Topic: Mario Kart World

Why couldn't they have just kept one icon per character and opened a sub menu for each outfit?

@tux_peng
Agreed. And a similar thing for the stickers would have been great, too. Soooo many stickers to scroll through.

@rallydefault More like 15+ hours because I just liked the game less and less the more I played. I think it's pretty natural that I would regret buying the system when the only game I was buying it for at launch ended up being a big disappointment. It was a lot of money to spend on something I won't be using at all for ages.

@StuTwo this made me laugh sm, thank you. i love the deep dive and obvious manner u did here. one of the best posts on NL ive seen in a while, and thats on a site with anti-matter
@tux_peng it annoys me a lot too, only criticism on the game so far. PLEASSEEE and update to fix this nintendo 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

@BenAV
Sorry, but I’m calling bull on you playing it for 15+ hours. Total bull.

@rallydefault That's what I says on my profile and I always go to the home menu and put my Switch in sleep mode when I'm not using it so it should be fairly accurate. Not sure why that's that hard to believe when the game came out Thursday and it's already Sunday morning here. Five hours a day isn't the crazy.

@BenAV
Your profile? The place where it shows our play data? The play data that doesn’t show actual hours until 10 days after you booted the game up for the first time?

Or is there a timer in the game somewhere?

@rallydefault Mine already started showing my playtime instead like yesterday. No idea why.

I personally like randomly driving around, but I get that it's not what people think when they think of Mario Kart. I think MK8 will stay popular for a while yet; I think I have just enough internal storage left to download it.

@BenAV
Dang, mine still just says “played three days ago.”

Well, I stand corrected.

So does it start showing the actual time after 3/4 days rather than 10/11? That's a huge improvement. Although... still totally stupid they don't do it from day one. Did Nintendo love their terrible time keeping so much that rather than fix it completely they decided to compromise? 😆

@StuTwo this was absolutely hilarious lol! Thank you for brightening my day!

Thoughts on Rainbow Road? I will give a vague ranking here for those who want to stay spoiler free and a more in depth version when I give a more detailed "review" after a month or so with the game. So, for now... 10/10 in this Rainbow Road!

@FishyS Everyone on my friend list that has it displayed as hours instead of days has played the game for at least ten hours or more so my best guess is that it might automatically switch over after ten hours played now.

My early verdict (after maybe 5 hours?) -
It is a great Mario Kart game no question. If you’re still enjoying Mario Kart 8 you’ll love this one too.

The issue is that it really feels very similar to MK8. I don’t think Nintendo factored in that many many people inevitably grew tired of MK8, because you can only enjoy so much of the same gameplay. And MKW I hate to say is not too different from another round of DLC.

What should they have done differently? Well imo the “character” of a MK game lies in its feel. It was a mistake having this one control that similarly. And it seems their main goal was “24 drivers”, I wonder if anybody else had that on their wish list.

Positives:

• there are great courses, not all of them are as wide as a football field
• the sense of elevation and scope works great sometimes
• Knockout Tour is an exciting format
• Connecting the courses makes for more variety and fun than I’d thought.
• water is so much more fun than in MK8. I hated the floaty underwater driving, the Wave Race style is way cooler. Oh and good riddance antigrav btw.
• generally a great polished Mario Kart

Negatives:

• you could often mistake it for MK8
• it’s mostly point-to-point races now, which I don’t like that much cause you lose the classic gameplay mechanic of “I’ll get that corner right next round” within a race. I’m unable to memorize those courses until the next time I try the same cup.
• open world is completely forgettable
• little nitpick: why can’t you see stats on the character screen, only after you’ve advanced to the vehicles?
• the music: Someone criticized it for being jazzy again, I’d argue that they lean even further to the tasteless side of Fusion. So much wailing guitar. I adore over the top electronic fusion stuff, but those trade fair guitar sounds have always been a bit yuck.
• oh and regarding the visuals: I think it does show that this was once a Switch 1 project. The floor is still completely flat for example.

The game looks artistically great but technically I haven't been that impressed with what I've seen in videos. There seems to be a fogging effect and dare I say it but it makes the Switch 2 look much weaker without DLSS. It feels like a game that shows what the Switch 2 is like without DLSS. I wonder if Nintendo will fully embrace DLSS for their later inhouse titles or maybe there is a DLSS royalty charge to Nvidia that Nintendo are avoiding paying. Cyberpunk looks so impressive and only has to render at 540p or even 360p when portable to get a 1080p image it takes a huge amount of work off the Switch 2 which can be used for more ambitious games with better features etc. I wonder if they will overhaul the engine later to make use of DLSS? The Switch 2 only has memory bandwidth of 68GB/s in portable mode or about 102GB/s in docked mode. That is about 3x the bandwidth of the Switch 1 (21.3GB/s portable) and 4x docked (25.6GB/s). It feels like without DLSS the Switch 2 performance level is taken down quite a lot as DLSS means more can be achieved with less memory bandwidth. No Mans Sky and Cyberpunk look really impressive on Switch 2 and they make heavy use of DLSS.

I might be getting crazy here, but does anyone else feel like these water physics take them right back to Waverace 64? They are so dang good. Makes me wonder if they’re using these as a test run for a new Waverace game…

@rallydefault
I doubt it's a test run but when I first saw that there were parts where you race in water my immediate thought was 'damn a new Wave Race game would be awesome.' Feel that way even more now after playing the game.

Alright, so I think I might've needed more time to get into the game. Enjoying it a bit more now that I'm learning how to steer the kart properly. The open world isn't interesting, but Grand Prix and Knock-Out Tour are more fun than I was giving them credit for.

@NeonPizza 200cc came to MK8 a year after it released. But I agree, the sooner the better.

@OctolingKing13 @CaleBoi25 You're welcome. We sometimes forget that this is supposed to be a fun hobby and this is supposed to be a fun community to be part of. Not everything is serious - if it were the fact that the Mushroom Kingdom appears to have privatised the hydro-electric power station to Wario might be a bit worrying...

In terms of the game itself I think, watching my kids play, that the true appeal of the free roam mode might be lost on us but it's busy enough with lots of tiny little bite sized tasks and enough tiny rewards for exploration that I can see that they will get many, many hours out of it.