Mario Kart: Super Circuit – A Review
July 25th, 2010
Developed by Intelligent Systems rather than fixed regulars EAD, Mario Kart: Super Circuit plays the Mario Kart formula pretty safe between the lines of the first 2D and 3D iterations of the series (Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64, respectively). Rather than attempt to break new ground by introducing new play mechanics, Super Circuit sets its focus on being a well-executed hybrid of previous games.
For players of Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64, the mixed blood elements, namely the combination of the hop and power-sliding, are readily apparent. In Super Mario Kart, a push of the right trigger causes the player to hop, making it possible to leapfrog over minor obstacles, while, at other times, the hop can be exploited to displace your kart at an angle advantageous for sharp cornering. In Mario Kart 64, players could slip into a power slide allowing for long drifts around corners, closing with a speed boost if the player could sufficiently wiggle the control stick back and forth. Super Circuit kinda does both, leaning a little more towards the Super NES iteration. Hopping is still useful for bookending long turns and avoiding minor obstacles, however, if the player holds their slide down long enough a boost will automatically be granted—no wiggling required. Part of the problem with this design is that rarely is there a turn wide enough for players to earn a boost. Or putting it another way, the duration of time required to stay in a power slide is largely incongruent with the nippy curves and bends Super Circuit‘s tracks provide. Furthermore, the tipping point at which you’ll gain a boost (or not) is too difficult to judge, leaving you dependent on the safer bet of bunny-hopping each corner in a spasm of undercutting leaps and slides.
In regards these twist and turns, Super Circuit is a constant barrage of immediate, oncoming corners which leave you ill-prepared and exasperated. The flashing direction markers become a point of reliance, yet, through the brief visual disconnects created against the player’s place on the track, these signposts work to frequently hinder the player as much as aid them. Coming into a corner I found myself fraught with anxiety, thrown off by the directional aid and unsure of how to first judge the bend; at which angle to enter, and then whether or not to hold a slide, bunny hop or break-stop my kart. The split-second immediacy of the corners hampers flow and throws any form of tactical strategy out the window.
Intelligent Systems’ pragmatic, hardware-concious approach shines through well on the GBA. The use of bright colours help boost the back-light-lacking GBA screen and cups are streamlined to fit in around a portable-friendly 5-6 minute time frame. A quick run mode where you can play any track is also included for short bursts of play. The fact that the 2D character sprites are now modelled on 3D models (as opposed to the flat, textureless SNES sprites) visually make the competition easier to interpret
Intelligent Systems also display an astuteness in the track designs which draw and build upon prior games. Previous games featured shortcuts, yes, but Super Circuit almost goes overboard with hidden routes. (Such a generous number of shortcuts is quite rare in most racing games). Rainbow Road is an excellent example, ramps outline almost the entire track, peppered for all sorts of creative short cuts when teamed with a mushroom or boost pad. As this video below shows, it’s very easy to shave time off your position with a little bit of risk and initiative.
Those awesome loop-around ramps from Mario Circuit 3 return in various permutations, as do obstructions which can be avoided by hopping over, like water puddles. Overall, there’s a fine degree of creative nuance permeating each track, from shortcuts (both major and minor), to weather effects which change per lap, and course-specific obstructions.
On reaching the end of this article, I’m feeling a little uncommitted to my criticisms of the boosting system. I stand by what I say, of course, but I can’t also help but get that lingering feeling that I still haven’t grasped the way the Super Circuit is intended to be played. Having gold-medalled all of the cups (bar the SNES ones), at this point, I feel that if I’ve gotten this far without having properly understood the power sliding mechanics, then there must be something awry with the intuitiveness of this mechanic. I’m really unsure to be honest, if you have any experience with this title, then please do give a holler.
User-generated Content as Sustainability
July 24th, 2010
From Adventure Construction Set to WADs, mods, community tools and those RPG maker games, user-generated content has been a long-running staple of video game continuity. Nowadays, with the infrastructure of the internet and possible global networking, games like LittleBigPlanet, Wario Ware DIY, Flipnote and Mod Nation Racers are overtly orientating their systems around a model of community tools and user-generated content. In a sense, games of this nature have formed a pseudo genre of networked user-generated-orientated games.
Currently in the games industry, when a game developer creates a worthwhile gameplay system which proves to be successful (Guitar Hero, Madden, for instance), publishers often capitalize on the success and sequalize the gameplay out of existence. User-generated content, I think, offers a fantastic opportunity for developers of these tried and true gameplay systems to establish a self-sustaining environment for content and community, effectively consolidating a franchise in the one place as opposed to killing interest by burning out sequels to an annual business model.
To prove my case, I’ll use the Tony Hawk series as an example. We’re all pretty down on Mr Hawk after each yearly iteration of the Pro Skater series added new mechanics to the point where the franchise became unrecognizable to the mainstream and alienated everyone else. Let’s not even begin on Tony Hawk Ride.
