8. FAST Racing NEO
Nintendo is in no hurry to produce a new F-Zero, which has left a huge futuristic racer gap in its lineup. Shin'en Multimedia is prepared to fill that hole with FAST Racing NEO, and even though the only available game materials thus far are a handful of screenshots from the company's Twitter page, you ought to be paying extremely close attention. Why should you have so much faith in Shin'en's capabilities? Because it has proven time and time again that it knows Nintendo hardware almost as much as Nintendo itself, if not more so.
This German third-party developer has worked exclusively on Nintendo platforms for the past decade and a half, and in that time, it has accomplished feats of technical wizardry that place it an echelon far above studios several times its size. One of Shin'en's earliest games was Iridion 3D, a launch title for Game Boy Advance that sported very convincing faux 3D graphics when just about every other GBA offering looked like Super Nintendo fare. Then there was 2010's Jett Rocket, an impressive-looking 3D platformer on WiiWare that became even more impressive once you remembered that WiiWare file sizes were restricted to 40 MB.
FAST Racing NEO also happens to be a sequel to another WiiWare marvel called FAST Racing League. Considering how amazing League looked on previous-generation hardware with all the limits of the WiiWare platform, you can only imagine how NEO will look and feel on Wii U, free from all of Nintendo's past digital roadblocks.
