track, mirrored Silence adds Spinners that make you spin, lose speed, and go flying sideways if you touch them. Since Silence is a pretty narrow track, one touch of a Spinner can make you ping pong against the walls, other players, or Bumpers that are driving nearby, costing you a ton of energy. The split path where mines used to be are replaced by Spinners, making it extremely tricky to drive through. And unlike mines, Spinners don't disappear when hit, ensuring that they are a hazard on every lap.