But MK7 actually means them. The vehicle speeds are actually derived from the CC number in that game. 100 CC is actually twice as fast as 50 CC, because the acceleration multiplier is double, and 150 CC is triple.

Meaning, if you hacked the game, or else made a mod, like CTGP-7, that let you set the CC number, by changing that one value you could affect the whole game, and try ridiculously fast, or slow, game speeds never intended by the designers.

But there is no need to stop there. CC is just a float. PabloMK7 hacked the hack and tried weird floating-point values for CC that shouldn’t rightfully work, like infinity, and NaN (“Not A Number”) , just to see what would happen. (5½ minutes) And then very high finite CC values, and infinitesimally small CC values, like point-lots-of-zeros-then-one CC, causing the engine to break in amusing, and somewhat frightening, ways.

So then, what would happen? Take a look for yourself:

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There’s been explorations into where the cars and NPCs come go, and we posted a video on that topic a while back. Sometimes they end up meandering in loops. Sometimes they leave the roads and just go tearing about the landscape. Sometimes cars actually find parking spaces, leave themselves there, and NPCs pop out and start wandering.

Well, similar questions can be asked about the game’s trains (15m). Mr A-Game on Youtube followed them around for a while to see where they come from. He claims to have discovered “how the train system of Mario Kart World works,” but I’m not sure. There appear to be tracks that trains can travel down either way, meaning, there must be some system in place to prevent train to train collisions. He does uncover some strong tendencies of trains to take particular routes though.

OnADock performed their own investigation that also involved boats. (17m)

If I had to guess, I think trains probably aren’t modeled outside far out of sight of active players, that they’re spawned randomly, and that some checks are performed to make sure two trains won’t share the same track. This is a guess, but it would be in line with the impromptu nature of the auto traffic simulation. It’d also mean that the P-Switch missions that rely on trains being in a specific place won’t be disrupted, and that the train can be left behind in the world after the mission without getting in the way of any grand schedule coordinating the trains.

Well, that’s what I think. Maybe I’m wrong. But… maybe I’m right?

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One consequence of the game world is that the NPCs that inhabit it have a bit more of a life than in past games. In N64 Toad’s Turnpike, they’re just boxes that travel around the loop getting in the racers’ way. But now, when you’re exploring in Free Roam, you can pick out a specific driver and follow them around.

And what do you know, there actually seems to be a bit of an inner life going on there! They don’t seem to pathfind between locations, sadly, but they can get the mad yen to drive off the road and tear across the desert. And, surprisingly, a drive can get out of their car, which is more than the player racers in the game can do!

OnADock, on Youtube, made a 14 minute video where he followed a Toad around on their travels through the Mario Kart World, um, world. Maybe it’ll inspire you to do some investigation of your own?

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Suuper W‘s makes videos about several different Mario games, but Mario Kart is their primary beat. They recently explained how Mario Kart DS detects when you’ve hit a wall. It’s worth a look if you want to either how the detection works, how it can be abused, or, just possibly, both. (14 minutes)

Also of interest is a video they’ve done about “Wall Assisted Super Bouncing,” a Mario Kart DS technique that can cause you to game big air and leap over barriers under the right conditions. It’s 11 minutes, and even if (as is likely) you’re not in the Mario Kart DS TAS speedrunning scene, it may be interesting for its look at the specifics of MKDS’s engine.

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In Mario Kart 8, Super Bell Subway was an extravaganza of environmental world building, implying far more about the Mushroom Kingdom than we ever hoped to get, and Mario Kart World is like an extended version of that. As with most Mario games, the only elements that will carry over between games are the ones Nintendo thinks are sufficiently marketable, and even then they’re known to throw out characters that fall out of favor (R.I.P. Toadsworth). But we might consider these glimpses as one version of what every day life in the Super Mario World might be like.

Check out the Mario Wiki page for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe: Super Bell Subway, which has a complete list of the signage used in that track. It also mentions that most of that game’s tracks are mentioned on the route maps in that course, as if you could hop a train and go there. Maybe it gave Nintendo’s designers the idea to make Mario Kart World a single cohesive map?

Anyway, here’s some more track signage from this heavily car-dependent version of the Mushroom Kingdom.

And, unrelated, under characters there’s this person:

Um, who in the name of the Question Block of Doom is that supposed to be?

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MKW’s apparently an open world Mario game, and open world games need more world building than otherwise. What I am hoping is this means we’ll finally find out more about all these weird MK-universe advertisers than
in the past. Does Mario actually own and run Mario Motors? Is Luigi the boss of a tire company? Will we get an explanation for Bowser competing in a (mostly) friendly manner against his eternal rivals? And…

Oh my stars and garters, how does this Toad DRIVE this vehicle? His eyes are right over the dashboard! Can his feet reach the pedals? It doesn’t seem like it was built for them, is this a common issue for Mushroom Kingdom cars and trucks? And do they ever suffer collision damage from hitting big floating, rotating coins? Along those lines:

He’s just a workaday Koopa, driving for his job with Hammer Bros. Co., and woah it’s KING BOWSER himself driving right past, and in the same lane! And he appears to have gotten fashion tips from Hellboy with that Right Hand of Doom glove thing happening. Also gotta note that Bowser’s license plate is just his logo. “Yeah that’s me, any questions?”

Here’s more traffic, I assume the open world theme means there’ll be a lot more in the way of street vehicle obstacles. Mario Kart World certainly has some weird, and weirdly useable, cars. Vehicular ramps, blast barrels, and I assume that Bob-Omb car is a live explosive. Road safety in the Mushroom Kingdom is a joke.

Sexy! I give them points for working the Girders board (sorry, “25m”) into a track. But it looks like we’re again getting the same style of tricks as in prior MK games: the vehicle gets a burst of speed, the driver turns around and mugs for the camera, and vroom vroom. Doesn’t seem too safe to me. Also, it looks like DK’s redesign for the movie has stuck.

My favorite element of the Mario Kart series, which I believe I’ve mentioned here before, are all the Mario-themed corporate sponsors, which suggest that not only are the characters race drivers, but also own their own auto supply and repair companies, and other companies besides. They’re all businesspeople! It’s a capitalist hellscape of their own devising!

Besides Mario Motors and Luigi Tires, among the MK businesses spotted are Koopa Construction (slogan, “High Quality You Can Trust,” how boring), Peach Resort (also a track name), a company called Dash (“Accelerate the Fun”), Waluigi Vintage Clothing (that’s more backstory than we’ve ever gotten for him), Wario Games (nice tie-in!), Fuzzy Batteres, Royal Motors (don’t know if that’s Peach, Daisy, Rosalina, or some combination; it’s tagline is “Supersonic Primeness”), Dolphin Marine Sports, Nabbit Courier Service(?), Garlic Power, Red Shell Speed Tires, what I think is Yoshi’s Cookies, Premium Scrap, 1UP Fuel, and there’s Bowser, Buzzy Beetle, Lava Bubble, Shy Guy, Chain Chomp, Fire Flower and just “Banana” (“Let one slip!”) companies I couldn’t make out the full names of, and the return of MKTV, which uses what looks like the eyes of Cappy, from Mario Odyssey, in their logo, but they’re probably Lakitu’s goggles—although Lakitu is a driver now.

There’s also THIS:

It’s the counterpart to The Mother Of All POW Blocks from the end of Super Mario 3D World! It is written in the Book of Mysteries, of the GREAT QUESTION BLOCK OF DOOM, the hitting of which will trigger the end of all things. Drive carefully, competitors.

This is probably my favorite track, a spooky horror movie track with big pictures of Peach throughout. You can’t see it in this shot but there’s a big black castle in the background and bats flying around.

Moo Moo Meadows not only returns as a track, but it seems like it’s been set within the Mario Kart World map! Are there differences? Are other retro tracks returning?

Also, a cow is a driver now. And it rides a boom box. Why not just make everything a kart, and put anything on top of it? Maybe I shouldn’t give them any ideas.

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

Why does Bowser set up race track courses in his castles? Does he have that many to spare? It’s a question with a simple answer, that he answers in 50 seconds. It’s also pretty good animation on Bowser, done in Blender by GleanieBOI!

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Explaining the Ways in Which Mario Kart 64 CPUs Cheat (Youtube, 12 minutes)

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The big game affected here is the first Splatoon, which still has, for now, free online play with the purchase of the game. Also affected will be Mario Kart 7 and Animal Crossing New Leaf for 3DS.

There will be some who will shrug over this, saying Nintendo shouldn’t be expected to run these services indefinitely. Sometimes they will shrug quite loudly. I am not one of them. I think online servers should be kept going for much longer than most companies run them. I think this should be considered part of the contract they entered into when they sold the game. It is true that 3DS and WiiU games had free online server access, that Nintendo’s multiplayer subscription service began with the Switch. But I still think the way I do, and I also think it’s foolish to think that, just because it’s a paid service, that Switch servers will be kept running for any longer than the 3DS and WiiU servers were.

My concern is an issue of software preservation. These kinds of games and services are in danger of being outright lost in their current form, like many MMORPGs, and iOS and Android games for previous versions of those OSes. I feel very strongly that this software should be remembered and made available for future generations. It’s true that there are efforts to reverse engineer these kinds of services, but there is no guarantee that they will be completely accurate, or even successful at all, especially if they rely on secret algorithms and information housed on the official servers.

Ah well. Get in those free splatmatches while you can. Their days are numbered.

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While most sites have already regurgitated the news into your waiting beaks, this time we’re recounting the release dates chronologically, so you’ll know what order to expect everything. Specific games of possible interest to a hazy mirage that I imagine to be our readers are in bold:

FEBRUARY
8th: Nintendo Switch Online Gameboy & GBA Support, Fire Emblem Engage Expansion Pass, Metroid Prime Remastered
15th: Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Expansion Pass DLC volume 3
22nd: Metroid Prime Remastered on cartridge
24th: Octopath Traveler II, Kirby’s Return to Dreamland Deluxe

MARCH
6th: Dead Cells Return to Castlevania DLC
17th: Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon
20th: Spring begins. Releases for Spring: Splatoon 3 Expansion Pass, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe DLC Wave 4,

APRIL
11th: Tron: Identity
21st: Advance Wars 1+2 Re-Boot Camp
27th: Omega Strike

MAY
12th: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

JUNE
Some time in June: Harmony: Fall of Reverie
1st: Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection
2nd: We Love Katamari REROLL + Royal Reverie (what is it with the word “reverie” this month?)
21st: Summer begins. Releases for Summer: New Samba de Amigo, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, Baten Kaitos I & II HD Remaster

JULY
21st: Pikmin 4
28th: Disney Illusion Island

AUGUST
29th: Sea of Stars

Some time in 2023: Fashion Dreamer, Decapolice, Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, Professor Layton and the New World of Steam

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It’s a great article! It starts out covering the classic-era games everyone remembers, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Mario Bros., and then slowly gets less and less well-known. It even mentions the two Gottlieb pinball games!

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Graham Smith at Rock Paper Shotgun tells about the return of Re-Volt, an RC Car racing game from the Dreamcast age that many regarded as fairly lackluster, but has nonetheless gathered a strong fanbase. It’s for sale again on Steam and GOG. While the game itself isn’t terrific as it is, fan-made mods that improve it require ownership of the original to function.

At GamesRadar (warning: will harass you to subscribe to their newsletter), Dustin Bailey (which may be a fun pseudonym) lets us know that the Coconut Mall reprise track from the DLC of Mario Kart 8 has been “improved,” in that the cars in the parking lot at the end of it now drive around getting in your way like they did back in the Wii version, and in fact are now even more annoying, doing pointless doughnuts in the lot just to piss you off. And yet, the drivers are Shy Guys, not the system Miis that drove the cars in the original, which in my bulbous eyes is still a downgrade.

Jesse Belinsky at The Verge contributes a personal essay about how the Animal Crossing series helped them explore their gender. They especially note how the pandemic gave them the push they needed, an event which will be remembered for years to come as a pivotal moment in time, I think at least.

In sillier news, at the Hollywood Reporter, Mia Galuppo tells us that Bandai Namco is trying to get a Pac-Man movie made. Pac-Man’s relationship with media has been a strange journey. In Japan it originally didn’t do especially well, but in the U.S. it quickly set arcade cabinet sales records, partly due to the stewardship and marketing acumen of U.S. licensee Bally-Midway. They commissioned several sequels that were unauthorized by original creator Namco, most of which have been stricken from the records, except, for a time, Ms. Pac-Man, created by GCC as a hack of the original game that would go on to eventually surpass it in lifetime sales. Namco would in turn adapt several aspects of the Pac-Man expanded universe for their own use, notably Ms. Pac and aspects of the first Pac-Man TV show, a pretty dumb cartoon made by Hanna-Barbera back in the period where they’d adapt anything for a buck. Namco made Pac-Land, an important early scrolling platformer, using the characters, music, and art style from that cartoon. In recent years rights issues have caused Bandai-Namco to reject Ms. Pac-Man too, creating a rights-unencumbered replacement character called “Pac-Mom,” which presumably will feature in this movie. All of this is just to demonstrate to you how incredibly twisted and fraught Pac-media has become, and I haven’t even gotten into the second TV show, Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures, which I’d rather not discuss. I will note, however, that because of Pac-Man’s inclusion as a character in Smash Bros. 4 and Ultimate, the first Pac-Man cartoon show in some small way lives on in Smash Bros’ Pac-Land stage.

Hamish Hector at TechRadar (that’s a different site from GamesRadar, right?) writes that there’s never been a worse time to buy an Oculus Quest 2. Considering that dumps more money into the hated trough of Zuckerberg, I can’t think that there’s ever been a good time.

Jenny List at Hack-A-Day points to a long and interesting post by Cameron Kaiser on good ol’ Blogger blog Old Vintage Computing about MOS Technology’s early entries into the Pong system-on-a-chip market, the MOS 7600 and 7601, which were programmable, meaning, they could run code, and systems that used them. It makes for fascinating reading to my gelatinous brain.

And at PC Gamer, Christopher Livingston relates how the developers of survival MMO Last Oasis decided their genre “sucks,” and reworked it to be PvE instead of PvP.

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

After a couple of pretty light reports,this time out we have quite a lot to go over, so let’s get started!

Chris Moyse at Destructoid says cult fighting game with a fun name The Rumble Fish is coming to consoles.

At PC Gamer, Kerry Brunskill proses about how Steam greatly expanded the potential market for Japanese doujin releases like Touhou.

VGC’s Chris Scullion notes that the FCC may approve Microsoft’s buyout of Activision/Blizzard next month.

Ollie Reynolds at NintendoLife tells us that the team that made Mario Kart 64 almost included a no item mode, they say to appeal to F-Zero players.

At EventHubs, someone going by the name of Justin “Adaptive Trigger” Gordon, which, if you can get people to call you that then fine I’m not opposed, tells us about how the Ice Climbers, long an infuriating opponent to face in high-level Super Smash Bros. Melee, might be getting some of that tech in Ultimate.

At Kotaku, a site that will on every visit ask if you want to sign up for their newsletter, Ian Walker notes how romhackers are putting Winston, the fourth Ghostbuster played by Ernie Hudson who for some reason was left out of most of the series’ promotional material, into the Sega Genesis Ghostbusters game. The patch doesn’t seem to be out yet, mind you. The original story appears to be from Ghostbusters News. Great Floating Radioactive Astrojebus, it’s about time, even if it had to be done via an injection of code to be playable through quasilegal emulation. Man helped save New York City from ghosts twice, you’d think he’d get more respect. There’s also a hack to add him to HAL Laboratory’s Japan-only Ghostbusters II game for the Famicom.

And TechRadar’s Rhys Wood at TechRadar informs us that a lawsuit is being brought against Sony alleging overheating issues of the PS5 causing the console to spontaneously shut down.

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

It’s a rare day that we get to link to the Washington Post, in this case a piece by Michael Cavna on the death of Yu-Gu-Oh! creator, mangaka Kazuki Takahashi. Hey there Michael! Bet you never thought your work would be linked by a single-celled pixel-art organism! Can you ask them to do something about their ludicrous paywall drebnar? Yu-Gi-Oh! is only tangentially part of our purview here but there have been enough video games from that series that we can probably make room for it under Retro, plus it’s published by Konami. One of my favorite facts is that the card game includes several cards that officially refer to the Gradius series, including cards of the Vic Viper and Big Core.

Elliot Williams at Hackaday challenges us: You think you know how Mario Kart works? I think so? You supply electric potential through a wire to a console loaded with some game software, which sends signals to a video screen, and you use a wired controller to interact with it. Yes, I win! His article just links to a video (see above) about how the AI drivers work. This subject has been thought of so much that there’s a patent on such drivers granted to Lyle Rains for his work back in the early days of Atari, in 1979! That it took 20 years for that to expire is a blight on the history of game programming, drebnar!

PC Gamer’s Rich Stanton tells us that Yuji Naka is still angry at Square Enix for removing him from the Balan Wonderworld project. He accurately notes that the degree of acrimony from Naka about this is unprecedented-Naka is pissed and doesn’t care who knows it. The article suggests listening to both sides here. Here at Set Side B we admit, we tend to take the word of developers over those of gigantic corporations, especially when the developer is someone of Yuji Freaking Naka’s standing! We may be wrong, and if the word comes out that we are we’ll cheerfully admit to it, but it is easy for me to believe, in Naka’s words, that Square Enix “doesn’t care about games.”

Zack Zaiezen at Kotaku writes that Take Two is going after another Grand Theft Auto modder. Boo! Hiss! News like that fills up my angry sac!

It’s a good day for linking to non-gaming sites! At CNBC, Ryan Brownie warns of a coming contraction of the games industry, partly due to it coming down off the boost caused by the pandemic, and also from bottlenecks produced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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