The field of electronic entertainment, our self-selected area of exploration, is vast. On one end you have visceral creations that we don’t even bother with, games that are mostly about pointing at people in a virtual world and shooting them. On the other, we have esoteric creations of pure mathematics like Conway’s Game of Life.
How well-known would you consider Conway’s Life to be? By one measure it’s incredibly obscure, in that if you ask a random person on the street if they know about it they’ll probably at best think you’re talking about Hasbro’sGame of Life, a simple board game where players pilot colored pegs riding in a tiny plastic car down a winding road from birth to retirement, a buffet of unexamined assumptions with a long history which itself may be worthy of exploration here itself some day.
But by another yardstick, few games are more well-known than Conway’s Life. It was created 55 years ago, in 1970, by British mathematician John Horton Conway, meaning it’s Older than Pong. It’s not technically just a computer game, but its explorations have grown so huge that practically everyone who cares simulates it on a computer.
When I say it’s a creation of pure mathematics, please don’t be scared off, because it’s really simple to understand. It was a popular subject of Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Recreations columns in Scientific American.
Imagine an infinite grid, a pocket universe that’s like an Excel spreadsheet that goes on forever. Each cell can contain a counter, which is considered “alive,” or nothing, which is considered “dead,” or just empty. From there, you use a simple process to simulate this universe.
You don’t have to worry about physics or gravity or free will. Instead, every counter on the grid with less than two neighbors dies (is removed) due to loneliness; every counter with more than three dies due to overcrowding; and on every empty space with exactly three neighbors is birthed a new counter. By “neighbors,” I mean on one of the eight spaces around it. By “birthed,” I note that reproduction in the world of Life is genderless and trinary.
So that’s how to do it. But why would you? It’s because despite its simplicity, Life patterns grow by unexpected and interesting processes. It’s a case of emergent complexity; like how DNA molecules ultimately produce living creatures in our world, simple origins create hugely complex results. That similarity of complexity to our universe is why it’s called a “game of life.”
A better introduction can be found at this page at Cornell University. It’s a type of cellular automation, a wider field with many game design implications. You could consider classical roguelikes to be a type of cellular automation, although not nearly as simple, or as elegant. Within the world of Conway’s Life there are Gliders, Oscillators, Wicks, Puffers, Guns, Methuselahs, Spaceships and more. While there aren’t physics as we consider them, there is a “speed of light.”
The website ConwayLife.com, created probably some time in 2009, is one of those many websites out there that invisibly hosts active communities that big media sites routinely ignore, the kind of thing that Set Side B carries both a banner and a deep affection for. There was a time where sites like this were a major focus of the World Wide Web, and it still is, even if the wider world fails to notice it. ConwayLife.com hosts a simulator on its homepage, a wiki of concepts, an active forum, a well-populated list of links, and even a Discord.
Please, those of you who read this, try to move your interest in the direction of exploring this strange but fascinating phenomena. Maybe it’ll bounce off of you, but maybe it won’t.
If you know where to look, there are many arcade machine restoration videos on Youtube, whole channels devoted to them. This Halloween-themed video from Electric Starship Arcade is only one of them. It’s mostly about the process of fixing up the cabinet and has very little gameplay, but it does end with a fun sequence where they dress up someone as a vampire and, driven in a hearse, bring him out in a coffin to introduce it! (40 minutes) And if you watch it, it’ll haunt your view history, and influence Youtube into recommending more restoration videos to you, in a suitably spooky fashion. Ooooooo!
File this under blasphemous acts of hackery, reported on by Video Game Esoterica (Youtube, 10 minutes) and Time Extension, a super-deluxe techno-nuts person going by malucard is trying to port Super Mario 64 to the original Playstation. They have a GitHub repo containing their efforts so far.
