I don't need to use many words to describe how bad and overrated -- let alone unrewarding -- this game is.
This game is hard, no doubt in my mind about that. It takes a while to get used to playing the game right, and even when you do, you will probably still have a lot of trouble winning even on Beginner in the Pawn circuit. The game can be extremely frustrating; if you hit the wall, odds are you're going to be bouncing around the course striving to maintain control. The racecourses even in the Pawn circuit range from being a joke (once you find the racer and gameplay style to your liking) to frustratingly difficult. Big fault number one: right off the bat you're in a race of 15 total racers and you have 5 laps to complete, but as the race progresses the number of racers next to your position in the race mysteriously lessens; that number next to your position is the lowest position you must maintain to stay in the race -- if you cross the finish line in any lap and you're below that rank, you're ranked out and you lose. This may not sound all that bad, but it goes from 15 to 10 to 7 to 5 and for the last lap, 3. The fact that you have to stay in the top 5 to even GET to the final lap is ridiculously demanding.
Another problem: you cannot see far ahead of you on the road, and your racer is going on average above 400km/h, so you always go barreling into every turn without any idea how bad a turn it's going to be -- unless you tear your eyes away from the road to the little map in the corner of the screen. Well, this wouldn't be as much of a problem if you could practice these maps, but you can't until you've tried racing them in the championship, so usually in a championship race you find yourself going between ridiculously easy races to being slapped in the face by races like "Twist Circuit". If that sounds fun to you, you're just demented.
Another big problem is how amazingly unrewarding the game is. If you're any kind of racing novice and you finally manage to beat the Pawn Circuit on Beginner (even if one or more of the races you came out in 3rd, indicated by that seizure-flashing 3 when you cross the finish line), you expect some kind of reward, like maybe a new racer, a new game mode, or something. Wrong. You get nothing. Yay! You just wasted [however long it took you to get it right] of your life! If you look at the Tips & Cheats section, you'll see that, to unlock any decent racers, you have to play the game and successfully complete 1,000 laps on any and all of the courses. Racing eventually just unlocks harder courses and harder difficulties. What the hell? When I play a racing game this hard, I expect to be rewarded for my trouble, not have harder crap thrown at me. You think I picked up this game so I could spend hours with an aching thumb yelling obscenities at the top of my lungs? Hell no! I'm going to sell this piece of crapula to some unsuspecting idiot who'll think it's a piece of art or some such nonsense. I can't believe people thought the N64 F-Zero was worse than this. This game bites; don't waste your time or money. But, if you think I'm just some one-in-a-million wacko, this game is for sale by me; only damage is to the box, which got a little squished in being thrown into my closet. It still works like a charm, if you'd call that a charm, and the booklet is in perfect condition -- trust me, you'll need the booklet since there's no in-game tutorial.