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Tube Slider is a hover-vehicle racing video game developed for the Nintendo GameCube system, launched exclusively to the North American markets in 2003. It was developed by NDcube at a time when they were a relatively obscure semi-property of Nintendo.
Gameplay[]
The game is a futuristic, high-speed hovercraft race à la the F-Zero series, which incidentally NDcube had helped develop a game for on behalf of Nintendo - the F-Zero: Maximum Velocity just two years back. The game slightly differs from the typical design of F-Zero races in that the hover racers speed across transparent tubes, in which there are 10 different variations of to select from.
Otherwise, the rest of the racing elements are straightforward, with a choice of Grand Prix competitions or free solitary runs. A total of 15 hover-crafts are available to choose from as well along with palette swaps.
Development[]
Having previously worked on the creation of the high-profile F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, the developers set on working on another high-speed, futuristic hover racing game. This ultimately resulted in the creation of this game as the end product; although it bore striking resemblances to the F-Zero franchise, this was a separate, one-shot project of NDcube.
At any rate, this game was fairly low-profile which was not helped by the cancellation of releases in Japan and possibly Europe. Although the developer was a subsidiary of Nintendo, the latter seemingly had no involvement in it with their resources likely spent on the F-Zero GX instead, the GameCube iteration of F-Zero.
IGN have speculated that this game could possibly have been the next installment of F-Zero in its early stages of design planning by NDcube, but whether this was the case is unknown and rather unlikely. [1]
External links[]
- Tube Slider at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Tube Slider at GameFAQs