Retro Gaming Australia

The launch of the PS4 in North America has me thinking about my history with console launches, and how leaps in hardware made for new gameplay experiences. Super Monkey Ball was originally an arcade game, but being a post 2000 release, seeing it in an arcade outside of Japan was an impossibility, making the GameCube launch release most people’s first experience with the game. It was kind of an evolution of the Marble Madness concept, guiding a ball around a level, except that this time, you controlled the level rather than the ball. Simple at first, but it got bloody hard.

F-Zero AX was the arcade equivalent of F-Zero GX, released by Nintendo and Sega for the not-widely-used Triforce arcade system, which was based on GameCube hardware. Players of F-Zero GX could take their GameCube memory cards to an arcade with an F-Zero AX arcade machine and download a save file that would unlock the AX Cup, letting them race on the F-Zero AX tracks on the home version of the game. Those not fortunate enough to have access to an AX arcade machine had to beat story mode on hard to unlock the AX Cup, which is a legendary feat few can accomplish.

It turns out that the entirety of F-Zero AX was actually sitting unaccessible on the F-Zero GX disc. Some industruous hackers armed with copies of the GameCube Action Replay have dug into the depths of the disc and found the arcade game nestled within.

If you have an Action Replay or Gameshark, you can find the code necessary to make GX boot into AX here.