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Games Entertainment

Arcade Version of Mario Kart Coming to Japan 62

Posted by Zonk from the let'sa-go! dept.
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..."
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Arcade Version of Mario Kart Coming to Japan More

Arcade Version of Mario Kart Coming to Japan

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  • Catch-up Items (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Huitzlopochtli ( 824537 )
    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.
    • Mario Kart was play balanced for console type multi-player. The mechanic is cheap and dirty. And it results in newbie players having a chance against moderate types. It does not, however, result in newbies completely obliterating experienced players. The only loser in this mechanic is CPU racers.

      Then again, there is really no shortage of racing games out there, both Console and Arcade. By all means, if this play mechanic bothers you, feel free to play something else. I hear Gran Turismo has very real

    • I was thinking the same thing. It sounds too much like lazy programmers. They didn't bother to balance the game properly, so they just gave other players an unfair advantage.

      If Mario Kart were a single-player only game, the equivalent would be allowing the CPU players to cheat, i.e. giving them extra weapons, extra stats, etc.

      Not only that, but unlike the home version, you have to pay every time you climb into the driver's seat. This is like rigging a carnival game. I think it's horrible.

      How many o

      • Re:Catch-up Items (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Daetrin ( 576516 ) on Saturday February 19, 2005 @07:42PM (#11725608)
        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.

        • Also, don't forget that in SMK, each player has different skills. If you're playing a game like Gran Turismo, or one of the NASCAR games, you're generally playing against competetors with very similar cars. In these situations, winning is entirely dependant on skills.

          SMK is different because that's just the way they made the game. Either love it, hate it, or just accept it. The point of these help-the-player-who's-behind programming tricks is that it keeps the game competitive. I know I don't appreciate or

      • Re:Catch-up Items (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You must be new to arcade games.....

    • Re:Catch-up Items (Score:3, Insightful)

      by BenjyD ( 316700 )
      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 (Score:3, Interesting)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )
      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
      • It's also worth doing this in some types of actual racing - if you're in front you can't be drafting. Thus, you burn more fuel, and need more fuel, and need to carry more fuel, and/or pit stop more often. So maybe it's not all that unrealistic anyway :)
      • I know burnout 1 and 2 use it, I dont know about 3.

    • Re:Catch-up Items (Score:4, Insightful)

      by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Sunday February 20, 2005 @04:56AM (#11727772) Homepage
      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.

      • Have you been to an arcade lately? It's not like the 70s any more man. Arcades now just have a few gun games, some DDR machines, and coin changer. Besides kids who are sick of the mall, there's no actual humans in arcades anymore. Unfortunately the arcade died years ago.

        Wish there was an alternative, but there doesn't seem to be.

        • Unfortunately the arcade died years ago.

          That's true about the US, but it's certainly not true about Japan where arcades enjoy a huge popularity.
          Maybe that's going to change now that Nintendo DS and Sony PSP make high-quality multi-user gaming evreywhere possible.
          Another country I've seen where arcades still are very popular is Spain. I don't know why, might be because there are so many tourists or because many people don't have a video game console or a PC at home.
        • The arcade isn't dead, it's just taking on a new shape. An arcade in a mall isn't going to do very well since you can just as easily go down to the GameStop and buy a game for your home console that looks better than some of the stuff in the arcade. You will find more and more people...and older people at that, hanging out at entertainment centers that sell alcohol. Dave and Busters and Main Event are two that seem to do really well in the Texas area. Main Even has bowling, billiards, shuffleboard, Black
    • The recent Gamecube Mario Kart has a setting in the options screen that allows you to tone down (or up) the items in the game in versus races, making this less (or more) of a factor.
    • I prefer the ability to toggle such effects on or off.

      In the Initial D arcade games, both players (it was 1 on 1) had to hit their brake pedals before the start of the race to turn off giving the trailing person additional speed. In this manner, veteran players can play on skill.

      While Mario Kart's design is for party/group environments, I would feel that giving the ability to turn off such handicaps would give players of skill something to do as well.

  • I bring those blue sparks! - Jesus, Penny Arcade
  • I don't really feel that the implied mechanics of a rubber band system qualify as anything new. Many (if not most) arcade based racers have been doing this for a long time. Back when Rush 2020 was big in the arcades I can clearly recall turning off 'Catch Up' before a big grudge match.

    Terminology != Innovation
    • I also remember Micro Machines being somewhat familiar in the term 'Rubber Band'. When one player had fallen behind the lead players, play would stop and the lagging player would be dropped just behind the pack.

      • "I also remember Micro Machines being somewhat familiar in the term 'Rubber Band'. When one player had fallen behind the lead players, play would stop and the lagging player would be dropped just behind the pack."