The growing number of fan-made decompilations of classic games is what make these hilarious affronts to the very idea of console exclusivity possible. But while ports of such games to PC platforms allow for much greater visual clarity and the resolution of long-standing deficiencies, this is almost a celebration of the idea of technical limitations—and I, for one, am all in favor. But you have to understand, I’ve given serious thought to the idea of picking up an old CP/M machine and coding on it in assembly. I’m crazy pants, is what I’m saying, and on things of this nature you probably shouldn’t be listening to me.
Just look at the footage in that video, and how it’s more glitch than game. It seems impossible that it’ll ever run like the N64 original, but we can dream, can’t we?
The Plush Girls Dozen is a collection of fantasy console games; that’s games for fantasy consoles, not fantasy games for consoles. 10 are for PICO-8, two for TIC-80.
I linked yesterday about an instance of the Gigantes legendary machine battle in Kirby Air Riders City Trial. Here’s a full game of it, from Gigantes’ point of view. (8 minutes) I hope this doesn’t become a frequent thing, it might be fun once in a while but not if every other game turns into a huge boss battle.
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.
Microsoft’s Evil Quotient (EQ) has fluctuated over the years. On the average it was trending down for a while, but their sponsorship of OpenAI, and their ruining of Windows 11 and forcing many people to buy new machines to use it, have caused it to shoot right back up again.
But they have made two significant historical contributions to open source software recently. Back in September they open-sourced the original version of Microsoft Basic, which was partly written by Bill Gates himself as a teenager. Here’s the announcement on Microsoft’s Open Source blog, and here’s the GitHub repository with the code. It’s worth noting that Bill Gates was long vocal against the principles of free code sharing, and his arguments in favor of commercialization of computer software are partly responsible for our current capitalist hellscape, but I guess better very late than never, eh what?
More recently, as in the 20th of this month, Microsoft announced that they were officially opening the source code for the three Zork games. The copyright for them passed into their holding by their acquisition of Activision. If you have a time machine, it’d be a fun trick to go back to the founding of Activision and tell them about the later history of their company, although in doing so you might cause them to give up their efforts in despair.
It must be said that Microsoft didn’t publish the source code to the Zork games; instead, they gave their official blessing to Jason Scott and the Internet Archive’s efforts to preserve it. They did that by adding documents to the GitHub repositories for Zork I, Zork II and Zork III. The source code takes the form of ZIL files, code written in the Zork Implementation Language to be compiled into object files compatible with Infocom’s Z Machine interpreter, so if you want to understand what that means, I suggest Andrew Plotkin’s introduction, What Is ZIL Anyway?
(Edit: changed stylization of the name of the system so it’s not all-caps.)
I was sure I had posted about this before, I mean I had to have. It’s such a cool bit of gaming history, never less than a bit obscure, but still, incredibly, has multiple websites devoted to it today. While waiting to binge on Kirby Air Riders, I figured I’d work off some of my indie KARma (heh) with this post about something that could not possibly be more different.
I’m talking about Eamon, an Apple II text adventure/RPG system with ports to other platforms (there was a not much used C64 version, and a PC/MS-DOS version with a bit more uptake), but was biggest on Apple II.
Eamon itself isn’t a single game, but is more like a family of games, each created to a certain specification. The closest thing that Eamon has to being at its center is the Master Disk, which is a character creation tool and a starter adventure. The idea is, you create and customize a character using the Master Disk, which saves your character and allows you to take them into other adventures, written by others.
If you remember me talking about Dungeon (from Loadstar issue #74 and others), it’s the same kind of idea, but from far earlier, and a lot more freeform. Dungeon had creation tools and a game engine. Eamon adventures were BASIC programs written from scratch, that modified the character file. Your in-game surrogate was really at the mercy of whatever horrors the adventure writers had in mind. If you feel a mild chill of existential horror at the idea, that’s because you live after decades of internet culture has trained you to recoil in fear that a software author could do just anything. It requires a degree of trust on the part of the user. Of course, Eamon adventures varied in quality and fairness. You have to expect that even your best characters could get pasted by a level 1,000 Tarrasque right as an adventure begins. Of course, smart people made backups of their character disk; in a chaotic realm like this, it’s a lot less cheating than basic prudence.
I promised links to websites. Here they are.
There’s Eamon Remastered, which is a web-based recreation with many recreations of classic games. With it, you can create a character which is saved to the website, then put it through the options on the Master Disk, and then can send them through the adventures, without having to get an emulator working or anything. If you just want to try it, that’s probably the best.
First off, you should probably try the Eamon Remastered web-base recreation, which has a fair number of adventures to play. Here is its manual.
After you create your character (if you’re playing the Apple II original, make sure to follow directions in town, as the game is positively gleeful about killing newly-made characters), you’ll want to buy a weapon and some armor. Advancement in Eamon is not of the level-based D&D style, instead characters advance by doing. When you attack with a weapon, you might improve in your ability to use it. When you’re struck by an attack, you might improve in your use of armor. It lacks the “dopamine hit” (I hate that term) of gaining a level, but I think this is quite a more realisticm, and dare I say, better, method of character advancement. It’s more like the Runequest/Call of Cthulhu/Basic Role-Playing system, where most of a character’s ability is encoded within a number of individual skills. Though it’s a lot more gradual, it also means that characters are a lot more individual.
When you play it, you’ll find that it works basically like Infocom adventures did. Since each Eamon game is a program to itself, things could work very differently between them, but I think most of them tried to adhere to some shared conventions.
The “Beginners Cave” adventure is the intended first experience with EAMON. It provides you with some basic treasure, opponents and advancement. It is quite possible for a new character to die there, so treat this adventure with care. I found that there’s some quirks. “take [item]” tends not to work; “get [item],” however, does. “attack [monster]” can be used to attack in melee. There is a button, by the input box, that you can click for a list of available commands.
I don’t know if this is true of every adventure, but to get away from a battle you’re currently in, it won’t do to move out of it, if you don’t want to fight you should use the “flee” command, although monsters can follow you anyway if they choose. Flee sends you to the previous room you were in. If the monster that was menacing you chooses to follow, then I don’t know what else to do than just keep attacking and hope for the best.
I don’t have a lot of experience with Eamon myself, so I must leave you to your own devices for furthering your adventuring career. Good luck!
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.
The Amiga line of computers from classic Commodore are rightly revered, but they did have their limits. Infamously, the people at id Software claimed that, despite all its custom chips, Wolf3D and Doom weren’t possible on it, and it’s true that in the time since no one has managed to make games like those on stock Amiga without some pretty major drawbacks. It’s been said that the lack of those foundational first-person shooters were really what caused PCs to be seen as gaming machines. From there, the fact that you could use one machine for both work and play arguably paved the way for the Windows hegemony of the current day.
But let’s not forget that Amigas were quite capable in other ways, and a recent technical feat has demonstrated this: the creation, by someone called reassembler, of a nearly arcade-perfect of Sega’s arcade hit Outrun (itch.io). Outrun was amazing to see in action at the time, and it’s still pretty awesome to watch today. It used Sega’s “Super Scaler” hardware to push up to 128 huge sprites per frame. The Amiga, by contrast, only has eight hardware sprites, and they’re not that different from those on Commodore’s 8-bit computers really. Where the Amiga excelled was using its blitter, a way to rapidly modify memory using custom circuitry, to simulate sprites.
Let’s not be too harsh on Probe’s port, as it was written for earlier Amigas. The new port requires the AGA graphics set and a 68030 processor, meaning the earliest machine that could run it was the Amiga 4000.
reassembler has made a video explaining the optimizations he made to get the game running so smoothly. (16½ minuites) I eat this kind of thing up. Here’s hoping it’ll be a filling meal for you too!
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.
I’ve got a huge backlog of things to post about, so once a week I’m going to just dump a few of them into a post, preferably on a Monday without much discussion of the contents, just to get them out of my notes. I figured I’d do a new pixel art banner for this idea later, for now let’s get to the links!
