This video seems to imply the two versions of pretentious penguin King Dedede have different designs, but honestly all I see is one of them has bigger irises than the other? (2 minutes)
Thirteen seconds about the dangers of being a pedestrian in Sky City Place Location Zone:
Finally, this isn’t an animation, but something that can actually happen in game. This is a major spoiler, so some space….
For the solid of mind and stout of body who has braved this far down….
There’s a new legendary machine that relates to events near the end of Road Trip, KARs’ story mode, called Gigantes, with stress on the middle syllable: Gigántes. Imagine saying it like SoulCalibur’s narrator says Cervantes. It’s an incredibly huge thing that takes up almost half the city! Immediately the remaining time becomes about defeating it, sort of how like, in Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, certain games get randomly chosen to be Mission Games, where in addition to turning a profit you have to save the universe.
If Gigantes is still active when time expires, then the Stadium automatically becomes Vs. Gigantes, the Gigantes player against all the others in a big dire battle. Like this (3 minutes):
I preordered Kirby Air Riders (not much of a surprise considering how much I’ve talked about the original, and the “Global Test Ride” demo.) Am I still enjoying it? YES! It’s like a bigger version of the original. If you’re tired of all these posts on this one game, it’s likely to be my last on the subject, for a while at least. In a few days there’s supposed to be a big launch event, to kick off a year of special event content. I might report on some of that, but c’mon; yesterday I made a post about Microsoft BASIC and the Zorks going open source. I think I’m due a little indulgence.
City Trial remains the main draw, even when I have a bad game it’s still fun. You start, you build up stats over five minutes, then you get a “stadium” (which you can usually pick from now) that tests your build.
Throughout the five minutes all manner of things happen: bosses attack, minigames happen, blanket advantages or disadvantages happen to everyone. It’s chaos, but it’s FUN chaos. Sometimes it feels like you win without trying; sometimes you lose despite everything. Every game is like a little story. But good or bad, it’s over quickly, and you can do it again.
My record at collecting stats so far. I wish you could save vehicles you’ve built, but alas each only gets used for one Stadium.
Each run has a selection of special things that can happen during it. One of them is a hunt for pieces of a “legendary machine,” a vehicle with extremely high stats that is sometimes hidden in some boxes. If a player collects one, an icon appears over them during play, signifying to everyone else that they have it. If player with a machine piece is struck by another player they might drop it. If a player gets all three pieces, a notification is given to all the players, and they get to ride it. It happened to me once! Here is video (½ minute):
Other things can happen too! It’s really never the same game twice.
Now, the worst thing about the original Air Ride still applies: there is no Grand Prix mode. (Why not?? I guess the inhabitants of Dream Land don’t have it in them to hold one?)
The most pleasant surprise, besides the fleshed-out, fully online-capable City Trial mode, which feels like the game it was always meant to be, is that Top Ride, the odd mode out of the original, is now decently playable and much more fun. It doesn’t have a Grand Prix mode either, but its races are so short that it barely even matters. I’ve mentioned before that it feels like Sakurai intentionally patterned it after Atari’s ancient Sprint games, which go all the way back to 1974’s Gran Track 10, giving it a legacy that goes back to two years after Pong. It’s playable online too, as well as namesake mode Air Ride.
The new singleplayer mode, Road Trip, is okay, but it’s just a disjointed series of challenges. You do get to build up stats throughout it, giving it an RPG feel, But there’s no exploration or anything like that.
The one thing that connects all the separate modes is Kirby Air Ride’s greatest invention, returning for another go: the Checklist. A grid of 150 boxes, one per mode, with an extra one for Online play. Every one has an unlock requirement.
At first, none of the boxes’ requirements are even revealed. You’re certain to check at least one of them the first time you play each mode though, purely by chance, and the requirements for the boxes around the ones you’ve checked off are revealed to you. Most of the boxes give you a little something when you check them. Some new decals or accessories to decorate your vehicles with. Some of them unlock characters, or machines for use in some modes, or costume pieces. A scant few give you free checks you can spend, to mark off difficult challenges for free. Many (not all) have optional setups you can activate, like little minigames.
