F-Zero 99 is pretty great, and continues Nintendo's Nintendo Switch Online streak of fun, inventive, and most of all excellent "battle royale" games. So far we've had Tetris 99, Super Mario 35, Pac-Man 99, and now F-Zero 99. All of these entries have taken classic games we know and love and remixed them to create insanely fun spins on the originals, bringing competition to the forefront like never before.
So that got us thinking: what other Nintendo properties could the Big N be revisiting for the "99" treatment? It doesn't even need to be a Nintendo property (as is the case with Pac-Man 99), but by and large we stuck with first-party Nintendo games for our pitches.
To hear us go over some of them in real time, make sure you check out the latest episode of NVC, but in the meantime, check them out below:
Nintendo-99 Game Pitches
Starfox 99 and Zelda 99
Jada Griffin
Starfox 99 is a battle royale that pits you against 98 or 99 other Arwing pilots for space supremacy. Taking down other users will drop items like upgrades for your lasers, bombs, and health rings to collect. It will follow the typical BR format, but to up the pace, instead of small ticks of damage, it will be waves of explosions that deal massive damage or eliminate anyone caught outside the arena. The battles will occur in various locations, such as Asteroid fields in space and on planets like Corneria or Venom. Winning matches will earn you various medals to decorate your Arwing with and if you won your previous match, you also get to fly in a gold-colored Arwing to show off your victory.
Zelda 99 instead will be a single-heart challenge dungeon, requiring players to run through a dungeon as fast as they can with a single heart. Speed is the key in Zelda 99. Only one Link can make it out of the dungeon. You will be racing against all the other players to complete each room in the randomized dungeon. Rooms in the dungeon will alternate between puzzles, combat, and avoiding traps, with the final couple of rooms combining these elements. The final room will also include a random boss that Link must defeat without taking damage, as the boss will defeat you in one hit. The first person who clears the dungeon and its boss will open a door to the next room to claim the Triforce.
Donkey Kong 99
Seth Macy
Picture this: Ninety-nine players are dropped into a match and their first order of business is to make it through the first level from the original Donkey Kong arcade game. Picking up the hammer and using it to smash barrels sends them into other, random players' games, but slows you down. The choice then becomes "to I want to knock some people out, or do I want to race to the finish?" After making it through the 3 arcade levels, the remaining players move on to three levels from the Donkey Kong Country series. Game-play would be similar to Super Mario 35, where the levels are slightly remixed, but essentially come in the form of one side-scroller, one minecart, and one underwater level. The goal is to simply reach the end of each level the fastest.
Anyone who makes it to the end of the DKC levels will then find themselves in levels based on Donkey Kong 64. The goal is as simple as the goal of the actual game: collect all the bananas for your assigned ape. Every time you collect a banana, it tosses a banana into the screen of a random, opposing player, until eventually their field of vision becomes a tiny, perilous one, bordered on all sides by bananas. Anyone who survives the time limit then moves onto a modified version of the DK64 multiplayer, which has normal battle-royale rules. The last ape standing is crowned the King of the Kongs.
Earthbound 99
Peer Schneider
Pfff, that’s an easy one. EarthBound 99, of course. Ninety-nine players enter a room and wait for EarthBound to get a sequel, a remake, or for Mother 3 to be localized. The last player to die wins.
Mario Party 96
Reb Valentine
Simple pitch here: Mario Party 96. 96 players all on a Mario Party board at once. Everyone takes their turns simultaneously (with a time limit to roll so you don’t get people slowing down play), and at the end of each turn, everyone plays a minigame. Most minigames remain in the traditional four-player format, hence Mario Party 96 - needs to be divisible by four. You’re divvied up randomly into groups of four and play a game to win coins. At the end of each minigame round, the 12 players with the least amount of coins/stars are eliminated entirely, and play continues until it reaches just 12 players left. Over the next two turns, the bottom four are eliminated each time until there are only four players left on the final turn competing for the Superstar.
As a fun twist, occasionally players might end up in a minigame involving every single player, where coins are awarded to everyone based on their performance. I’m thinking classic games like Crazy Cutter, Face Lift, Hot Rope Jump, Shy Guy Says, and others where everyone essentially plays on their own and then is “graded.” Hot Rope Jump with 96 people sounds especially grueling and I want to see it happen.
Hexagon Heat 99
Brendan Graeber
Two Words: Hexagon Heat. Mario Party’s greatest minigame (and no this is not open for debate), just add 95 more player slots to the minigame! Of course this might be a little tricky as you would either have to create hexagons big enough for 99 people, or have multiple “correct” tiles similar to Fall Guys’ Perfect Match mode. But it would be worth it, trust me.
Egg Emergency 99
Casey DeFrietas
I may be affected by recency bias, but the Egg Emergency minigame in Pokemon Stadium 2 would make a great 99-person game.
Traditionally, the concept is pretty simple. As a Chansey, your goal is to catch eggs as they fall from the top of the screen. Pressing the L button will lean Chansey to the left to catch the egg in that column, R to the right, and pressing nothing leaves Chansey in the middle. Eventually, Voltorb start dropping, threatening to delete some of the egg you’ve already caught, and the pace increases, making it more difficult to catch every egg and avoid every Voltorb.
In Egg Emergency-99, the concept would remain, but with egg catching streaks you’d send hate to opponents, different egg colors would grant different buffs, and there’d be more than just Voltorbs to avoid with varying consequences.
But really, why stop there? Pokemon Stadium-99, with all the mini-games designed for 99 players!
What are you pitches for 99-style games using classic franchises? Please get the discussion going below, I'm really interested in hearing what people come up with.
