The Mario Kart 8 Direct is a labor of love, going through the history of Mario Kart and sharing developer excerpts to explain how the game evolved, to eventually come to antigravity in MK8. We’ll go through these details, and some others we skimmed over in our last article, here.
1st things 1st, course variety has always been integral to the series. Hideki Konno explained that racing on walls and ceilings was the next logical step they came up with, after years of squeezing through every idea they had. They do credit the Wii U for having the processing power to make this possible.
For those who didn’t notice, this is how antigravity works. Parts of the racing course have blue strips on them. When your vehicle goes through the strips, that activates the antigravity and makes your tires turn on their side. Going through the yellow strips deactivates it. While it’s activated, you can race through walls, ceilings, vertical tracks, even hover through waterfalls.
In addition to this, there is the mechanic called Spin Booster. By bumping into other racers, as well as objects on the track, you get a temporary speed boost. Therefore, you will want to deliberately bump into each other to get that boost, but of course, it will also feel good. Heck, you can collude cooperate with a friend to get ahead.
We already discussed this in the leak, but there will be a host of customization options for your karts and bikes, that brings it closer in line with sim racers. The small tweaks will affect your vehicles’ performance, and really, it only falls short of having a body shop for tuning.
Now, let’s look at the items:
Boomerang Flower – throw it out for two chances to strike, once on the initial trajectory, and then on the rebound. You can throw the boomerang three times in a row.
Piranha Plant – You already know it can take racers out, but the plant also doubles as roadside sanitation. It can clean the streets of banana peels for safe racing.
Crazy Eight – This item is truly crazy, as it gives you eight items all at once.
Super Horn – And you thought vuvuzelas are annoying. Pass by a bunch of racers blowing this horn and they will all stumble over. You can also use it to deflect attacks from shells, even the dreaded Blue Shell.
Kosuke Yabuki explained that bikes actually beat karts in Mario Kart Wii, as seen in the leaderboards. Subsequently, they have made changes to how both vehicles work in Mario Kart 8. Bikes excel at cornering, but karts do better in straightaways. Subsequently, each will have their specialty courses.
So, these are the four online modes:
· Worldwide: Race with players from around the world.
· Regional: Race with players from nearby.
· Friends: Race with your circle of friends.
· Tournaments: These are the tournaments you can customize, with rulesets and dates. There are tournament specific rankings as well.
And now, some odds and ends:
· You will be able to download other players’ ghost data, including from your friends, top players, and the developers.
· When you post highlight reels to Miiverse, you can add your own comments (yes, including drawings) to them.
· All the game’s music is recorded live, just like in Super Mario Bros 3D World, by Nintendo’s own Super Mario Brothers Big Band.
Mario Kart 8 comes out May 30 for Wii U. Check out the full Direct below.
