MBRedboy31

In kart racer news, Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers (aka Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart 2.0) is finally released, after 5 years of development!!

Current mood: Hyped about implied Super Monkey Ball unlockable characters based on the newly revealed silhouettes in this trailer, even though it’d be incredibly hard to speculate on them since many of them are probably new original characters

The California State Lottery is currently selling Ms. PAC-MAN scratch cards. How does that work? I thought she was banished to copyright trouble heck? Is it different for things that aren’t videogames? Was California able to make a deal with Ms.’ owners instead of going through Namco?

If you want a cute free game that’s vaguely similar to Kirby’s Dream Course, Wonder Wickets is now free on Steam! Steam says it’s free to play, but it has no MTX, it’s just a formerly paid game that’s free now.

Not a free game, but I want to shout out Vividlope as another cute game with a cool retro style. I beat it, but it was tough. The style for the level design reminds me of Geon Cube on the Wii, but I doubt anyone else has played that, ahaha.

There is only one level left on the entire Super Mario Maker 1 server that remains uncleared, “Trimming the Herbs.” A long community project to beat every last level existing in SMM1 is nearly over, as long as someone can beat this one last level before the Wii U online servers are closed down for good…

It might be sacrilegious for me to say this as a Super Monkey Ball fan, but I’ve never really cared that much about Monkey Target, even back in its heyday in the classic two GameCube games.

I thought the idea and the overall vibes of the levels it takes place in were cool, but I never got into it enough to pursue high scores and stuff and thus really come to love the mode. I do commiserate with people who are frustrated with the fact that no later SMB game has had a Monkey Target that’s as good as the originals, though. I just don’t care enough myself to complain about it.

One thing that’s funny about the amiibo figures‘ descriptions in Hey Pikmin is that, based on Olimar’s descriptions of some of the Animal Crossing figures, Olimar doesn’t immediately understand the concept of anthro animals. Evidently those just aren’t a thing in any Hococatian culture? One might’ve assumed that Hococatians are similar culturally to humans, but it’s interesting to think about the ways that they aren’t.

Random Kalos fact: There are Floatzel in X/Y but not Buizel, so, the only way to get Buizel is to catch a Floatzel and breed it. I wonder why that is the case? Functionally it’s probably because the places you can encounter Floatzel in the game are too high level for there to also be Buizel (lowest level Floatzel you can get is level 34, well past the evolution requirement at level 26,) but, in-universe, why is that the case? Are all the Buizel hiding? Are all the Floatzel actually from another region and they don’t ever naturally lay eggs while in Kalos? Hmm. (I wonder if this will still be the case in Legends Z-A.)

In the next Mario Kart, I feel like the Mini-Turbo stat needs a major tweak. As it currently is, a higher Mini-Turbo stat makes your turbos charge faster, which makes it so that you can use them more frequently. But, the problem with this is having a build with a low MT stat just feels awkward and doesn’t offer anything that fully compensates for how bad it feels to not be able to get any turbo whatsoever from smaller turns. One option is to just remove the MT stat and have every build have consistent charge speed. Another option is, instead of having a MT stat that can be high or low, there’s instead a dichotomy between MT charge speed and MT power. So, some builds have quick charge so you can use them frequently but they are weak, but others can use them less frequently but have more powerful boosts so it’s satisfying when you do get them, and raising one of these stats directly lowers the other so that there’s no build with more total charge speed + power.

I kinda like that they changed the designs for the characters in the new Super Monkey Ball. The games have had the same design style since Banana Blitz released on Wii back in 2006 (18 years ago!) so it’s about time they tried something different.

You know, Bubsy and (videogame) Sonic have the exact same amount of durability, it’s just that Sonic happens to live on a planet where he’s constantly surrounded by protective items, so he doesn’t die anywhere near as often. Bubsy should pack his bags and move there, he‘d have a much easier time. He’d also have a lot more room to reach his maximum running speed without bumping into things.

Super Monkey Ball on the GameCube (plus the Deluxe ports) has a really good real-time reflection effect in environments where the floor is shiny, which reflects the player, bananas, many of the background elements, etc. So… how come this effect never returned properly in any other Super Monkey Ball game? You can be playing Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania on a PS5 and the best they can do is static reflection maps of the background, despite the vastly more powerful hardware?? This is a pretty minor thing but it has been frustrating me for many, many years. What kind of magic did Amusement Vision do back on the Gamecube that other Sega devs could never replicate?

Y’know, that one sport really should’ve been named Americaball. It’d greatly reduce confusion, plus it’s arguably a more accurate name.

Despite it being a currently ongoing cartoon series, I've barely seen anyone mention, discuss, meme, or draw fanart of Kiff. It feels like I'm somehow the only one who knows it exists (despite the fact that this obviously isn't the case,) which is kind of a weird feeling...