Kirby Air Riders’ biggest sin, and greatest virtue, is that it’s really different from other games. It throws out features one would have thought obvious. (Grand Prix modes!) It adds weird new ones for no reason other than the joy of doing so. (Playing with gummis in a physics engine! Customizing machines and selling them in a little fake marketplace!)
And it does unexpected things, like after spending five minutes attacking and avoiding up to 15 other players, having them each choose which Stadium to play in. There isn’t an overall winner: each Stadium has its own winner! And, if you’re the only one to choose a Stadium, you win automatically.
Yes! That’s Lolo and Lala, from the Adventures of Lolo, a.k.a. Eggerland, games, slightly renamed and playable! Their special attack is shooting familiar-looking big green blocks at the other players!
This happens much more rarely than you might assume: it’s only happened to me once, after playing a whole lot of City Trial. Even those rare times were the game randomly decides you’re all playing THIS now, players are still split up into arbitrary groups.
It’s hard to say if you’ll like it because other than Air Ride, there’s nothing really to compare it too. It’s its own thing, but I think that’s what I like most about it. Whatever Kirby Air Riders has, this is the only place to get it. And it definitely has something. It’s a shame that you have to take a seventy dollar gamble on whether it’s something you want. Ideally the Global Test Rides were when one would have tried it out and seen if it was to one’s liking. Maybe they’ll do another one some day, or you can watch Youtube videos of gameplay? (I once again humbly offer myown.) But if this is something you’ll like, you’ll really like it. Maybe use that new Switch “game borrowing” feature to bum it off a friend for a while. It should be experienced at least once.
So it’s over, and all of those Switch 2 demo apps used to play it are now useless hunks of code. If you load it up now, it’ll tell you the period is over and direct you to the eShop page for the full game. Maybe they’ll offer another one someday, they’ve been known to dust off Splatoon demo apps as a promotion from time to time, but odds are it’ll never work again.
Debuting in the second demo: Regular Waddle Dee! Motto, “I have no mouth and I must RIDE!” (Image taken from a thumbnail for this video.)
It seemed to go well, and I only had a couple of disconnects, despite being saddled with rural internet. Most of my play in the second demo period was spent with the fine folks of the Kirby Air Ride Online Discord, people who are fanatical about the original game, and seemed to like the new one just fine.
I love Masahiro Sakurai’s determination to make the kind of games he wants to play, and I love that that’s so different from other games. We need lots more people like Sakurai making big games, but should remember that he can only do it because his games consistently sell well, and that he’s the creator and director of one of the biggest series there ever was, Super Smash Bros.
It’s like a last vestige from the classic age of console game development. Even if you don’t like them yourself, it’s important that these different games are being made, they help keep the gaming world viable, if just a bit, for new concepts. Without Smash Bros., it’s obvious we wouldn’t have Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl or Multiversus. Personally I have grown tired, very tired, of the idea of crossovers, but I don’t think that can be laid at Sakurai’s feet. It’s the executives that love the idea of mixing their properties together, even though it makes of their worlds and stories the same thing you get when you mix red, yellow, green and blue paint together: a big pot of gray.
Sakurai’s in a unique position, as both creator of one of Nintendo’s biggest series, but also no longer working at Nintendo. When you see his beautiful living room in his game design videos, that was paid for by the moneytrucks Nintendo must send him daily.
Let me impress upon you how weird the Kirby Air Ride games are. The “main” mode, the one the first game’s named after, Air Ride, is pretty basic. It has no Grand Prix mode, even in the sequel. Every race stands alone. The main way you play Mario Kart doesn’t even exist in Air Ride(ers). That’s a pretty strong statement that it isn’t a standard kart racer!
Of City Trial, it’s most interesting aspect is how invented it is. Most games try to follow elemental archetypes. You’re a shootyperson on a battlefield; you’re a swordperson in a dungeon, you’re in a maze, you’re jumping across platforms, you’re a commander of troops, you’re running a civilization, etc. City Trial can’t be summed up so easily.
