Tag: citytrial

On the Kirby Air Riders Demo

My Experience with the Global Test Ride Demo

Acronyms:
KAR: Kirby Air Ride, the original for Gamecube.
KARs: Kirby Air Riders, the new game for Switch 2. (Note the following lowercase ‘s’.)

Who’d have thought that a Kirby game could be so vicious? If you think Smash Bros is a fun and lighthearted romp then this game will show you how perilous a Sakurai game can be. Several of the characters, even among the limited selection in the demo, are former bosses (King Dedede, Meta Knight, Magalor, Susie), so you might think of this game as them taking out their frustrations on Kirby for beating them up.

I should say that the demo was missing many items and events, this only covers elements from the Global Test Ride demo, available here. The first Global Test Ride is over, but there is another one on November the 15-16th, depending on your timezone. The full version of Kirby Air Riders is out on the 20th.

While it allowed playing Air Ride, the namesake mode, in an offline capacity, the demo focuses on City Trial, the mode everyone remembers from the original KAR. The game comes with a bunch of tutorials, and they can be played even outside of the demo period. They explain the basics adequately, so other than a bit of a recap I’ll content myself with explaining City Trial in more detail.

If you’d like to see what it was like during play, I recorded some of my adventures playing the demo and uploaded it to Youtube, here (1 hour, 22 minutes):

How it works

  • You and up to 15 other people are thrown onto a big sandbox map, a city on Kirby’s home planet of Pop Star called Skyah. In the demo, in practice, you’ll be playing with 15 others; I never had a match with fewer than that.
  • You all start out riding Compact Stars, which are maneuverable and can glide a bit, but are really fragile and have little else to recommend them.
  • Rapidly move the control stick from one side to the other to do a “Quick Spin.” This is an essential move! While you can damage other machines just by driving into them at a sufficent speed, Quick Spins make it easier to do damage, and you even get a brief period of invulnerability at the start of a spin.
  • You have five minutes to pick up “patches,” single-color icons that increase your stats a bit in one of a number of categories. Get as many as you can!
  • There are different colors of boxes that appear. Blue boxes are the most important, as they contain both patches and food items that can repair damage. Red boxes contain Copy Essences that give you different attacks; Green boxes have other kinds of items. Only the patches are permanent. Break boxes by either boosting into them repeatedly or using the “quick spin” move.
  • You can also change vehicles. Ride up to an empty vehicle and hold down the Y button (sometimes called “Special” in the game) to switch to it. You take all of your patches with you when you do this!
  • While you can get off your vehicle by holding Y for a while, there is little reason to do so. You can’t even pick up power-ups while unmounted.
  • You can attack other players. So, too, can they attack you, and as mentioned at the start 16-player City Trial can be incredibly vicious. Stay on your guard. Players who are attacked usually lose a patch or two. If your vehicle gets destroyed, you’ll lose a bunch of patches, although not as many as in the original KAR, where you usually lost half of your patches. By the way, when I say you’ve “died,” I really mean your vehicle got destroyed. Your character cannot be harmed.
  • The city is pretty big, and has several hidden areas. Generally, the more out-of-the-way areas are safer, and have more powerups to collect.
  • Throughout the time period, different random events can occur. Some good, some bad, and some are just weird. If the event has some special location, an arrow will often appear around you pointing which direction it’s in.
  • One kind of event is the competition event, and it’s like a minigame. You’re told a “quick race” or a “dustup derby” is about to begin, with a start location somewhere in the city. It’s up to you if you want to participate, but if you do you’ll get at least eight random patches for participating, a few more if you arrive early, and you’ll get some more if you place well. Even if your vehicle gets destroyed in the event, it isn’t permanent. If you choose not to participate you can continue to explore the city, and without the participants attacking you might come out ahead. It’s your choice.
  • The purpose of all of this comes after time runs out. You’ll be given a selection of one of four “stadiums” to participate in using the machine and all the patches you’ve collected. The stadiums are all very different from each other: there are races of several types, battles, combat against enemies, button-pressing competitions, jumping contests, and even boss fights. At least one will be recommended to you based upon which machine you’re riding. Think carefully: some machines are unsuited to some stadiums. If your machine is really unsuited (a wheeled vehicle in an aerial stadium), the game will even stop you and ask if you’re sure, but it’ll let you do if anyway if you tell it yes.
  • This bit is important. Each stadium is its own game: you’re playing to win your stadium, not the City Trial session. Due to this a large game of City Trial can have up to four first-place finishers. If a lot of players (more than eight) pick a stadium, it’ll be split off into two separate competitions with their own winners. If you’re the only person to pick a given stadium, you win it automatically.