I watched a few episodes on Disney+ sometime last year and I think the character designs are cute at least (or are they actually really bland, and they stood out to me since I barely watch modern cartoons...? )

How terrifying would it be to wind up in a wallless Tekken stage? There’s mountains, trees, buildings, people, ect. seemingly just a short distance away, but you can run forever in any direction and never reach them, you’re trapped in an endless stretch of flat terrain…

Tokyo Blur is the sickest name for one of the most basic Tour city tracks, which makes it feel like it was a lot of missed potential…

They could’ve at least given it dramatic night + rain atmosphere, or alternatively they could’ve called it “Tokyo Tour” or something that fits its vibes better?

Really niche thing I want that I pretty much never see people discuss: I still want a new Freakyforms. I still boot up Freakyforms Deluxe on my 3DS occasionally to recreate one of my OCs in it...

If Nintendo ever makes Mario Maker 3, they really need to do something about underwater levels being such a slog that you barely see anyone use the underwater background. I have a few ideas that could help (ideally they could add all 3) :

1. Add the Dolphin Kick badge ability from Wonder. It could be an item that you could place at the start of the stage, or there could just be an option in the level settings to have it be given to the player automatically. I don’t think Nintendo would want to completely remove the “classic“ swimming gameplay, hence why it’s an optionally added item.
2. Add Warp Pipes that emit wind/current. This is the main solution the NSMB games use to speed up underwater gameplay (and Wonder uses them too) and it’d be fun here as well.
3. Add arbitrarily sized water blocks usable in all backgrounds, that would become air blocks when the underwater background is selected. Swapping between swimming and running would make it feel more dynamic. Random floating rectangles of water or air might be a bit strange looking, but Mario games have had those water blocks before, and you could always arrange the terrain to make them more natural looking if you prefer.

Really random thing, but, anyone else remember the obnoxious plastic packaging that Wii Shop Channel points cards used to come in way back in the day that you had to cut through just to get to get to the card itself with the code on it? The eShop cards nowadays are so much more convenient, you just peel off the thing covering the code and that's it...

In terms of newcomers for Rivals 2, I think it’d be cool if, instead of just more fighters of the usual 4 elements, we’d also get some kind of horrible Abyss monster as a playable character.

As an example of this, I’ve been thinking about how the Gatekeepers (the final boss from Rivals 1, assuming I didn’t forget their name) would look as a playable character, scaled way down of course. Normally the two floating eyes bound with shadowy tendrils would be entwined together and act as a single body, but you can separate them for powerful projectiles, setups, and combos, at the cost of you potentially taking big damage if the opponent is able to attack them when separated.

Here’s a silly idea for a future fighting game: Customizable Super cutscenes!

You know how a lot of supers result in a cutscene, and what happens in the cutscene doesn’t functionally matter as long as it deals the same damage and lasts the same amount of time? Give us the ability to choreograph what happens in that cutscene. You can select from a wide variety of moves your character can use on the opponent, plus a variety of other actions for both you and the opponent, and you can set up camera angles and effects. Super sick combos? Really silly combos that’d never really work or be super suboptimal normally? Some kind of silly animation where the two characters are super out of character for a bit and it ends with the opponent becoming the object of slapstick comedy? The choice is yours! You’d be able to go online, and you‘ll never know what will happen when you get caught in the opponent’s super! (You can also turn off custom supers client-side if you want, since the altered animations affect nothing.)

In the 2024 Minecraft mob vote, there should be two separate votes, and each user would vote in both: one for the mob’s design, and one for the mob’s function.

This would require all of the designs to be in a similar category where their functionalities could be interchangeable (i.e. all of the design options are golems of different materials, or different small dragons of similar size, or something like that) but it would mean that nobody would need to choose between either voting for their favorite mob or for their most wanted function.

Watch for Rolling Rocks is no longer 0.5 A presses. There is no more building up speed for hours, and no more parallel universes. It is the end of an era.

One nice thing I’ll say about Sticker Star is that I think it’s kinda neat that some enemy types can drop their weapons as usable stickers after defeating them, such as Spikes’ spike balls, Ninjis’ shurikens, and Sombrero Guys’ sombreros.

Personally, I'm really glad we got all 3 of Diddy, Funky, and Pauline in Mario Kart; aside from the fact that all three of those are great picks in their own right, people would complain forever if we got only 2 or fewer...

Did you know that Super Bomberman R 2 is out now in stores and the digital version releases tomorrow/in like 20 minutes (depending on time zones)?

Like… wow, did they barely advertise it…

I‘m not currently planning on getting it (I might change my mind later,) but I still want it to succeed…

Here's a Kirby costume from Spirit Halloween to bless your day/night.

I’m just imagining if Splatoon added “Salmonlings,” but, instead of being humanoid salmon like Inklings and Octolings, they’re just Smallfries driving person-sized mechs and trying to blend into Inkling society (and somehow succeeding at it even though you can very obviously tell what they are)

One thing that still bothers me: in the first Ant-Man movie, (spoilered since it’s still technically spoilers even though this isn’t even a big part of the movie and the movie is old at this point)
Sorry about unleashing my inner evil genius for a bit there, but it drives me crazy when something so powerful is just forgotten about. I guess I get why these kinds of things are forgotten about, but still.

