Sonic Racing > Mario Kart

Actually, I've never liked Mario Kart very much. Double Dash was a lot of fun, and the Wii one held some interest because it was a unique control for a kart racer, but the MK games are pretty god damn generic otherwise, and have major balance issues.

I mean really, after all this time, they're still doing blue shells. Red shells are annoying enough, but "Hey, you're in the lead, so you lose" weapons? Come on.

The Mario characters are a pretty limited cast when there's such a good Nintendo catalog to draw from, the levels are all so damn generic. I know Mario isn't a game that's loaded with iconic level designs but "Here's a snow level, here's a desert level, here's a city for some reason" is bullshit even if the track is Yoshi shaped and NOTHING HAPPENS. They're static visually and tracktually (fuck you it's a word now).

The point is, Mario Kart is boring and never takes chances. Even though it had a great game (or two) in there, it's stale as fuck.

Sonic All Stars Racing Transformed is the opposite of that. It's really fast, the characters and level designs are not only diverse, but true to source (which is really impressive given that a lot of the sources are old 2D things like Shinobi levels). Also because riding around the same track three times in a row in a kart for 5 minutes gets boring, 3 fucking vehicles, levels that dynamically change through the race, and weapons that are all balanced and do interesting things.

Dumbfire weapons are very vast with a small hitbox, or slow with a large hitbox. A good slide or boost can get players out of the way of tracking weapons. The "attack the leader" weapon doesn't autotarget the leader and blow them up, it puts obstacles in front of them that last long enough to affect the top three at least, meaning it levels the field, but doesn't deliver a win for the second place player.

There is crazy shit happening in every level. Most of the tracks get tore the fuck up and change during the race, sometimes all 3 laps are different, and there's cool thematically relevant stuff going on most of the time that affects the race. Giant air battles, rampaging zombies, and a rapidly flooding opera house thing in New Zealand god damn.

tl;dr - fuck Mario Kart, Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed just wrecked Nintendo's shit. MK better step it the fuck up, because this is a fresh take on the kart racer that makes big changes to the formula that were desperately needed.

Just bought this based on your recommendation, excited about it.

Though for the record I like in MCart how being in the lead is more dangerous. Makes for some exciting games.

Blur > Sonic Racing > Mario Kart

*goes to the corner and sobs*

Emergent, the great thing here is that being first is no less dangerous than Mario Kart, it's just fair. The swarm attack is still going to slow the lead player, but it's going to slow the ones near them as well, without being a guaranteed hit.

The problem with blue shells isn't that they're dangerous, it's that they're unfair. Or total bullshit. I think the latter is a better fit for what's really going on when you look at it critically.

SART seems to have more focus on driving skill rather than just lucky pickups (there's a fair amount of races that are nothing but boost pads, no items, in the single player modes), and they've skipped gamebreaker items entirely. Even the all-star transformation is a speed boost with a weapon attached, but it's not even a full charge speed and you still have to steer the car or you'll get yourself nowhere.

There's a lot of evolution of the genre here that was started the first. Small touches add up fast - lengthened times to get a level three boost charged up, the ability to change directions while drifting, drift inertia (the strength you're pulled in the direction you're drifting increases with time, making it much harder to sustain a long one, especially in a straight section of track), rebalanced weapons, and things like boost levels stacking. If you're already moving at level 1 when you hit a pad, it pushes to level 2, or to level 3. That way if you use a boost and end up right at a pad, you didn't waste it, you just got a better boost out of it.

This is definitely the new direction of kart racers, and I'm curious if Mario Kart will resist as it has, or go with it now that there's real competition. I say real because Blur was still the best kart racer ever, but NOBODY UNDERSTOOD THAT AT THE TIME.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=124645502

Boy this game is fun. I grew up playing a boatload of mario kart 64, and havent really played a kart racer for long since.
I ended up playing it for about 3 hours today and remain pleasantly confused on most of the nuances(only got in the top 3 twice, out of 10 people)

Key Features:
-COLORS EVERYWHERE
-It has open mic at all times, which ended up adding a lot to the atmosphere. Most people used it for light trash talk and laughing when they got confused.
-The networking for private games is completely broken for me, but hopefully they fix that fast so I can have fun coop-tacular games.

I use the X360 gamepad and it works fine, mouse and keyboard is lacking on the airplane sections but meh, you should really have a controller by now.

For those interested, this game is $22.50 (that's 25% off regular price) on GreenManGaming.com with the following code:
GMG25-T6JV8-1NPBA

Link to game.

Just picked up a copy. Once I download it and learn how to play maybe a few of us can run a course or two on Steam.

Man this is getting very tempting to me, especially for like $20. I used to love Mario Kart games quite a bit but the last few iterations have left me cold. And I loved Blur - I think that game didn't get the marketing it deserved because it really was basically an awesome "kart" racer that didn't look it to a casual observer. All these positive comments...

Okay, I'm getting it. It's on.

I know PC and blah, blah, blah, but has anyone tried this on the Vita? (Vita est mort, vive le Vita!)

Props to this game and the recommendation. Definitely a steal at $22.50 over on GMG. I was able to fix my Wireless Xbox Receiver Adaptor last night so now can do more than one controller the right way and just need to talk the wife into giving split-screen a try. Also, we should set up a steam group or something to get some online racing in.

Jesus I thought you were talking about Sonic R for a second and felt a little ill. Gotta be more careful.

Wait, you can play as Gilius Thunderhead, Shinobi, or a VMU in this? Why was I not informed before now?

Charles, I feel exactly the same way. I loved the SNES Mario Kart back in the day but each new one has grown steadily less exciting to me. I thought that maybe it was just that I'd sadly outgrown the genre, but playing this game (which is fun!) makes me think that the design was just devolving away from what had made the original great. Reading that they've got guys from the Blur team onboard makes total sense to me - that game had the good design but the theme was just too serious and by extension felt too violent compared to having the same design in this light-hearted colorful cartoon style.

Also you can play as Football Manager, who I previously didn't realize even counted as a character in anything.

Give this a spin then, Charles. Sumo Digital isn't having any of that bullshit, it wants actual skilled racers to win, the rest is just to shake things up. They've made a good enough game that they have a mode which has no attack items, just boost pads and driving, and it's great.

Plus if you have any love for Sega as it used to be, this is a spectacular tribute. They managed to get Rolling Start in as a joke, and pulled voice clips from Daytona USA for VMU (who races in one of the DUSA cars).

Sumo knows Sega's history, and really had fun with taking it places.

So far the game is really fu^K^K^KASN_App_PcDx9_Final.exe has stopped working
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Damn ASN's!

*hacked by chinese*

I love this game. I've earned a little over 120 stars so far, by unlocking and defeating all the default maps on either Medium (B) or Hard (A), with a couple Expert (S) victories tossed in here and there, and am now running through and clearing mirror maps. I have all but the last 3 characters unlocked, a few of them maxed out, and several more that are level 3-4 at the moment.

I’m playing the PC version, and right now the multi-player in this version seems completely busted. In the last seven days I've tried on and off to find matches, and there are either no PC players at all playing this game, or there’s something else wrong. In all my efforts I've only managed to play one single multi-player game, and there were only two of us in that race.

Aside from the regular crashing that occurs after I finish a race (The .exe crashes and kicks me out of the game almost every time my experience is done being totaled), I have no other technical problems or quibbles in this regard. The game is beautiful, and aside from the crashes it performs absolutely flawlessly on my machine with everything turned way up. I love the look of this game pretty much everywhere but the dreadful pee-water map (whose name escapes me at the moment).

I think the weakest parts of the game are the water and flying sections of the maps, and they have a tendency to make nearly every map worse for their inclusion. They're okay when used in moderation, but some maps rely much too heavily on it. The rest of the game more than makes up for the worst of the maps, but being forced to play through some of them still annoys just the same. Though I can respect the developer's intent to make not only every map different, but each lap of a race different, I think I would have preferred fewer transitions to water & air laps after map transformations.

As for the weapons, there's nothing really special here. I despise the Tornado and wouldn't mind the ability to simply mod it out, but everything else is fine, if a little boring. But I'll take boring over Blue Shells any day of the fucking week. And though I desperately miss Mario Kart's weight system, I'm not missing anything else.

I love the look and variety of the vehicles and locations. Because my only experience with Sega characters and worlds stems from my time plugging quarters into games at the local video arcades in the 80s and early 90s, I have only the vaguest recollections of most of these places, and only a passing familiarity with the like of Sonic the Hedgehog (I'd never even heard of the red and black hedgehogs before this game). I was very familiar with the dudes from Golden Axe and Shinobi though.

Overall I can easily say this is now my favorite Kart Racer. Though I can find stuff to complain about (too fucking many invisible walls and barriers in the skyboxes during flight modes for example), that doesn't stop it from being better than any other kart racer I've played up to this point (I never took the time to play Blur).

Thanks for making this thread and introducing me to the game. With any luck they'll get around to fixing multi-player on the PC some day, until then I'll just finish up what stars I have left to get and unlock those last couple characters.

P.S. Ulala, Alex Kidd, the Shinobi guy, and Gilius Thunderhead have my favorite looking karts so far.

Technically Knuckles (the red one) is an Echidna and not a Hedgehog. My only problem with the water sections is they don't give you the same sense of speed that the driving does - otherwise I like the change-up of steering you have to adapt to for those parts.

I'm ok in the really turbulent water, the sort with huge waves everywhere so I can do flips and stuff to get the speed boosts, but yea, otherwise it's a huge slowdown and quite the drag. Water with an excess of ramps can be ok for this same reason.

I feel fine with the air sequences, but yeah water is weird and I blamed myself for being bad at them for the first half of the game.

Top 3 characters:
1.Football Manager (He has the best sayings post race and is awesome)
2.Tails (Because he is the Yoshi of this game, and I played a lot of yoshi on mario kart until the easy wins with bowser)
3. Danica Patrick(Same vibe as football manager where she feels completely out of place)

My favorites to play so far:
Alex Kidd, simply because I love his vehicle. Even though I maxed him out (and have other characters that need the experience more), he's been my go-to when I'm stuck trying to defeat certain maps on Hard. However, I can't just use him anywhere on Expert Mode, where it seems I have to pay more attention to which specific vehicles and mods would be best on a map to map basis. Up until this point though he's pretty much got everything covered if I just want a quick fall-back. It also seems easier to pull off otherwise difficult flips and air combos (like on shallow waves, and certain lower speed hill crests) with his short little car than with bigger vehicles, but I haven't gone out of my way to test this a great deal.

Wreck-It Ralph: His has a couple very well balanced mods (those being Balanced and Acceleration) that make him useful in a huge variety of situations. I'm not a big fan of his or his vehicle's model though, with my biggest complaint in this regard being that he's too big and blocks the road ahead of me in too many situations (mostly when cresting hills), making it so I can't see what I'm about to run over or crash into in certain key areas of certain tracks. My other minor complaint in this area is that I don't like how his huge wrecking ball swing around during the race, since it can be distracting for me when I'm watching for a tailgater.

I also hate, hate, hate, his constant references to the fact he has his own video game. I don't care, I'm still not buying it!

Shadow: This one seems to give plenty of speed, coupled with great control. Not so great if you're the type that plows into the occasional wall, given that the mod I prefer minimizes his acceleration, but otherwise I find him exceedingly useful indoors with lots of tight tunnels or tubes.

I also like the bike that Shinobi guy (Joe Something) uses. But, unlike Shadow he's not maxed out yet, and as far as I can tell with my current available mods for him, the two of them play so similarly that there's no real reason to choose one over the other at this point except to level him up.