The finer points

Machine choice
You start out with the Compact Star, which is extremely fragile. I don’t know if this is still true, but in KAR it was found to have zero defense, meaning Defense patches had no effect on it!

You’ll want to switch to another machine, scattered around the city, as soon as possible, before some of the players will pick up the stronger machines. Shadow Star is prone to being taken out in one hit, with the main compensation that the rider can do the same to other vehicles. Also, Wing Star has always been notoriously killable, and Paper Star is even more frail. All of the flight-focused machines are made of paper, figuratively or literally.

The sturdiest machines are Rex Wheelie, Bulk Star, Wagon Star, Battle Chariot and Tank. Especially Wagon Star, whose health bar can extend up and off the screen.

You can choose your character too, and that can have a substantial effect on your longevity. Throughout all the vehicles and characters there’s a general theme of lighter: easier to get killed and fly, and heavier: does more damage and sticks more to the ground.

Evasive maneuvers
Driving in a straight line is pretty dangerous. In fact with people riding Battle Chariots and Tanks roaming around almost anything you do can be lethal to your machine, but driving in a straight line out in the open pretty much paints a big bullseye on your back. The more fragile your machine, the more important it is to avoid open spaces and driving in obvious straight lines.

Try not to brake for too long, or drive into walls. This might seem obvious, but there are players that look for people driving into barriers.

Awareness
Despite all these things, you’re gonna die sometimes. Somethings that could help: look for icons at the bottom of the screen indicating pursuers. And be aware of a red border along a side of the screen: that means there’s a big danger nearby, like a bomb explosion or a Gordo.

Machine advice
If you decide to go with a flying machine, all I can suggest is being very careful. Most of them can’t take more than one or two hits. If you go with one, you’ll want to spend most of your time in the air, where it’s much easier to survive, and get your stats from the tops of buildings and flying through rings

The most important stat, as with the original, is Top Speed. Not only is it generally useful in most stadiums, but the faster you move, the quicker you can get to patches, and the faster you can grow your machine.

Unlike in Kirby Air Ride however, depending on your choice of character you might have low acceleration, a.k.a. Boost. And all drivers that have high Top Speed have low Boost, and vice versa. If you’re playing a high Top Speed character, Boost may be a higher priority for you. At least one machine, the Bulk Star, can’t move at all unless you charge it up, so the Charge patches will be more important to you.

Places
– Underground mall
No place is completely safe, but the underground areas tend to have a better ratio of reward to risk. The mall is tight corridors and little room to avoid conflict, but also more boxes than other places.
– Crystal Caverns
The crystals here can be destroyed, and contain patches. They tend to get cleared out early in each match, but it’s pretty common for one or two to be missed if you find yourself here anyway.
– Shipwreck
The lift pad in inside puts you on deck, where you can use the cannons to immediately become airborne
– Plaza
This central location has ramps for getting into the air
– Rails
Like the original, there’s a system of rails that goes around the outside perimeter of the city. KAR enthusiasts tend to call these “rail jail,” since getting on them tends to mean you’re stuck for a few oh-so-important seconds. Now the rails sometimes have a patch on them, and you can escape a rail by holding to the side for a second or two. Be careful now to fall off on the wrong side though.
– The Volcano
During the Portal event you can sometimes find a lunar landscape, which is actually beneath the Volcano! The lift pad inside it sends you way up high in the air. Is there another way into the Volcano? I’m not telling! Because, honestly, I don’t know. Sakurai says there is, but that could just be via the portals.