Have you ever thought about how awful the view from a lot of the stadium seats in some Mario Kart tracks is? Like, some of these people can see almost nothing, yet it’s always a sold-out crowd. Imagine sitting behind the big antigravity track piece in Mario Kart Stadium, or next to the underwater section of MK8’s DS Wario Stadium where it’s completely walled in with very tall walls and nobody can see what’s happening there. At least the people in the bottom seats in Pokémon Stadium 1 and 2 in Smash can clearly see the fighters when they’re edgeguarding…

Any port of N64 Block Fort to any other Mario Kart game will never have quite the same feel for one big reason:

In later Mario Kart games, Green Shells don’t bounce forever. It was always a terrifying moment whenever you dropped down to the base floor and had to face the possibility of a long-forgotten Green Shell randomly coming your way, but later games don’t have that. It’s probably for the better that later games don’t have that, but still…

I miss the bizarreness of the Fighting Polygon Team, Fighting Wireframes, and Alloys, and I hope we get something new that’s like them in some future platform fighter.

I appreciate the fact that the Fighting Mii Team gives Miis a notable role in singleplayer, but there isn’t much interesting about them.

I have yet to see a Smash fangame or indie platform fighter with a unique equivalent to these old teams; most of them just recolor or retexture the default characters and leave it at that. Admittedly, part of that is just the fact that many of these games are sprite-based so there isn’t much else they can do, but still. At the very least, I hope Rivals 2 makes the Abyss clone enemies look more unnatural instead of just being shadowy-looking retextures, assuming that some kind of Abyss mode returns.

It would’ve been cool if Rey attached her lightsaber to her scavenger staff instead of using it the normal way. It’d make her fighting style more unique as she’d be one of the only polearm-wielding Jedi, and it’d make her quick mastery of the fighting style make more sense as she had already used the staff for years.

I hope the guy who narrates the descriptions of the poses you do in Warioware Smooth Moves returns in Move It!.

Just like last time, I enlisted an AI to bring us some Direct leaks. Here's the most interesting one I got:

On June 21st, 2023, Nintendo released a new Nintendo Direct presentation featuring news about incredible new games releasing later this year. One incredibly surprising reveal in particular set the internet ablaze, however, which was the reveal of the controversial new game (the AI's part starts here) company in the form of Invisible, Inc.

The announcement to turn the offices of major corporate players into hostile zombie-like environments and manipulate their workforce into mindless zombie minions, as well as making them fight for control of a mysterious device, gave a huge advantage to anyone using the Game Manager, the zombie analogue of the Wii Fit Balance Board, which could be plugged into almost any workstation, turning it into a zombie version of itself.

(edit: I forgot where the AI‘s part started, I fixed it.)

I wonder what's going on in the Star Wars galaxy right now. You know, not "a long time ago." Is it peaceful now where technology and culture flourish? Or, have the wars continued in the long run in an almost cyclic manner and so it's barely different than it was a long time ago? Or, did the current Empire-equivalent win so decisively at some point that nobody has been able to effectively rebel against them for a long, long time and life sucks? Or did they slowly eventually giant-death-laser every single planet in the galaxy out of existence and there's basically nothing left except a few spaceships, if even that?

Fall Guys has an event ongoing right now that allows one to grind for Crowns ludicrously quickly (at least compared to how you normally grind for them.) Over 800 of the over 1,700 Crowns I’ve ever gotten in Fall Guys I’ve gotten this week during this event, and I’ve been playing since the game released. I finally got my longtime goal, both halves of Golden Wolf, and I am exhausted.

Although, on Tuesday, the next battle pass begins. More grinding! Woo!

I was just thinking about if WarioWare is canon to Mario, and, a theory I just thought of is that the Mario characters really are just actors in the Warioware + Rhythm Heaven universe. Wario does acting work for Nintendo's Mario and Wario Land games from time to time, which is why he has a different outfit in those games and why the other characters in these games almost never mingle with the rest of the WarioWare cast. Wario Land games also sometimes appear in 9-Volt's Nintendo themed microgame collections.

(Speaking of 9-Volt's microgames somehow containing Nintendo IPs, either Wario somehow convinced Nintendo to license out their IPs to his tiny indie company, or this universe just doesn't have copyright laws. I'd assume it's the latter since you can rip off as many IPs as you want in WarioWare DIY and sell them, and you'll never get in trouble.)

Furthermore, in this theory, Wario and Waluigi aren't at all friends in real life, just in Nintendo's games, hence why Waluigi never appears in Warioware. It's a bit sad, but that's how it is with actors sometimes. On the other hand, Mario and Wario's rivalry is real to at least some extent (or at least it is from Wario's viewpoint,) as shown in a few particular microgames.

I was just thinking about that time Paper Mario basically performed a Fatality on a boss.
Like, it’s pretty gruesome when you think about it…

I went shopping today and, while in the car on the way there, I saw someone who was dressed as for some reason. It was absolutely, unmistakably meant to be a Ness cosplay. It was kinda random (I didn’t see anyone else in cosplay, I don’t think there was an event or anything,) but it was kinda neat to see.