Genre: Racing
Developer: Shin'en Multimedia
Publisher: Shin'en Multimedia

Many of Fast Racing Neo's track locales are simply jaw-dropping: a water-logged road laced through the eye of a hurricane; a route that looks like it was carved with a pen knife through an endless desert; a paved mid-air trail winding through a blizzard, the whole scene looking as if it were eternally trapped in a snow globe. The ships marry esoteric science fiction with real-world physics applications, and the scenery literally blurs as they dart and sprint around the courses. If there is a fly in the ointment, it's that the art direction is somewhat let down by the lack of resolution, with 720p being a very generous approximation of the title's output.

Some years ago, the overdone "futuristic, evil capitalists have taken over the universe" tropes gave way to a parodied counter-genre-- first seen in games like the original "Unreal Tournament"-- that laced slapstick, timing-based humor with a sense of the absurd. Fast Racing Neo's entire experience is meant to deliver against that backdrop, and the music-- mostly a mixture of techno and dubstep-- perfectly provides the necessary ironic looniness. F-Zero GX voice actor Jack Merluzzi supplies the game's narration, and furthers the aforementioned central motif with lines such as "out of business!" in the event of a loss, before calling out the next track's name-- names which are ever so aptly wry and gut-bustingly funny: try, "Chuoko City", "Daitoshi Station", or "Zvil Raceway" for starters.

Fast Racing Neo's central mechanics are: batty speed-- faster on the easiest difficulties than the Wipeout games are on their hardest difficulties; weighty ship physics-- which are pleasingly reminiscent of the craft in the 3DO's nuanced, 1995 ballblazer revival "BattleSport"; and a "phase shifting" mechanic, whereby the player alternates his ship color to match boost pads. All of these gameplay facets are tremendously fun to employ together. If there is a criticism, it's that technical limitations and design choices conspire to limit the complexity of the tracks perhaps a bit more than in an ideal world.

Manfred Linzner, the crazy German game making whiz, practically created this entire game by himself, doing all of the design, most of the programming, and even some of the music. All accounted for, the entire development team consisted of only five people. This means, of course, that many of the "ticking the boxes" aspects of contemporary industry orthodoxy-- "experience" points, upgradeable ships, and so on-- are not present in any way, shape, or form. And thank the heavenly kahuna for that! Fast Racing Neo is a water-tight breath of fresh air in a world rife with padded, bloated derivative-ware, replete with consequently padded and bloated budgets.