Arcade Version of Mario Kart Coming to Japan

Gamespot has the story about a heads up arcade version of Gamecube favorite Mario Kart. The arcade version will apparently have several tweaks from its console brother to allow for the changes in setting. From the article: "The Mario Kart series features an item system so that players can catch up by using them when they're trailing behind, but with the new rubber-band system that Namco implemented [in Mario Kart Arcade GP], the races become a really close-pitched match..."

Comments

Catch-up Items

[Huitzlopochtli]

Is it just me or are methods to help you catch up (i.e., you go faster when you're last place) in racing games kinda cheap? You already get better items when you're down (like the blue shells), making you catch up by other methods ruins the fun of the game.

Re:Catch-up Items

[Daetrin]

They didn't bother to balance the game properly, so they just gave other players an unfair advantage.

That makes no sense at all. In one sense of thinking balancing is exactly what they _did_ do.

If you want to talk in terms of more traditional balancing, to make sure that one one car/team/whatever is equal in stregnth, or has an equal balance of strengths and weaknesses, to all the others, then it doesn't address the issue we're talking about at all. More balanced play acutally makes things _tougher_ on newbies. With unbalanced play an experienced player might choose to give the newbie the stronger team or the newbie might stumble across some combination of factors that the more experienced players haven't discovered yet that gives them a big edge (unlikely, yes, but not impossible.)

In a perfectly balanced game the newbie is going to get their ass kicked everytime until they learn the tactics and get better.

I agree that the rubber-banding (which is _not_ a new feature) can get very annoying at times, but it is not due to lazy programmers. The programmers could have done a lot of other things to "balance" the game between newbies and experts, like _always_ giving the guy in last place a spiked shell, but the designers decided that rubber-banding was a better solution.

Re:Catch-up Items

[BenjyD]

Mario kart isn't really a racing game, it's more a racing-related party game.

Sure, you can play it seriously, blue-spark the whole way round and try to shave 0.1 seconds off your time if you want, but that's not really the point.

That said, it does annoy me that in the cube version, blue shells seem to target whoever was first when they're launched, so you can't drop back to second to avoid them. I'm sure you could do that in the N64 version.

Re:Catch-up Items

[cgenman]

The point of Mario Kart is to be fun competition for groups of people. And where are you going to find larger groups of people than in the arcade?

It needs to be fast. It needs to be fun. It needs to work better if everyone is drunk. Ranking the players on skill is kind of irrelevant.

Of course it's coming to Japan

[ZephyrXero]

Well, if you don't live in Japan, don't bother giving this game a second thought.... arcades are dead in just about every other country, especially the US :(