5½ Hours of High Level Discussion of Kirby Air Riders Machines

A few days ago I linked to a nearly 10 hour documentary of the Gold Box computer D&D game Pool of Radiance. Maybe it’s something in the air, maybe it’s people desperately trying not to think about elections, but now there’s someone on Youtube talking for five-and-a-half hours of strategy for Kirby Air Riders.

It’s been some time since I obsessed in detail about KARs (my acronym for the sequel, it’s KAR with a plural y’see) here. I haven’t had the chance to play much of it, but I still like watching other people play, and the player who made the video, Moip, doesn’t just rank highly in the competitive scene, but she has logged 2,485 hours in it.

2,485 hours! I think that’s more than I played Animal Crossing New Horizons! It’s more than I logged in Smash Ultimate when I was running experiments on amiibo, running the game overnight with CPU players beating each other up! Both of those figures are over 1,000 hours, I think, but they aren’t as much as that, and I had far longer to log them; KARs has only been out a little less than a year so far.

Will any of you care that much about it? I don’t know, but I care about it, and I write on this blog, so you’re along for the ride. Even so, 5½ hours is a whole lot of obsession. The advantage to posting daily, as I say every so often, is if you don’t care about one day’s subject you can just come back tomorrow.

Even if you are interested in Air Riders though, 5½ hours is a formidable amount of time, even if you turn the speed up to double. Here are the basics of what they say about each machine:

Warp Star:
Doesn’t like, pretty weak generally.

Wing Star:
Really fragile, while not as fragile as Paper Star but being slower on the ground makes it easier to attack

Shadow Star:
Great for City Trial for the combo of flight ability and offense. It’s got low defense, and lift is poor though, you probably won’t make it to sky islands on its own.

Wagon Star:
The “master of being decent at most things.” One of the most solid generalists in City Trial, so long as you don’t care, at all, about flying.

Slick Star:
If you can control it it’s pretty fast, not as fragile as Shadow, but has trouble breaking boxes.

Formula Star:
Great for going straight. Recommended in City Trail to go for Boost and Turn. Being on Formula can make you a target.

Bulk Star:
They love Bulk Star, but say they’d never take it in City Trial. Moip says it is good for keeping legendary pieces.

Rocket Star:
Hard to control, but great boosts. Becomes hard for others to kill you because your movement is unpredictable. Low turn in the air.

Swerve Star:
Feels good to break things with it and collect stats, but bad for PvP. You instantly stop when breaking, and being absolutely still is dangerous in City Trial.

Turbo Star:
A favorite generalist pick. You can do something they call a “wall bounce” with it, which they explain in the video.

Jet Star:
Very bad for heavyweights, but a good generalist pick for lightweights.

Wheelie Bike:
Moip’s favorite generalist for City Trial. She explains you have to know how to build it: avoid Weight and look for Turn early. This gives you a lot of control and makes it safer to go for other stats. Takes some practice to get used to.

Rex Wheelie:
Similar to Wheelie Bike. A risky pick with low stats. Very hard to control, go for Boost and Charge to make up for it. Has really good Top Speed scaling. Benefits from Turn too. A top pick for offense.

Wheelie Scooter:
Great in City Trial early game due to high manueverability. Fragile though, and top speed is a little low.

Hop Star:
Low acceleration, needs Boost.

Vampire Star:
Normal state, it’s sluggish but has strong boost. Blood state: stats scale to extremes, and becomes the best machine in the game but for only a few seconds. Also it can steal items.

Paper Star:
Extremely good flyer. The master of air farming and going for islands, but it’s very fragile. Great if you can stay in the air, but often dies in one hit.

Chariot:
Great generalist for ground characters.

Battle Chariot:
Great for battle, but Moip would only pick it as a generalist with a lightweight.

Tank Star:
Aim for Boost and Turn. Makes it difficult for other players to tell where you’re turning. Pretty fast.

Bull Tank:
Loves taking it with lightweights.

Transform Star:
In wheel form, a mixture of Wheelie Bike and Wheelie Scooter. Too much Weight makes it hard to turn without stopping. Generally for wheeled machines, Weight increases grip and slows you down, so it’s important not to go for it too early.

Dragoon:
A Legendary. Moip notes it can actually be a bit squishy for a Legendary. If completed early, says it’s best to farm air rings and sky islands.

Hydra:
A Legendary. Extremely high offense, tends to one-shot most other machines.

