Online Quality

To anyone who loves to mock the online quality of Nintendo, you cannot do it to this game, or even any of the games of the "99" series. If you have online problems, the problem is on your side. 100%.

Either your connection's terrible in which case I cannot do anything for you, but most of the problems that I had with the game, it was all solved with either a fix of my internet connection setup (cables, Wi-Fi setup, etc), or by rebooting the Switch system entirely, this is most likely what you need to do the most.

It's not entirely perfect of course, but for the entire year of its existence, I have legit no serious complaints to make to the game.

Datamining The Future

Now... let's go over what we originally datamined at first.

I'm not gonna go over what was clearly experimental content such as a 3D Mute City I map or other things like that.

Extra Modes

We found code and references to 2 modes that have yet to be added to the game since launch:

Arcade Mode It is believed to work similar to old arcade racing games, where you have a limited time, and you go through Time Gates (also datamined) to add more time to your counter to let you either finish the course, or run out of time and rank out.

Survival Mode We found some references to it for the schedule file, but also what is feeling like to be a circle plane. I speculate it to maybe work like a battle royale where the playable place reduces in size, but it's hard to fully understand how it works at this point in time.

I have no idea when these modes would be added, if ever, actually, it's still subject to interpretation.

Extra Courses

We also found references to 4 placeholder course files:

Sulfur Swamp

Volcania

Fungus Swamp

Forest

Three of them uses recolored Mute City I and a custom but clearly placeholder background. But the inclusion of Forest placeholder was definitely an odd one.

It was actually hard to say what it could have been, but Forest is actually the name of a course in BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 on Satellaview, and more to that, it's the name of a course that we never actually had recovered until the recent BS F-Zero Deluxe hack that used tons of tools in an attempt to reproduce them. We still don't have the original data yet, though. The bounty for that is still up, by the way.

I did definitely get my chances to suspect that maybe, NST was looking into Satellaview tracks, alongside brand new tracks, but maybe that Forest was just also a placeholder name.

But considering the inclusion of Ace League now, I doubt it is a coincidence. Especially when they bothered to have pretty creative names for the others, Forest just sticks out from the rest for being a pretty generic word, an argument that I had already used back then.

But I also noticed something odd, though, on this one I will DEFINITELY give an update if they ever fix this, but the Ace League's best machine ranks are not saved in the stats. This is odd, I don't know if it's a bug, or if it's actually voluntary... because IF it is, then I think the Ace League will change in the future to include the rest of the Satellaview tracks alongside a new Joker (?) League.

UPDATE from October 16th: F-Zero 99 1.5.1 update just released, and they did fix this so I was just doing copium. Not that I didn't expect it, it was a very shaky thing.

In one of the updates, before the inclusion of Secret Tracks, we had seen what was named Death Wind I Remix, which was the Death Wind I + White Land fusion. It's not unlikely that in the future, we will receive what would be called Remix tracks, for possibly entire leagues, but we might need to wait a while before we get those.

Incoming Event?

As NST is definitely aware of datamining attempts, they have been actually pretty busy scrubbing every unused files related to future content especially.

But then they missed a file in the latest 1.5.0 update that added Ace League:

It seems they are looking into doing a Mario VS Donkey Kong Festival Event in the future, including a Mini Mario League, and 4 Star Rivals called Mario, Mini Mario, Donkey Kong and Toad.

There's not much else to it, as it is just text. This text was not localized in most languages from English.

If I had to guess though, I don't rule out that this event might happen for the anniversary of the Mario VS Donkey Kong remake in February 2025. Mario VS Donkey Kong was also the baby of NST, ever since the first of the series on GBA, so it might just be meant to be a fun thing they wanted to do.

I would expect the Mini Mario League to contain either brand new or modified existing tracks to a newer style related to Mario VS Donkey Kong, new music, possibly new machines, and, definitely to me, new emotes to unlock. I expect that to be a limited time event like the others, though what you unlock will definitely stay to your workshop, like previous events, and possibly Training mode if there's indeed new courses to play that they care enough to let us play after the event.

I wouldn't be surprised if we have to collect Mini Marios or something like that, but either way, it seems NST is trying to be a little more daring to F-Zero 99 and possibly follow the footsteps of Tetris 99's themes.

Depending on the situation of the Ace League machine stats, I might have to update this post if I really somehow went too far with my suspicions. (UPDATE: Yes I went too far, they fixed the bug with 1.5.1.)

I do expect more updates related to Ace League for sure, as I do think we'll get Classic versions of the Ace League tracks, and possibly Mirror versions too.