Events
– Meteors & Gordos
Both involve huge round dangerous things falling from the sky. You don’t have much vertical range of vision, so it’s difficult to avoid them while you’re out on the surface. It might be a good idea to hide underground during these events.
– Bosses (Dynablade, Grand Wheelie, Kracko)
Fighting the bosses is dangerous, but can be a good source of patches. As with any event that attracts lots of players to one spot, you might actually get more benefit from attacking the distracted players than the boss.
– Lots of Boxes
They all appear in one location. Again, attacking the gathered players feeding at the trough works well here.
– Portals
The game hurries you into them, but they just lead to other places in the city. As explained before though, one of them leads to the lunar chamber beneath the Volcano.
– Competition events
It’s usually a good idea to participate in the competition events even if you don’t have a good vehicle or character for it. There are two kinds: Races and “Dustup Derby” bouts that are kind of like vehicular deathmatch. Even if you lose, your state is restored afterward, and you get at least eight random patches, risk-free, just for participating.
– Secret rooms
There’s a few secret rooms in the city that are usually locked off, and only open for this event. When they open, each has several of the same powerup in it. Sometimes they’re patches, but sometimes they’re just attack items. Unlike KAR, there’s more than one secret room in the city this time. The arrow around you points to the nearest one that still has powerups in it.
– UFO
One of the few upsides of aerial machines is being able to get up on the flying saucer when it occasionally visits. There’s a lot of patches up there, often including an All patch, which increases all your stats by one point.
– Rare boxes, and Rare boxes with fakes
Rare boxes have lots of patches and few downsides. Rare boxes with fakes, though, are infuriating; opening the wrong box will inflict a lot of damage on you, and has a good chance of destroying your machine outright. If it follows a similar philosophy as KAR then there’s some way to tell them apart, but in the hectic atmosphere of the demo period I didn’t have a chance to figure out what it was.
– Treasure chests
Search the city for a key, then take it to a treasure chest for a prize. The arrow around your vehicle points the way, although the two times I spotted this rare event I wasn’t able to get anywhere near one of the keys.
– Tiny players! Gigantic items! All the boxes contain the same items! All machines fly more easily!
Some of the events are just strange happenings. At least the worst events from KAR, dense fog, fake items and bouncing items, don’t seem to occur here, or they don’t in the demo.

Priorities
– In the original, Top Speed was the undisputed king of powerups. Higher Top Speed means you can explore and find more patches faster, and most of the stadiums prioritize speed. Two things challenge Top Speed’s domimance. Bigger characters and vehicles tend to already have a good speed, but are slow to reach it; for them, Boost (acceleration) might be a greater priority. Second designer Masahiro Sakurai said in KARs’s first Nintendo Direct stated that Top Speed actually reduces your Defense a bit, which as far as I’m aware is new. Now Top Speed, while still very important, is a bit more of a tradeoff. Rider/vehicle combos with lower acceleration will want to get more Boost (which should properly be called Acceleration). Weight increases speed a little and makes you a bit more durable. Flight patches on a wheeled vehicle are practically worthless, and Flight lowers durability a bit too. Look out for the gray patches though, those are powerdowns.
– The best Copy Abilities are Needle and Sword. Both are excellent for attacking bosses. Plasma is also pretty good, and easier to use than in KAR.
– There are also special weapons and powerups. One of them, the Firecracker, has gotten a severe downgrade since KAR, it’s only got ten automatic shots now instead of the original’s 25 and so is useless if there isn’t a target in sight right away. That’s a common issuen with the powerups, but it’s especially bad with the Firecrackers.

Stadiums
Oval Course: A race around a simple course. In KAR, all of the Air Ride courses got used as stadiums, but there’s been no hint that this will happen in the new City Trial.

Drag Race: A quick trip down a straight course. While races are a bit more competitive in KARs than they were in KAR because of the new trail-of-stars catchup drafting mechanic, this still usually comes down to whoever has the best speed stat.

Beam Gauntlet: The event doesn’t mention the fact that this is a race, but through a treacherous obstacle course. If your machine gets destroyed along the way, you end up in last place.

Gourmet Race: While called a “race,” the players are actually trying to collect as many food points as they can. The winner, I think, is usually the one who knows how to get extra food on top of the buildings, instead of grubbing the ground grub with the other players stuck down there.

Target Flight: A good event for upsets, if your vehicle has enough airtime to make it to the target board you might earn up to 100 points. This event gives you two tries to get the best total score.

Skydive: Also prone to upsets, this is my favorite of the new stadiums. Use the boost button to plummet down through the target rings, and find the highest-value landing place you can. You get a time bonus for finishing quickly, so even if you somehow end up here with a non-flying vehicle, you can get a good basic score by just plummeting down as fast as you can.

High Jump: Use a ramp to jump as high as you can. This one is mostly a stat check: how good is your flying power?

Air Glider: Use a ramp to jump as far as you can. While also a stat check in essence, at least in this one you have to strike a balance between forward speed and height.

Dustup Derby: a version of the “deathmatch” event from the city. If your machine gets destroyed you get another one, letting you stay in the game (but also letting the other players kill you again for another point).

Kirby Melee: the players are put in an arena with a cloud of basic enemies, many with copy abilities, and compete to defeat as many as they can. I found the Needle copy power to be very helpful here, if you can snatch up an enemy that has it.

Vs. Boss: A co-op event where all the players work together to defeat a bit enemy. The only boss in the demo is Robo Dedede. If you don’t work hard at attacking it you won’t win, although the players get ranked either win or lose. Quick Spins won’t cut it: you’ll need to use the powerups that appear in the arena to have even a slight chance.