Leo:
A Legendary. Very maneuverable, generally high stats. Not invincible though, high offense machines can still kill you.

Dog Online

Due to project recovery I haven’t had a lot of extra time to spend on blogging, so I hope today you’ll be content with Dog Online, as linked from Aftermath, a web game in the vein of the Neopets of old and the Kingdom of Loathing of slightly-more-recent. Remember Neopets? It was popular enough to get actual console game spinoffs. A quick aGooglin’ reveals one was released just this year. Huh!

It’s the good and pure kind of web game that used to be much more common. Maybe it’s inevitable that things like this will eventually sell out, like Neopets did, and become a cesspool, so please enjoy it while it lasts.

Dog Online is in open beta, and it’s a little difficult to see how to get started. The Explore link just took me to the homepage until I created an account and adopted a dog. To do that, first you must go to the Dogtown Pound.

There you can pick one of three randomly-chosen pals, like this oddly-colored fellow:

When naming your dog you can’t name it after another dog that already exists in the game, and it took me several tries before I managed to adopt Plurpel.

Once there, you can buy plant seeds with coins (not real money!) from the Farmer’s Market, then plant them at the Farm. You can find tokens to play the Gatchpon Machine. You can buy bait from the Fishing Mart and fish at the Fishing Spot. You can play a couple of puzzle games at the Temple of Dog.

Part of the fun of this kind of website is exploring and finding everything there is to do. There’s a simple action game under the Games menu, Mimi’s Countless Children.

It’s the most fun if you’re a kid, but unlike Neopets Dog Online seems to be here mostly as a simple fun thing to do, without any visible profit motive. Again, it’s always possible that it’ll get ruined some time in the future, and these kinds of things do tend to either disappear or get ruined eventually, so please find as much joy as you can in its transitory nature.

Dog Online (free, browser)

Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival 2026

Coming late to adamgryu’s Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival this year, that community experience where you can carve pumpkin models with simple tools then upload them to a display for people to enjoy. The festival is open for a while around Halloween every year then goes offline until the following year, with all the old pumpkins discarded at that time, so enjoy it while it lasts.

Just a plain ol’ Jack O’Lantern here, but you’ll find much fancier ones at the festival.
I’m sure this is fine.

Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival 2026 (adamgryu, itch.io, $0, for Windows, Mac and Linux)

Sundry Sunday: Electric Light Orchestra’s Mr. Blue Sky, with a Twilight Princess Animatic Set To It

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

If you’ve never played The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess then you probably won’t understand much of anything going on in this five-minute animatic, and even though I have played through it I still found it difficult to follow, but it’s well-made and entertaining. By the way, how about the song? I misidentified it as from The Beatles until I looked it up….

GameHut Reveals Graphics Tricks Used in Genesis Adventures of Batman & Robin

It’s been quite a while since GameHut, a Youtube channel run by Jon Burton, 29-year director of Traveler’s Tales and an old maven of Genesis/Mega Drive effects, posted a video. I’m not sure Burton himself worked on this game in this one, but he does a fine job of explaining (14 minutes) how the developers used the Genesis’ catalog of technical tricks to make one of the most visually striking games on that platform, The Adventures of Batman & Robin, pulling off realtime effects that might seem impossible on a system with no hardware scaling.

The primary trick used is the old raster interrupt on HBLANK, manipulating graphics registers while the beam is part of the way down the screen, abetted by the Genesis/Mega Drive’s speedy, for its time, Motorola 68000 processor and 7.87 mHz clock speed. Change horizontal scroll registers midway down and shear the background. Swap palettes on vertical stripes and create a checkerboard pattern. It’s not the only trick used, but its versatility sure made it impressive when it showed up.

A Ten Hour Documentary on Pool of Radiance

MrEdders123 on Youtube went way way beyond the call of duty and made a video on nearly every aspect of SSI’s classic RPG Pool of Radiance, the first official D&D product to attempt to adapt the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons tools to computer play with any degree of completeness and the first in the legendary “Gold Box” series. It’s nearly ten hours long.

It’s true that the length is kind of ludicrous, but in its description there is a helpful directory of chapters to get you to jump around it to the places most appealing to you. And what a monumental task they’ve accomplished! Included you’ll find a history of unofficial attempts to adapt D&D (many games cribbed from its rules in the early days), the licensed Intellivision D&D games, TSR’s own computer products, SSI’s becoming the official D&D company for computer games, the history of the Gold Box line, the play of the game itself, the ports of Pool of Radiance (including the Famicom release) and three fan remakes in different engines.

Some Tips for Balatro

To this date the most-read post on this blog is a link to a Youtube video from Dr. Spectred of Balatro University about getting really high scores. Which is fine, I guess, I’m not resentful at all, no, I’m okay with that, really.

But you know, I personally have just come off a 92 game win streak in Balatro. Sure it was on White Stake, and in specific circumstances, while Dr. Spectred has 100+ win streaks on Gold Stake. Yes you forced me to admit it, I’m nowhere near as good as they are! But I am one of the 0.54% of players who’s earned Completionist++ on Android, that’s got to be worth something, right? Right?

So, here is some information that may help you play, in case it’s useful. This is oriented towards winning, that is finishing Ante 8, not towards getting astronomical scores or reaching naneinf.

All images borrowed from the Balatro Wiki.

1. I think the easiest deck is Checkered Deck. It makes it nearly guaranteed that you’ll be able to get a couple of Flushes. All you need is a one card hand size increase, and a Flush becomes a certainty. The tradeoff is that Flush is the weakest five-card hand, only worth 15 chips, but it still delivers +4 Mult. One of the difficulties with getting a run started is getting past the early Antes, and Checkered Deck makes that simple. If you can put together a hand of at least four face cards or tens, you’ve made the first round’s requirement right there. On Checkered Deck Jupiter is the best Planet card of course, but Neptune also helps.

2. Even if you don’t pick Checkered Deck, it’s best to find a single hand you can make consistently and focus on it. It takes fewer resources to build levels and Jokers for more than one kind of hand.

3. Early money is extremely important. Money makes all other things possible. With enough money you can not only buy things you need, you can reroll to find more. Aim at getting full interest (normally at $25) every round, and then keep that much unless something really valuable comes up. Sometimes this means you have to make a hard decision between a useful Joker and building interest. Survival comes first, but you don’t get any benefit from blowing past score requirements.

    4. Attack all of the game’s benefits simultaneously: Jokers, Planets and card modifications. Each of these things by themselves can win the game, but you’ll have to take them to such excess that you probably won’t get everything you need in time.

    5. Planets are probably the hardest tool to use well, but are very important. Planets get you hand levels, which increases both base Mult and Chips. Since hand levels form the base of scoring, they all help empower Times Mult. This makes Telescope one of the best vouchers, and Trance one of the best Spectral cards. I like to open Standard Packs when I can to get cards with Blue Seals, even on Checkered Deck if it’s not a Heart or Spade, which is usually a really bad idea.

    5. Prioritize Jokers for the phase of the game you’re in. Early Antes: plus Mult, plus Chips. Late game: times Mult. If you’re struggling in the first three Antes, it’s better to get a good source of flat Mult or Chips than to go for a Times Mult Joker, until you manage to get your base Mult up a bit. But remember, the higher your main hand level, the more powerful Times Mult becomes.

    6. If you have the spare money to fill them, empty Joker slots are liabilities. If you have the cash for it, there is little reason not to fill all your Joker slots. There are exceptions, like with Joker Stencil or Madness, or of course Rentals or Eternals on high Stakes, but lots of Jokers have no downside other than cost. Remember that selling a joker gets you half its price back. This is a reason why Perishable Jokers in higher stakes aren’t all that bad: you can always sell it even if it expires, and you’ll get half your money back.

    7. Grab onto Common Joker combos. Some of the best combos involve Hanging Chad (retriggers first scoring card twice), which applies to any effect that triggers on individual cards. Hanging Chad and Photograph are both Commons, yet are still worth a total 8x Mult if your first scoring card is a face card. Or Hanging Chad and any Glass card, but be prepared to replace it.

    8. The best card modifications vary depending on your jokers and where in the game you are, but really great are: any Seal but Blue and Red especially, Holographic, Steel, Gold and Glass. The worst modifications are Wild, +4 Mult and Stone, but Stone has uses in certain cases.

    9. Most Building Jokers are better the earlier in the game you get them. Building Jokers are the ones that increase in power in some way depending on your actions. Green Joker increases by +1 Mult every hand you play, but decreases by 1 when you discard. Some of these Jokers require special play like this to make them powerful, and some have significant drawbacks: Ride The Bus and Obelisk can lose all their built-up power instantly. Supernova and Fortune Teller are building Jokers that don’t have to be bought early, because they are empowered by your actions even before you get them. The best ones naturally are the ones that raise Times Mult, which can be valuable even if you get them in later Antes.

    10. After you win and pass into Endless Mode, most builds top out around Ante 13. The score requirement for the Small Blind of Ante 13 is 47 billion, over 100 times the requirement for the Small Blind of Ante 12, and they rocket up even faster beyond that point. Fortunately the last score achievement is for reaching Ante 12. There are ways of playing past that point, but I must refer you back to Balatro University for such rarefied air.

    So now that I’ve won 92 games in a row, I’ve uninstalled the game. I’m not going to try to top that… at least, not until the long-awaited content update comes up. LocalThunk, please take your time….

      An Example of Competitive Kirby Air Riders

      I’ve enthused here before about Kirby Air Ride, and its improbable recent sequel Kirby Air Riders. Racing games, and more than racing games, from the mind that invented Super Smash Bros., and with more than a little similarity to the perennial fighting megahit, but at the same time completely different from it. In fact, there is no other big-publisher game in existence like the Kirby Air Ride games, especially its innovative City Trial mode.

      If you’ve asked yourself how well would City Trial work as an e-sport-like competition, well we made a post here with examples of that last year. There is a pretty nice community of Kirby Air Ride fans that have created their own variant of the game, with play tweaked and unfavored events removed, that meets in a Discord. I refer interested players there.

      The community on the Discord also plays Kirby Air Riders, which is a much expanded game with many customization options.

      If you’d like to see how it works, here is a three game match (31 minutes) from a currently-running tournament. It makes, in my opinion, for interesting viewing, with some unexpected upsets.

      I’ve already explained how City Trial works in detail before, but here is an overview that should help explain the above video. A number of players, up to 4 in Air Ride and 16 in Air Riders, roam around a sandbox city environment for a period of time, usually five minutes. The city contains a variety of different vehicles to switch to, stat upgrades to collect and time-limited powerups to use. They explore the same city, and can attack each other during this time, sniping at each other with a viciousness belied by the riders’ cutesy appearance; Grand Theft Auto isn’t nearly this chaotic or cutthroat.

      Different events happen during the Trial, some of them helping everyone, some of them detrimental, and some of them a mixture of the two. There are also Legendary Machine parts that sometimes appear, and a player who manages to collect all three to one machine gets to ride it, and become extremely overpowered for the rest of the match.

      When time runs out, the players’ stats are revealed to everyone, then they’re thrown into a random Stadium event. The players don’t usually know what the event will be, but sometimes the game drops them a hint. Sometimes, in Air Riders, they don’t all get the same event. Sometimes they get to vote on the event. There’s lots of Stadiums, and they each test the player’s stats, vehicle, and playing skill in different ways. You could end up with a Stadium extremely well suited to your machine and stats, or you could end up stuck with a fragile paper airplane in a demolition derby.

      The randomness is part of the fun, but if you’re playing to maximize your wins you can’t usually risk putting all of your statistical eggs in a single hoped-for Stadium basket. Even completing a Legendary Machine is no guarantee of success. The ups and downs of Air Ride and Riders make for exciting viewing, but it’s largely without the posturing and negativity of many e-sports. I recommend watching a match or two, either the above-embedded video or one from the recent Skyah Summer Slam event, whether you’re interested in playing it or not.

      White_Pointer Gaming Tracks Down Serious Retro Bugs

      WPG’s big thing lately has been finding out how various games, especially 16-bit games, pull off their graphics tricks. This one’s a bit different; they’ve found game-crashing bugs in several 8- and 16-bit titles and investigated their causes, and figuring out how to fix them. (30 minutes)

      The five specific bugs they examine are:

      • The Battletoads second-player control lockout that happens near the end of the game.
      • The PRG0 version of NES Castlevania crashing hard when too many objects are on the screen. I’ve been bitten by this one several times, and it even happens in the US version of Castlevania in the recent console compilations.
      • Joe & Mac 2 crashing early in the game if you’re riding a dinosaur while unlocking a door with a key.
      • NES Rainbow Islands crashing during the ending cutscene.
      • Sonic the Hedgehog crashing if the control pad is held in the down direction after passing the sign at the end of Labyrinth Zone Acts 1 or 2.

      Sundry Sunday: Jazz Cover of The Balatro Song

      Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

      Hello. Here is a jazz cover of the Balatro song. I don’t say Balatro theme song because it only has one song. Here is the jazz cover (8 minutes). Enjoy responsibly.