Despite the disdain we may carry for Activision and the Hawkster, Tony Hawk’s Proskater 2 is still awesome, is it not? That game and the systems contained within it will always remain good, regardless of how Activision drive the later games into the ground. Theoretically speaking, if Neversoft reclaimed the mantle, streamlined all of the needless complexity of the later releases, packed in a meaty ‘best of’ selection of levels from THPS-THP8 and centered the experience around accessible construction tools and a networked community of level creators, I figure that the Tony Hawk games of yesteryear would have a respectful place to roost and the brand would gain some credibility back. I enjoyed playing and making levels for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, as did millions of other players, and there’s no reason why we wouldn’t want to revisit this franchise if it were given the proper treatment and allowed to grow. Appeasing fans by recognizing the significance of prior titles is a good idea at this point for Activision. Reworking these games in a HD format and creating an environment which will keep this type of game alive, is a step beyond that.
As we’ve discovered through downloadable services like Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network and Steam, old gameplay systems don’t have to fade into obscurity, particularly when they’re still fun. This generation has taught us that well designed games like Mega Man can live forever while those which are a little archaic, like Bionic Commando Rearmed, can adopt modern design sensibilities and start anew. Self-sustaining systems of content like user-generated content – if viable – are an even better means of not only preserving the past, but keeping it fresh and relevant for a contemporary audience.
Grant Morrison on Game Narrative as Environment
July 24th, 2010
I was very impressed to read a recent interview with acclaimed comic book writer Grant Morrison who, with brilliant articulation, identified the medium-specific advantages of video game narrative (environment as character) and then elaborates on how he’d like to introduce these elements into the comic book medium. This makes me terribly excited because Morrison is fantastically talented, really understands whatever subject matter he chooses to become invested in and is testing out this new approach on nothing less than Batman, w00t! In anycase, I’ve pasted the particular excerpt below, please click here to read the full interview.
IGN Comics: We also know you often draw much inspiration from the world around you – music, film, research, etc. Is anything in particular informing your development of Batman Inc?
Morrison: So many comics are still inspired by Hollywood movies, (many of which are now inspired, in turn, by comics in that pop-will- eat-itself way), and by extension a kind of approach to narrative which dates back to Aristotle’s Poetics and the fundamentals of Greek Drama, almost two and a half thousand years ago, in the name of our dear lords Hermes and Zeus Almighty!
It occurred to me, immersed in my 50th hour of Just Cause 2, how far beyond that silent audience, proscenium arch, here’s some well-paid ‘actor’ pretending to be someone else experience we’d gone and how very timidly other forms of storytelling entertainment had reacted to the challenge of the beast in their midst, this ultimate choose your own adventure playground that in some cases simulates ‘life’ and terrain so effectively it’s like actually like going on vacation (how many gamers know the geography of Silent Hill as well as their own town? Do streets and locations from Liberty City, Panau, or Saints Row, turn up in the dreams of other gamers like they do in mine? I’ll lay odds they do. These amazing virtual environments appear in my memories as real as Chicago or London. Paris, Venice, New Delhi, Jogjakarta or any of the non-CGI cities I’ve been to.
Although many current video games are constructed on a narrative spine which follows the basic action movie hero-beats-baddie script, it’s never that aspect of the player’s interaction with the virtual environment that’s important. I know I tend to skip the cut scenes in games without losing any awareness of the arrow of narrative progression. Batman Inc. is an attempt to do a comic influenced by the storytelling structures, images, senses of scale, movement and perspective and so on that I’ve absorbed from games. The experience of actually being Batman in the Arkham Asylum game was profoundly eerie and I’d love to find a way to capture that depth of involvement and identification with the character and environment. I’m not sure how much of this I’ll be able to realise but this is where I’m beginning my thinking on what might make Batman Inc. different from other books.
Batman Inc. is Brave and the Bold meets Just Cause or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare! That’s my pitch! Throw in a dash of Mission Impossible and a pinch of The Magic Christian and it’s nearly there.
As research for my book Supergods, I re-read a lot of my old comics and got really excited by that old ‘musical’ approach to writing superhero comics I saw especially in the work of Roy Thomas (the Kree/Skrull War is an amazing orchestration of plot, characters and ideas into a multi-levelled narrative that uses several interwoven voices – including blended 1st, 2nd and 3rd person captions – to practically conjure sound onto the paper. Almost every scene has some reference to sound, in fact, from the opening, apocalyptic door slam, through Black Bolt’s whisper and the continually pointed out lack of sound in space), Steve Engelhart, Doug Moench, Don McGregor and the others of Marvel’s ’70s auteur generation.
The popular ‘cinematic’ approach to comics has largely done away with those poetic narrative captions but an even greater loss is that free flowing multi-perspectival viewpoint – when was the last time you read a comic that addressed the character directly ‘You are the Batman!!’ before sliding into an omniscient 3rd person narrative voice, ‘He is the Batman!!’ then shifting to a 1st Person ‘I am the Batman.’ voice, all in the same story! That kind of writing has a metamorphic, psychedelic and very refreshing quality that seemed to tap more directly into the way comics can work together as words and pictures. The dance between writer and artist seems more fluid and the comic book artist is set free from the constraints of being a mere storyboardist, the writer gets a chance to express his or her own voice rather than just the voices of the characters etc. So with this book, I’m trying to find a road into that kind of multi-narrative approach that feels modern rather than retro.
We’ll see how it works out and how far it seems appropriate to push in that direction but these are the influences I’ve been absorbing and the thoughts I’ve been having at the beginning of the process. For me, it’s about seeing the familiar from a slightly different perspective.
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