        Yes, but that was how the point system worked, at least in the versions I've played. Drop outside the camera's view (which followed the lead player), and you lost a point, whilst the leader gained one. They took a rubber-band mechanism and made it into an AFAIK unique gameplay.

        Anyway, this whole

    • Hell, the original Super Mario Kart itself had this rubber band system. It was especially strong in Mario Kart 64. I have no idea why some commentators are spinning this as new.
  • Where did F-Zero AX go? I thought Nintendo was working with Namco to make that show up...

    • Re:So um... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Gothic_Walrus ( 692125 ) on Saturday February 19, 2005 @07:19PM (#11725458) Journal
      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.

      • There's one at an arcade in Toronto that I'm real close to. It lets you import custom vehicles, and the machine tilts when you turn... it's all right. It's no Bishi Bashi or DDR though.
      • If all you want is the AX tracks you can unlock all the of them in FZero GX by completing all the cups on the master difficulty. I've had GX since the day it came out. I STILL find it hard to beat the master difficulties.

    • Re:So um... (Score:3, Informative)

      by SetupWeasel ( 54062 )
      First, get a load of this site [smashboards.com] 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.

  • Of course it's coming to Japan (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ZephyrXero ( 750822 ) <zephyrxero@yahoo . c om> on Saturday February 19, 2005 @07:25PM (#11725501) Homepage Journal
    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 :(
    • 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 (

  • more images from AOU arcade exhibition (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    AOU2005 [kobayan.jp] 968 KiB
    Neo-Arcadia.com: Toutes les dernieres news [neo-arcadia.com] 10,4 MiB
    MSN-Mainichi INTERACTIVE [2005] [mainichi-msn.co.jp] 308 KiB

    Now mod me up, shitnipples. :)
  • The original Super Mario Kart for the SNES was the best of the series. It was down hill after that. The entire game became newbiefied. The graphics and sound improved, sure, but the gameplay got allot worse.
    • You forgot the AI. All the karts used to follow the exact same route in the original... Double dash sucked but the rest arn't bad.
    • "The original Super Mario Kart for the SNES was the best of the series. It was down hill after that. The entire game became newbiefied. The graphics and sound improved, sure, but the gameplay got allot worse." Newbified? I wouldn't say that, as I just picked up a copy of the game for my SNES. Beat the Star Cup on 100cc on my first try. I think all the games in the series are tailored to be plug-and-play.
      • I guess I am mostly refering to battle mode. The sequals made it far too easy to get combo hits on your opponents because they let you pick up multiple attack weapons at a time. The original battle mode required you to attack your opponent when you had the ability to quickly pick up an item (or two if the one you pickup sucks) and then attack with that.

        The items you get in racing was greatly influenced in the sequal games by your position in the race. So even in match races, little racing was done, and
    • "newbified"? You say that as if there was some element of complexity present in SMK that was removed by a later version. The only thing I can think of is that SMK doesn't let you hold a power slide indefinitely (though doing so is still stupid in later games). On the other hand, all of the later game introduce new elements.

      Or perhaps by newbified you mean how they actually kept the same control scheme between 100cc and 150cc in later games--having different control styles wasn't some kind of godly SMK

      • The characters were balanced. In time trial Kong and Bowser are the best. In match and GP, the Mario bros are the best. In battle it is a toss up between the Mario Bros and the little guys: koopa and toad... though I have seen really good battle players use the princess/yoshi... but I am not convinced.

    • Agreed the Snes version had it all...great graphics, homing red shells, speed bumps that accelerate you to infinity, LR shoulder button drifts, cool shortcuts and wonderful level design...man I miss that game :(
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • DK Mountain or Bowser's Castle, you and me... let's do this!

    The gods do not subtract from the allotted span of men's lives the hours spent playing Mario Kart.
    • Um.... take a look at the screenshots. This isn't a version of the GCN game brought to the arcade. It's a totally new game separte from it. (Back to the 1-player karts... w00t) In time, though, we may see this ported to home consoles.

  • "rubberband" system? (Score:3, Funny)

    by DavidD_CA ( 750156 ) on Sunday February 20, 2005 @03:06AM (#11727476) Homepage
    ...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!

  • I'm not sure if I'd trust Namco with any more Nintendo property after what they did to Star Fox with Star Fox Assault. Who'd have thought the crappy tech demos for Assault that Namco were showing 2 years ago would end up being just like the final game?
  • http://www.4colorrebellion.com/index.php?p=294#mor e-294

    "The game, happily, plays closest to the original Mario Kart on the Snes of any in the series that have been released since."

    Also. GameSpot has movies...
    http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/02/18 /news_61188 68.html
  • Hurray for giving the losers a boost! Nothings better than dusting them, only to have them right back behind you shortly after. :\ And thus I prefer realistic racing games.

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