Speed Zone’s premise is promising: It’s a high-speed racing game that takes you through several unusually designed tracks similar to those of F-Zero, and it comes in a retail package around $30 US. This sounds great at first, and the variety of tracks and futuristic car designs to play around with are enticing... but the core game around that fails to deliver on the promise.

Actually, let me rephrase that: Speed Zone is one of the worst games I’ve ever played on the Wii, or indeed any system. It starts out okay, putting you on a fairly simple track where your goal is to build up enough speed to be ’in the zone’ for several seconds, thus unlocking the next track. I ran into problems immediately however, as the ’Wiimote as steering wheel’ controls have about two levels of input: Barely even registering, or being far too sensitive and sending you flying all over the road. Well, I’m willing to live with that, so I got a Gamecube pad and tried again.

Now armed with a Gamecube controller, I found I was able to complete the first few courses just fine. Then another problem cropped up, as the course design turned from ’average’, to being genuinely unfair. All sorts of problems arose, such most of the available camera angles preventing me from seeing that there was a massive hole in one course until I had already fallen into it. Another course had turns engineered such that if I hit them at a slightly less than perfectly straight angle, I would fly clear the track and have to respawn. Another course had obstacles that would cause me to respawn right in front of the thing that had stopped me to begin with, resulting in either having to respawn dozens of times or lose several seconds backing off to try again from another angle. Another still was filled with tunnels whose twisting routes were not obvious to follow; driving straight would cause me to go flying for lack of any physical track, and even the tiniest of inclines in one tunnel proved to be near-impossible to drive past, instead sending my car backward at 40 miles per hour!

Suffice to say, the racing segment of Speed Zone just left me alternating between sighing, yelling various profanities, and even the occasional dismayed "Oh come on! That’s ridiculous!" I gave up on that after a while, and moved on to the other major feature: Battle Mode. Like Mario Kart or most vehicular combat games, this mode puts you and several other racers inside an arena, with weapons lying around to blast one another’s cars with; the winner is the one who does the most damage in the time limit provided. This mode is actually competent and I can’t be too hard on it, but at the same time it’s not amazing and I certainly wouldn’t pay the full $30 for just that.

Interestingly enough, Speed Zone offers local multiplayer for up to eight people; you need four Wiimotes and four wired controllers on the Gamecube ports. This sounds awesome, but combined with the camera angle issues mentioned earlier it’s actually not all that good; you get a serious case of diminishing returns after just a few players.

Between a bad camera, mean-spirited or just incompetent track design, and rather poor controls, I found myself alternatingly depressed and enraged as I played Speed Zone. Its battle mode is okay, but on its own it can’t justify this game’s $30 price tag, and the actual racing mode is horrible. If you want some fun racing on the Wii, you have much better options both cheaper and more expensive than this game; check the Virtual Console and Wiiware for cheaper offerings worth your time, or perhaps Mario Kart for the latter. But in any event, stay very far away from this hideous excuse of a racing game... I truly feel I’m a less fun person for having played Speed Zone.