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.