I especially admire how each City Trial match can end so differently. You might have a fight, run a race, or participate in a vehicular version of a track-and-field event. This probably turns some people off; even the Kirby Air Ride Online people, when they run their tournaments, hold them in a customized version of the Gamecube game that disables many of the events and Stadiums. It makes for better spectating if the game doesn’t sometimes douse the game in a heavy fog, or if the Grand Finals doesn’t end up decided by whoever jumps the highest. If they hold Kirby Air Riders tournaments, how will they feel about Air Glider and High Jump returning to the event pool, joined now by Skydiving?
It became evident during the second demo period that Sakurai, despite talking about Air Riders for nearly two hours on the internet, has kept his lips shut about some substantial aspects of the game. Two vehicles that have never been seen before debuted, the Vampire Star that attacks nearby players automatically, and the Bulk Tank, which takes a heavyweight option and makes it more. We still don’t really know much about the Road Trip mode, which didn’t feature in the demo at all, not even appearing on the menu screen.
Well the demo is over now. The full game will be out on the 20th. See you on the riding fields, ya bunch of hamsters. (1 minute)
Oops! I spent the time I should have been using to make a post for today playing the second Kirby Air Riders “Global Test Ride” free demo. This time though I played it in “Paddock” rooms created by the happy inhabitants of the Kirby Air Ride Online Discord, which despite being a competitive scene for KAR players, and if you watch their match videos you can find some remarkably cutthroat play, struck me as rather less vicious than playing against internet randos.
Here is a record of that play session, from early in the morning of 11/15/2025:
Yes, it seems that internet room creation is active during the demo period, and if you have a community of people (maybe, dare I say it, friends?) to play with you can set it up so you don’t see any interweb nobodies in your group. You can even set up a gaming room of your own, and play matches with 15 computer opponents, who at the unchangable default settings of the demo are even less likely to wreck your star/bike/wheeled vehicle.
There were some other changes noticed during the event. Maybe this is an indication that while the game is active, it’ll also have subtle rule changes over time? The menu screens spotted during Sakurai’s Direct broadcasts have an “Event” option in the corner, which may indicate this will be the case. Well, I noticed one difference in this version. The lineup of randomly-spawning vehicles is different. Jet Star has been nowhere to be seen; in its place though I’ve seen Slick Star, a low-friction ride that returns from the original KAR, and Vampire Star, a new kind of machine, that is like a more extreme version of griefer favorite Shadow Star, but without its fragility.
Another thing that doesn’t seem to have changed, but went unremarked upon before, is that City Trial in Kirby Air Riders has some subtle anti-frustration features. If your vehicle gets trashed and you’re stuck on foot for more than a little while, it’s not known for a random vehicle to actually seek you out and park near you, and the game will even give you a little flashing icon pointing to it. And if you’re having a bad game, I’ve seen it, more than once, outright drop an Invincibility Lollipop directly on you. These aren’t frequent occurrences, but they’ve happened often enough that I think they can’t be coincidences.
If you’re sick of me talking about the KAR games, please forgive me. I’m riding high on the hype, and you have to admit it’s definitely a unique kind of game. Just give it a week or two, and I’ll probably go back to posting about Rampart again, or something like that.
I’ve heard it said that there are several different varieties of Nintendo Directs. There the Major Announcement type (Switch 2!), the Bunch of Games type (Indie World!), the Franchise Update type (what’s Pikachu up to next?) and then there’s the type that introduces an individual game. (Breath of the Wild!) This video is of that last kind, but the game it announces is not the usual kind of thing.
Why did he leave? I can’t say with any accuracy, I have no sources at Nintendo, but I do sometimes remember little things I’ve read, which may or may not be true. One of those things was that he had left under a cloud due to the perceived failure of Kirby Air Ride, which had a long and troubled development process, starting on N64 then moving to Gamecube, and not having a lot of traditional content compared to its sibling Mario Kart. But this could be false: I believe he’s said publicly it had to do with not wanting to make the same kind of game over and over. So now, let’s set this thread down, and come back to it in a few paragraphs.
Sakurai worked as an independent game designer for a while, enviable work if you can get it, and are as good at it as he is. The first game he made out of the gate was early Nintendo DS hit Meteos, a fine game that everyone should play, if they can find it now.
Meteos was an action-puzzle game that did genuinely new things in that genre, and was really good, a tricky combination. He then founded his own company Sora Ltd., which has maintained close ties with Nintendo: every game they’ve made since has been published by Nintendo. One of those was Kid Icarus: Uprising, another fondly-remembered title. And then….
Yeah, I’m getting to it. Sakurai has continued to direct every Super Smash Bros. title. It’s been said that Nintendo believes no one else can effectively make a Smash Bros. game. Super Smash Bros. Melee came out before Sakurai left HAL and was a gigantic hit; the Gamecube wasn’t exactly a stellar success, but imagine how it’d have fared if Melee hadn’t been made? People still play Melee in large numbers today; ask AsumSaus about it.
While some subsequent entries have not met with perfect acclaim (Brawl), every installment has still sold an awful lot of copies. Nintendo keeps asking Sakurai to make the next Smash Bros., and although he’s mention feeling tired and worn out (he heads gigantic teams to make them, and it’s an immense amount of work), even threatening to retire at one point, Nintendo seems to keep finding bigger dump trucks of money to leave at his houses. So as an independent agent he’s made the huge Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and the colossal Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and Super Smash Bros. for 3DS, and the utterly gigantic Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the fighting game that contains Mario, Link, Samus, Fox, Ness, Ryu, Simon Belmont, fighting Mii characters, Cloud, Sora and freaking Steve from Minecraft, among with dozens and dozens of others, even more if you count the Mii costumes you can buy, including Shantae, Cuphead and extra-freaking Sans Undertale himself.
And now, to pick back up that thread I left back there on the ground.
A few months ago at the Major Announcement Nintendo Direct about the release of the Switch 2, there was a short section announcing a sequel what may have been the game that caused Sakurai to leave Nintendo: Kirby Air Ride.
Sakurai has been vindicated many times over since then. Does it not have much content? He’s make the Smash Bros. games, each a greater tribute to the concept of excess than the last.. He said he didn’t want to make the same game repeatedly, but there’s been six Smash Bros. titles now. And after all this time, KAR’s City Trial still has a surprisingly large and involved fanbase, and even a tournament scene.
Early in the new announcement video (below), Sakurai mentions that it was bosses at Nintendo and HAL that asked him to make a new Kirby Air Ride game, not the other way around. It had to have been quite the vindication for him. Here is that video (47 minutes); for discussion of its contents, see below.
It has the slightly confusing name, when mentioned alongside the original, of Kirby Air Riders. I’ll abbreviate it KARrs.
Where KAR basically only had Kirby as a character, with King Dedede and Meta Knight more as gimmick characters, KARrs is full of characters, including former villains (Dedede and Meta Knight of course, and newbies Magalor and Susie), allies (Gooey and Bandana Waddle Dee), enemies (Chef Kawasaki, Knuckle Joe, Cappy, Starman and Waddle Doo), and various Kirby colors too. It has most (if not all) of the vehicles, called “machines,” from the first game and a few more. And it supports up to 8 players, 16 when played online.
And it still has City Trial, which Sakurai accurately refers to as the main event. Air Ride mode is a good basis, but City Trial is why people still obsessively play KAR today. It has a new City, on a floating island in the sky, and named “Skyah” He said there’s only one map, which seems a shame. KAR only had one City Trial map too. Skyah looks more varied, but not much more varied.
The core of City Trial is the same: the search for vehicles, the collection of vehicle-upgrading patches, the player-vs-player combat, and the sometimes-faulty information on which Stadium you’re trying to optimize for. KAR is a game where you can be told prepare for a race, and 10% of the time it won’t be a race. “Mind games,” as Sakurai calls it.
There’s still random events, but now there can be random contests that take place in the time-limited City portion of the match. All the players who choose to participate join in a special minigame that can award extra powerups, but players can also choose to ignore all that noise entirely, and just keep exploring and collecting patches on their own.
What’s missing? Sakurai says at the end that there’s lots of things he didn’t have time to mention, but they might just be gone completely. One of them, Top Ride, isn’t likely to be missed; it was a single-screen racing mode kind of like Atari’s Sprint games. KAR’s Air Ride’s tracks often made appearances as City Trial’s match-determining Stadiums, but Top Ride played no part in it. It’s probably been binned.
Another thing missing is KAR’s Checklist feature, a grid of squares for each of the three game modes, and each space representing a single challenge. Clearing the grid offered meta-progression in a game that made absolutely no attempt at storytelling. The Checklist was one of KAR’s big unique ideas, and it migrated over to a couple of titles in the Smash Bros. series. It’d be a shame if it was entirely gone from the game that birthed it. But Sakurai is known to discard even prominent features if he’s bored with them; remember the “Special Bonuses” in the first two Smash Bros. games, and how they vanished starting with Brawl? Remember how its Trophies didn’t make it into Smash Ultimate?
Even without the Checklists, there’s so much in the video to be excited about. This is unquestionably the Switch 2 game I’m most excited about. It’s true, it’s a sequel to a game that Masahiro Sakurai has made before, but it’s also an opportunity to iterate on ideas that deserve to be given another chance. Kirby Air Ride was something unique, and how often do we see that these days? Kirby Air Riders may be that utter rarity here in the 53rd year of video gaming: the birth of a new genre. It’s a personal pleasure to witness.
I’ve had a number of ideas for big posts lately, but those all take substantial time to make and finish. But I want to post something, so here are the directions my explorations have taken me lately.
Loadstar has a number of interesting things in it, including a trove of Print Shop clip art and (surprisingly) over 200 recipes. It’s full of those kinds of thing.
Action Retro just posted a new video on using the Apple Lisa (15 minutes), including browsing the internet on one, although on a text-based browser. A text-based web browser, on the first commercially-sold GUI OS, how about that!
Been back playing the Pac-Man Championship Edition Famicom demake on Namco Museum Archives Volume 1 on the Switch 2. It’s not really what I’d call a demake though, because it’s really good, in fact it might secretly be the best Pac-Man CE game, which isn’t meant to slight the others. It occurs me that I’ve learned a huge amount about all the games in the series, and I should try to get that information out onto the internet. I’ve got a WIP document about that, and I’m sure I’ve got some previous attempts at writing one in the archives somewhere.
Continuing on that thread, I’ve also learned that “Shadow Labyrinth,” that Metroidvania Bandai-Namco’s made with a truckload of classic Namco references including a spherical robot character called Puck, has a mini-game in it that is heavily inspired by the Pac-Man CE games, down to using some of its music. It isn’t scored the same though, and doesn’t seem properly set up for score attack play. It seems to follow along with some of the ideas they used in Pac-Man CE 2+’s two player mode, which I thought didn’t work very well.
Been wanting to investigate some C64 BBSes, but to do it proper you need a terminal that supports PETSCII. I have one, but I really want to get it working through C64 emulation.
There’s also the matter of getting the custom version of Kirby Air Ride set up with their bespoke version of Dolphin for netplay. I’ve already posted multiple times about KAR lately so I’m reluctant to make a full post about it again until I’ve had a chance to try it for myself.
Jeff Gerstmann got sent a message that suggests something you’ve probably never considered, that Mr Do! is real:
People say that you should turn off notifications and live your life and all that, but if I did that I wouldn't occasionally get a buzz on my wrist and see that some maniac has sent the phrase MR. DO! IS REAL to me.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
othatsraspberry is a hilarious maker of comics and has a Bluesky account. One of the things they’ve made comics about is the Metal Gear games, a surpassingly fertile ground for visual weirdness, because the games themselves are often very weird. (FISSION MAILED)
That’s right, no video today! We can do other things on Sundays than linking to video! And not Nintendo either! Let us rejoice in a world without Mario, for 24 hours at least!
Here is one comic, to give you a taste. For more, hie the away to that Bluesky feed or comic page!
Source: othatsraspberry’s comic archive page
An extra for you. We’ve had two items on Kirby Air Ride lately so I figured I wouldn’t devote a whole post to this, but if you still have room for more (Kirby always has room for more), the first game in this tournament match between Awsm_599 and heynoww has to be seen to be believed. The full video is 23 minutes, the relevant section is the first 7½ minutes, but if you stick around it also ends in an unexpected way. It’s a demonstration of why it’s important not to be too careless when playing City Trial. (I notice that I had linked to the end of that first round in the last KAR post, but the whole game is a nailbiter.)
Possibly
As it turns out, I linked a video today after all. It’s a hard habit to break.
There is a whole developing competitive scene around Masahiro Sakurai’s hugely underrated racing/combat game starring colored blob-monsters, Kirby’s Air Ride. (Previously: about City Trial, Sakurai talks KAR, stats explainer video). It’s like F-Zero, but cuter, but also meaner. Its standout mode, City Trial, is possibly Sakurai’s greatest creation, yes more than Smash Bros., yes more than Kirby themself. If you’ve never tried it, it’ll be hard to picture. I linked to my previous explanation, but here’s a quick summary.
Up to four Kirbys (including possible computer Kirbys) roam around an open world map that’s not too big, but not too small either. They start out with weak star vehicles, but there are better/weirder/different replacement vehicles randomly scattered around the map. There’s also “patches,” each of which is a small but significant improvement to one stat, randomly placed too. For 3-7 minutes, everyone tries to get the vehicle most suited to their play style, and as many powerup patches as they can. But they can also attack each other, using powerups that are also, yes, randomly scattered around. There’s also random events that occur. And Legendary Machine parts to collect. After time runs out, all the players are thrown into a random contest. Surprise! You were collecting Glide powerups the whole time, but you’re in a race event! Or you got Top Speed powerups, but you’re in a battle event! You don’t know which event will happen. Everyone’s often given a strong clue, but it isn’t always accurate!
City Trial is a great spectator game. It’s fun watching human players zoom around building their machine’s power, and sometimes savagely tearing at each other with all the ferocity a cute blobular creature can muster. Each Trial is a little story to itself, its participants struggling to increase their power in the limited time. Which a single patch isn’t much, really good players can scoop up over 100 of them in the short period allowed, and machines rapidly advance from merely fast to pure manifestations of bewildering, near-uncontrollable speed. Then the contest is chosen, it’s over in less than a minute, and the next round begins, everyone back at square one. It’s so intense.
Kirby Air Ride was one of a very small number of games to use the Gamecube’s Network Adapter, meaning it supports LAN play, and through that function rabidly enthusiastic players have turned it into an internet-capable game. KAR, as it is amusingly called, has been further hacked to make it more suitable for competitive play.
The community has a homepage with details on how to get involved and downloads for their customized version and emulator, a Youtube channel with loads of great matchups, and a Discord. Here are a few matches to show you what I mean.
I post two complete matches below, here’s some things to watch for:
The star each Kirby starts with is the Compact Star, which has good default turning and acceleration but little else. Particularly, its Defense is the absolute worst, and no number of Defense patches will improve it!
Each stat except HP can get up to 18; HP tops out at 16.
Stats from patches are multiplied by the stats of the vehicle the player is riding. A high vehicle stat means each patch will make the effect even greater!
Players can hop off their star at any time. While not on a vehicle will point out the location of other stars within the field of view.
When a player is attacked, they usually drop a patch, which the attacking player may be able to snatch away.
If a player’s star gets destroyed, they drop a lot (although not all) of their patches onto the ground. Players can’t collect patches while not on a vehicle, so the attacker can scoop many of them up unchallenged!
If time runs out when a Kirby isn’t on a star, they’ll be given a Compact Star for the event, which usually means they’ll lose.
The Shadow Star (the purple glowing one) has the highest attack but low defense. The Wagon Star (like a pink cube) has very high health and defense, but can’t boost, so isn’t great for racing. Both tend to be strong choices.
Patches can generate out in the open, but blue boxes can drop from one to four of them when broken open.
Gray patches are power-downs.
Scattered around the map in some matches are Legendary Machine parts. If one player collects all three parts of a Legendary Machine, they get it immediately, and it replaces the machine they had before. There are two of these, the Hydra, a big green monster with extremely high attack but that needs charge boost power to even move, and the Dragoon, a red/white wing with very high maneuverability, flight and speed. Completing either one usually, but not always, spells victory in a match; Hydra particularly can be stunlocked before it can move during the end-of-game contest, and worn down before it has a chance to react. There are rules to how Legendary Machine parts can appear: they always generate from Red boxes, and appear in certain parts of the map, at certain times.
The patches also have patterns to how they appear. The probability of finding different patch types is a subtle clue for which contest will occur.
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!
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:
