I’ve been playing quite a bit now and I have some likes and dislikes that I thought might be worth noting.
Likes:
*Online – Awesome, everything I pretty much hoped it could be. I haven’t tried the tournament yet, but just playing friends and being able to see the world champion time on a track is awesome.
*Bikes – Sweet, just awesome, a great new level of skill has been added by making two different types of boosts you can use. It reminds me of when the manual was added to the Tony Hawk games, allowing for longer more cohesive lines to be put together.
*The Bullet – Don’t know why really, but I just like this weapon.
*The number of characters – It is just more fun to race w/ 12 and to have a bunch of characters to pick from when you do.
*Jumps / tricks – Again, a whole new level of strategy in terms of finding lines and combo-ing these with wheelies and slides.
*Course Design – I think they did a pretty good job this time with the new tracks.
Dislikes:
*The weapon balance – there is zero strategy left for weapons. N64 was really the king of balance for weapons being both defensive and offensive. A skilled player would weather quite the storm if they knew what they were doing. No longer is this true. Every weapon hit you receive robs you of your own weapon no matter what. The POW, the Ink squid, the blue shell, and the rest all add up to ass-gouging if you are in first place. Yesterday I got hit while I was ON the finish line. Not across it, but my front wheel was in the middle of it, and I was passed after a blue shell blew me up.
*The characters weights and effects there-of – Yeah, I just get pissed when getting passed by someone while I’m in the middle of the track throws me into a lake or lava. Not happy about that, and I feel like it is a pretty worthless thing in terms of balancing the characters. this has made me switch to a heavier bike to avoid this problem being so severe.
*The fishing pole guy – the guy who picks you up and puts you down after you fall of the track seems to randomly decide that on certain curves you must re-do the curve, instead of setting you down where you fell off. WTF? Rainbow road is a biatch because of this.
*Rubber-band AI – I’m pretty sure we are back to SNES levels of crap here. It still isn’t quite as bad as bowser’s castle on N64 where the computer literally appears to warp ahead of you. If you don’t believe that try it out sometime – it is cheap as hell what happens on that course for some reason.
*Retro Courses – Where the hell is my Koopa Troopa Beach. That was my favorite course of all time – and instead we get Shy Guy Beach which is LAME. In general the 2D courses made 3D kinda suck IMO. They could have left them out for more courses from the 3D ones such as N64. At least they did a good job making the old courses have some new jumps and stuff, that is cool.
Despite these dislikes I think this might be my favorite if just because of online play and the course design being way crazier. Also the rubber band AI is always OK for playing with newbies – so we had a lot of good times at my party the other day.
In other notes, I’m home sick today so I’ve just about beaten all the GP circuits. And I’ve unlocked all but a handful of the ‘fast’ staff ghosts on time trials. I’ve gotten one 3-star round, and a handful of 2-stars and a bunch of A’s, B’s, and 1-stars. I hear you have to get 1-star ranking on a bunch of GP circuits to unlock certain things. That might be tough w/ the AI bombing me all the time when I’m in front for 2 laps. I plan on doing a little work, but I’ll mostly be trying to relax and eat (my throat is hurting so that it is hard to swallow), so if you want to IM me or give me a call (college people who are out of finals) I might be up for a little online action.