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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..."
well, the point is that only the last quarter of the last lap matters, regardless of how anyone else drives.
makes it kinda useless to do long racing, but then again it's more of a fighting game than anything else. it would be useful if it was labeled as such straight up.
personally i've always hated the rubberband approach.. ever since ironmans offroad(just nitro on the last lap because if you do it earlier the ai is going to catch up anyways regardless of how well you drive). it makes long races pointless as it really is just down to how you drive the last lap(and who uses what bonuses there, in comical carting games it sometimes makes even sense to fall back on purpose so that you're not nro1 on the last lap.. until you get to use some bonus and drive to victory).
same kind of thing is used with ai in lots of other games too though(1 on 1 fighting mostly.. in loads of fighting games the computers reflex speed depends on how good it has deemed you to be and there's even couple of games if you play them too well it becomes sharply impossible as ai will block everything.).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The item system makes SMK different from realistic driving games, because you're not driving for hours only to never catch up to the leader.
It's very satisfying to shoot a shell at a player in front of you to take the lead and the win. You prepared that shell just for them, they should have prepared a defence (I would run entire races in the SNES original with a banana peel or shell hanging out behind me while in 1st). It's not like you can't just look at the other person's screen and realise they're coming to get you.
It adds another element into the mix.
And in my day you didn't get boosts from sliding! And we didn't need any fancy-schmancy polygons either. Mode 7 all the way!
Seriously. Not only are they diminishing, but arcades are made up of only three types of games: fighting games (Tekken, Marvel vs Capcom, etc), gun games (Time Crisis), and racing games, with a ratio of about 50:30:20, and all of them cost a buck to play, so much so that machines have dollar bill acceptors built into them. WTF is that? Gone are the good old quarter plunkers which I wasted my allowance on back in the day. Games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Alien vs. Predator, Golden Axe, Gauntlet (Oh man, so many quarters went into Gauntlet). Plus pinball, pinball is so hard to find these days. Every arcade will have maybe 1 token pinball machine, and it will be something lame like "Roller Coaster Tycoon Pinball". Not that I don't appreciate a good franchise pinball machine, "Star Trek: The Next Generation Pinball" kicks ass :-) Basically, there aren't any games out there that make me want to compulsively drop quarters in to the machine. Maybe I'll play a game at the movie theater before a movie, but I almost never feel like dropping more money in to continue. The last game I really liked was probably the Star Wars Trillogy game. And even that hasn't been popular in arcades since the late 90's.