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

[gl4ss]

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.).

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.

Re:So um...

[Gothic_Walrus]

It came...and went.

From what I've heard online, the machine is somewhat rare. I've never seen one, and most of the people who have have seen it in one location only.

Arcades seem to be almost completely dead in America. If the market wasn't so small now, it would be easier to find. As it is, though, how many arcades exist where the investment that would be needed for a giant and relatively complex machine that may or may not result in a profit?

Short version: it's out there, but good luck finding it.

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 :(

Re:Of course it's coming to Japan

[MagicDude]

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.

Re:So um...

[SetupWeasel]

First, get a load of this site that has catalogued F-Zero AX sites in the US that they can find. They haven't found many.

Second, F-Zero GX/AX was made by Sega's Amusement Vision.

Third, you may be thinking of the arcade hardware itself. Namco, Nintendo, and Sega teamed up to develop the "Triforce" arcade hardware which is used in F-Zero AX and the Mario Kart arcade game.

Re:I think...

[shufler]

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.

"rubberband" system?

[DavidD_CA]

...but with the new rubber-band system ... the races become a really close-pitched match..."

Yes, shooting a rubber-band into your opponent's eye is a sure-fire way to get back into the race!