There was also stadium where you tried to change more buttons to your color than the other players, and another battle event where there are powerups that make you huge and extra powerful. I’m pretty sure there will be more events in the full game than featured in the demo.

References:
Kirby Air Riders Direct #1 and Kirby Air Riders Direct #2

The Stats of Kirby Air Ride

Kirby Air Ride appears set to be finally remembered, with the announcement that a sequel is in the works for the Switch 2, with Masashiro Sakurai again at the helm.

Air Ride, possibly the most atypical game in a franchise with maybe 50% or more atypical games in it, is a sadly-neglected title that is, no lie, one of the truest underrated classics of the Gamecube, and it’s mostly because of the amazing City Trial mode, which I’ve mentioned here before.

In play terms, City Trial is what turns Air Ride from a severely diminished F-Zero clone to a game for the ages. Multiple colored Kirbys (Kirbies?) explore a sizable map, not huge but not tiny either. Scattered around it are a variety of randomly-generated vehicles and items. Of the items, the most important is probably the upgrades, or “patches,” which improve the stats of whatever vehicle a Kirby may pilot. They are Boost, Top Speed, Turn, Charge, Glide, Weight, Offense, Defense and HP. Each has a definite effect on your vehicle’s performance; the more you have, the stronger the vehicle gets.

People who haven’t played Kirby Air Ride, but have played Super Smash Bros. for 3DS, may recognize this idea as the basis of its exclusive Smash Run mode, but in Smash Run you each had your own map to explore; it only became a true multiplayer game at the very end. But in both Air Ride and Smash Run, after the players build their vehicle or character, they’re all thrown into a competitive event. It might be fighting, but it might also be something different. Their success at collecting stats helps determine how well they do in the event, but while there may be clues, there is no definite indication of what the event will be.

So collecting the stats is very important to success. But the game doesn’t explain what they do very well, and in fact some of their effects are quite complex and difficult to communicate briefly. The video above goes into detail, but here’s a few quick takeaways:

  • The “Boost” stat, as it turns out, is more like Acceleration.
  • The Glide stat works partly by reducing weight, so it and the Weight stat counteract each other a bit.
  • All of the stats work by multiplying the vehicle’s base stat, so a vehicle with a 1.3 base gets more effect if it collects that kind of powerup than if it were at the usual 1.0.
  • However, the default vehicle, the Compact Star you begin each City Trial game with, has a Defense stat of zero. Since any number times zero is zero, you get no benefit from Defense patches if you stick with the Compact Star vehicle.

Watch the video if you want to know more. And if you’ve never played Kirby Air Ride but have a Switch 2 keep a look out, because it seems very likely that Nintendo will give it a rerelease for Switch Online Expansion Pack eventually!

About Kirby Air Ride City Trial

One of the best Kirby games isn’t a traditional Kirby game at all. Long before Kirby and the Forgotten Land finally worked out how the game should work in three dimensions, there was Kirby Air Ride, a Gamecube racing game that’s so weird. Kirby tools around on the Warp Stars that are his trademark ride through a number of courses at speeds usually only seen in an F-Zero game. There’s a variety of stars that can be ridden, more to unlock, it was the second game in which Meta Knight was fully playable, and the first where King Dedede was (unless you count short sequences in Kirby 64).

Kirby Air Ride had three modes, but they all felt a bit half-baked except for one. The standard Air Ride mode wasn’t bad, but could only be played one course at a time, with no overarching mode that connected them. That’s right, it didn’t have a “Grand Prix” mode. And the other competitors were only differently-colored Kirbys (Kirbies?) anyway. The courses were pretty good, but it didn’t give you much to keep you playing except for its checklist (which we’ll get to).

There was also a special racing mode that took place from an overhead view, on special one-screen courses, like Atari’s Sprint games, which felt even less substantive than the standard racing mode.

Possibly the best multiplayer experience on the Gamecube

But the reason Kirby Air Ride is special, and the reason I still have my copy of the game after all these years, is City Trial, which is one of the most engaging racing game experiences I’ve ever seen. It’s really good. Not because it has any overarching structure the other modes lack (other than its checkbox screen). But because it’s so novel; no other game I can think of provides the kind of gameplay that City Trial does, unless you count Smash Run from the 3DS version of Super Smash Bros., which was also made by Masahiro Sakauri. But even it isn’t really the same thing, because you can’t interact with the other players during it!

“Forget it Jake, it’s Kirbytown.”