Gotta thank you guys for bringing this to my attention and for the GMG discount code, as it's just a fantastic cart racer. Not too far into it, but my favorite racers so far are Knuckles, Beat from Jet Set Radio, and the Team Fortress guys. I'm really looking forward to unlocking Vyse from Skies of Arcadia, Joe Musashi from Shinobi, and Gilius Thunderhead from Golden Axe.

I have to thank Thorn for gifting me a copy last night. I remember hating the last Sonic racing game I played a few years back. But this one is like night and day.

I have to echo the compliments. I like all the little tricks you can pull off during a race to get boosts. Coming from playing the Mario Kart school of design, it's great that the weapons here actually require some thought to use. I wish that the matchmaking was working, as it would be great to play another cart racer with BFers.

I think AGES might be my favorite, because I mean come on he's a Daytona USA car that plays Daytona USA sound clips, AND as a boat he's a Dreamcast controller. If he took his Chao out on a trip as his victory screen it'd be perfect.

Also nice, I think if you drop a tornado, it's capable of multiple hits. The fact weapons don't just fire forward or back but some actually function differently is just awesome to me. Tornadoes work like mines, I think swarms form immediately behind you too, that's just great.

Things it took me too long to figure out:

You get a starting boost not by pressing the accelerator on "Go!" like Mario Kart, but by pressing somewhere between "3" and "2".

Right stick causes you to do barrel rolls or flips when you're in the air. Doing one gives you a boost.

The Hot Rod pickup overheats after a bit and causes you to slow down. Press A before that happens to emit a fireball and keep going with no loss of speed.

The same for starting boosts. There was a specific timing in the first game to get a boost, but now you can stack three. You hit it at the same relative time, between numbers/just as it comes up. Hit all three and you get a triple boost, but if you mistime on you lose all the boost.

I think the best trick boost is 4+ tricks to get blue, and yeah, the hot rod is a speed boost AND weapon, but you can't collect other stuff while it's going unlike other speed boosts. Watch the timer on the back of it or listen for the warning beeps. If you blow at red you get max speed and a huge fireball attack.

SART really likes risk-reward play. You get boosts for air-dodging stuff at the last second, you get boosts for tricking over rough waves, and usually the path with more obstacles is faster/shorter, if you don't fuck up and hit something or not land the trick or not make the dodge.

For the starting line boost, I find it best to time my trigger pull for when the screen goes completely black between counts. So it goes:
"Get ready!"
*black screen* Trigger pull/release
3
*black screen* Trigger pull/release
2
*black screen* Trigger pull/hold
1
"GO!"

You'll know you got all three when your third pull changes your starting boost color from red to purple to bright blue.

Yea, I didn't actually figure this one out till I started playing harder AI opponents that started flipping off cliffs etc, was quite surprised.

One thing to note for those new to tricks, some ledges/drops are too short/shallow to allow you to do a forward or back flip at high speeds, but are just high enough to allow a left or right barrel roll, which will still give a boost.

Also, flipping too many times (like 5+ I think) will make your driver dizzy and slow you down in car mode.

Transform boost!

Actually, I hold between pulls. It's more of a pump for me. Or an unpump. Either way it's hold at 3, or a smooth series of out and in. In at 3, out and in 2, out and in 1, WHOOOSH.

It's good to know it's a little forgiving in that regard. I haven't played around with all the possibilities, I just lucked out when trying to figure out ho it works and found a working combo. Yours would probably be an easier way to pull it off, because all the trigger movements will take place in a more useable fashion, given that mashing the trigger seems more natural to me in this game that not.

I think it's really best to just do what's comfortable. Yet another way the game rewards consistent skill. MK it's start at the right time and boost or don't, here you need to be consistent to get the best results.

Any tips for winning A class races? I'm at the point where I can reliably come in 1st to 2nd on B class, but can barely break into the top 5 on A. Also what exactly does leveling up do?