I’ve been playing racing games ever since I was a kid but was never into Nintendo. I played everything from Crash Team Racing to Assetto Corsa and everything in between, but never own a Mario Kart game.
Just in the last year my roommate picked up a Wii U and I played through 8. It doesn’t necessarily do anything that other racing games haven’t individually done better and there’s nothing truly unique.
That being said, the one thing it does better than anyone else is precision and feedback. It is exceptionally tight and responsive compared to others like it. It’s also just incredibly well animated and visually consistent. The game still looks good a decade later, no issues.
I would akin a lot of what Nintendo does to Apple. Not necessarily the first, or the most powerful, but almost always the most polished.
It’s fun because you never know what will happen. It’s not totally random, the more skilled players will tend to win more often than not, just not every time. Also there are other game modes than just racing. Back when me and my friends played on SNES and N64, it was almost always battle mode.
Yup. In a regular racing game, if one person knows how to play, they’re going to wreck everyone else, and that’s not fun. Mario Kart is more accessible, and the items, it adds an extra influence element to the game.
Oh my goodness, someone else who played ghost master! What a quirky awesome game! I wasn’t aware it was PC exclusive, because who the hell consideres PC to be “exclusivity”
A lot of the game before you escape the testing track, minus maybe the point you are told about momentum jumps, feel like one big tutorial without even realizing you’re in one. It’s done very well.
When I played through Portal in dev commentary mode, I was surprised at the time to realize they’re basically trying to teach you things through the whole game (or at least heavily signpost). Made me realize a lot about game design, and design in general.
I’m here to say Portal as well, specifically because, once you really look for it, you realise that about 90% of the game is tutorial. Like, seriously, basically everything leading up to “The cake is a lie” is teaching you the skills you need for the final sequence. It’s a massive tutorial followed by one level of actual game, and it’s beautiful, precisely because you don’t even notice that the tutorial hasn’t ended.
Despite not owning one, I really like the Steam Deck because I suspect it has made my transition to Linux far smoother (for a while, I dual booted because I was fearful that gaming on Linux would be difficult.)
There’s a lot of videos and articles like this one discussing how Stage 1-1 of Super Mario Bros for the NES is a cleverly designed tutorial for the core game mechanics.
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Aktywne