City Trial puts from one to four players, either human-played or computer-controlled, in a free-roaming city area. It’s not really a “race” at all. While the city is, spatially, quite large, the players’ warp stars are so fast that it only takes about 20 or so seconds from one end to the other, and the game also keeps you appraised of where the other Kirbys are with on-screen indicators and a map in the corner. Over a period of between three to seven minutes, you zoom around trying to collect powerups for your star. They come in a variety of types: Top Speed, Acceleration, Charge, Turning, Gliding, Weight and more, all taking the form of 2D icons scattered randomly around the city.

Giving your warp star a tune-up is as easy as scooping up these symbols.

As you collect icons, each provides a small permanent (for the duration of the match) improvement in that one area of your star’s performance. Some are in boxes, which must be broken apart either by colliding with them repeatedly or spin attacks. Some of them are gray-colored, which are permanent power-downs.

Throughout the time limit, you seek out and collect as many as you can. If there is a maximum stat you can reach I’ve never seen it; I think it can go at least as high as 20 icon’s worth, but it’s nearly impossible to get that high. It’s gratifying to feel your default “Compact Star” get steadily better and better as you snatch powerups. But also, there are other vehicles throughout the city, and you can get off your default star at any time by holding down on the control stick and the A button and board another one. All of the varied stars from Air Ride mode (some of which aren’t really stars at all) are present, and they all control really differently from each other. Some even have special properties, it’s not a case at all of them just having different stats. When you switch stars, you get to take all of your collected powerups with you, though if you have a lot you’ll drop some, and have to spend a few seconds picking them back up again.

The amount of care that went into this one mode is almost shocking. You can attack other players and steal their powerups! You can even destroy their warp star, and force them to wander around on foot to find a replacement! Some of the traditional Kirby copy abilities can be found and used against the other players! There’s random events, with a lot of variety, that can happen, providing different dangers, or opportunities. You can sail out over the ocean on your hovering star. If you get enough height, you can fly over the invisible border wall and explore even more ocean.

What cosmic horror is invading Popstar this week?

You can also collect Legendary Machine parts, which are hidden in some of the boxes. The Hydra, from the more recent Super Smash Bros. games, is a direct reference to this. If you manage to find all three parts, to either the Hydra (the green one) or the Dragoon (the red one), you get to ride it. They’re both ludicrously overpowered, although they can also be difficult to control.

Target Flight is one of the more common competitions. It’s like a lost Monkey Ball minigame.

The real mark of genius in this mode is what happens when time runs out. The game shows a chart with everyone’s vehicle stats on it, then throws all the players into a random event. Your vehicle’s stats may make this event easy or hard! If you end up in an event where you have to attack enemies or aim to collide with targets, you might find yourself wishing you had laid off getting all those speed-ups, but plenty of the events are races too, including all of the race courses from Air Ride mode. How do you know what kind of event it coming up? There are two ways: sometimes, during the City Trial portion, the game will drop you a text hint as a message. (Hilariously, once in a great while it lies.) Or else, if you don’t like the randomness, you can choose broadly what kind of event will happen in the game settings.

Whichever player comes out on top in the event, the victory is short-lived. There is no huge victory celebration, no advantage to be gained. The game doesn’t even save player profiles. But City Trial mode is entertaining enough that we don’t really end up caring much? It’s even fun to play against computer opponents.

It was a long time ago, but at one point I had every one of these squares checked off.

Each of the three modes in Kirby Air Ride has a “checklist,” a grid of squares, each representing some accomplishment, or at least occurrence, that can happen in its game. This is the closest thing Air Ride has to progression. If you’ve seen the Challenges in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, this is the same kind of thing. All of the challenges are hidden at first, but when you unlock one, the requirements for the ones around it are revealed to you. Some of the boxes unlock things, like new events, being able to play as Meta Knight or Dedede in the practice mode, or more Kirby colors. But mostly it’s just something to give obsessive players (like myself) something to work for. In a racing game without even a Grand Prix mode (seriously what is up with that?), I’ll take what I can get.

An aerial view of the bad part of Kirbytown, where the Waddles Dee all wear eyepatches and have goatees.

One more cool thing? Until fairly recently (and ignoring that non-canonical anime series), City Trial was our only glimpse into what day-to-day life was like in Dream Land. This city is evidently where Kirby and his friends live and play (I don’t think any of them have a job). There’s skyscrapers, a river, an ocean, an underground region, mass transit rails, a golf course (overseen by Wispy Woods), a castle and a volcano, and even “dilapidated houses,” which the players can demolish with their vehicles. I guess even Planet Popstar has a seedy part of its towns.

Apparently, day-to-day life in Kirbyland is spent in endless vehicular combat sessions. I’d like to say that I’m surprised, but for some reason, I’m not.

If you’d like to see how this works out in play, here’s an hour and 54 minutes of City Trial play, without commentary, on Youtube: