I was never able to get into Riders, as the controls and physics felt dodgy and unresponsive. They made the last tracks a major pain in the ass, and rail grinding was just ass. Transforming into a plane was just fun and provided some nice variety and spectacle. It also controlled reasonably well. The track design was also great and felt vast and rich yet tight.
Pretty much. But ya how do compete with this when CTR came out the same month with 4 times the content, or Mario Kart 8, which now due to its expansion pack has so many tracks now it’s almost daunting. Maybe if they made a sequel and pumped more money into it it’d be more worthwhile but Sega basically just ripped one and left the room here.
I hated ASRT's transformation gimmick so I was glad to see TSR return to pure kart racing. The team mechanic even sounded cool. But then the game launch with broken online where rooms would always crash. On PC, you couldn't even squad up with people to race as a team. There was no way to delegate teams in public lobbies ruining the whole "team" gimmick. A majority of the tracks being recycled meant that the gimmick was barely used in track design and even the original tracks stunk since the "class" gimmick was really only useful for small segments in tracks. I think this game needed some combat style racing to really flesh out Power and Tech and give them more unique features throughout the entire race rather than just small bits. Still waiting for the day some mad man takes TSR or ASRT and mods in all the tracks from every game into one game.
I think it would involve seriously stripping the game’s mechanics down, for one. Which automatically makes it a no go for me personally.
Riders' vibe is pretty great in 2D but I hated how they tried to translate it to 3D. Everyone having these huge hands and feet works when the entire thing is stylized, but in-game it just looks like grotesque modded SA2/Heroes models hahahaha. If they were to ever make a new one I hope they'd stylize it more and make it more like the cool animation and art they made for it. (I haven't played it. I just know it through gifs and its OST )
Riders 1 was better than gravity imo, the wake riding was cool, people hated it because they didn't understand how it worked and that you can leave it at any time and you're not stuck in it in a linear fashon. Riders coming back needs to be simple, no kinect, motion or gimmick stuff, just a racing game with tricks.
Well to be fair, iirc, the game didn’t exactly tell you that you could exit slip streaks by doing the tornado input. (Btw, has anyone ever actually used that latter mechanic?) There was a lot of little things like that. Another one I think was that you can’t jump on rails as a speed character, but it is more like you homing attack them, by pressing the button twice. The game suggested the opposite, from what I can recall. And did you know you can hold back or forward to determine if your jumps off ramps make you go higher or farther? I don’t think it should take looking up tips on YouTube (which is what it took for me from what I remember) to learn stuff like that.
I wouldn't consider Riders in the same ball park as the Racing games. I did enjoy Riders when it came out but I wouldn't call it good by any metric. You spend much of the racing just letting the game play itself for you and wiggling the analogue stick to get air power. These sections were essentially mandatory because of how punishing the air system was in the game. Needed some way to provide support for inexperienced players. The game was so incredibly punishing. It was like CTR in that it was far better in single player because if you are bad at the game you will just get absolutely demolished. I also remember the controls being absolutely terrible, especially when taking tight turns. I might have been bad at the game (I did complete it though) but I distinctly remember the tight turn on the pyramid level being essentially down to luck because of how awful tight turning was. SEGA Carnival was great though. So kudos for that.
Riders' issue wasn't any of the core game design, it was simply the lack of any tutorial. The mechanics are really fun and complex, but all of that is lost on a player who doesn't know how to properly play the game because the game never told them. Things that an experienced player loves about Riders will be the bane of any new player because the new player will have no clue how the fuck anything works. All Riders needs is an in-depth tutorial and it instantly becomes a 10x more accessible and fun game. Just simplifying it is completely missing the point IMHO.
Riders is just more overcomplicated than most racing games, and even most Sonic games. I don't think any tutorial would fix that. In a modern context, people will ignore tutorials as they're happening just to get through them, and then call the game bad when they're not playing optimally either because they didn't learn or can't learn. Riders as it was would be worse off now than it was then, and it wasn't even well off then, it just kept people playing because there was nothing else to do with their time. AKA every Sonic game. It's an experience increasingly smaller amounts of people are willing to have with a game, and if they are, there's cheaper alternatives than a Sonic game would be.
Sonic Riders has a pretty active, though small, competitive scene. I don't think it's that complicated in any capacity at all, and most players can figure out how the surface mechanics work as long as they're explained. The tutorials are buried and take the form of annoying videos that don't even truly explain the concepts to the player, so a lot of things you learn through trial and error. The resources made available by the Sonic Riders Tournament Edition community make the game so simple to learn that it makes you wonder why SEGA never implemented a real tutorial or made an effort to teach the game's mechanics naturally. The lack of a true tutorial and confusing, inaccessible documentation is one of the most criticized aspects of the game, from what I've seen and heard in reviews and retrospectives. Charcoal nailed it, that's one of the biggest gripes both casual players and competitive players have with the base game
I disagree on multiple grounds. Firstly, I don't think the game is well balanced or intuitive. It's just overbearingly punishing. If you run out of air then you have essentially lost right at that moment unless you are a very experienced player. The game isn't clear with how often you should be boosting but boosting is required to get up to a decent speed and that's clear from the other racers. Even the AI constantly boost about. The developers clearly knew this was a major problem which is why they put many automated sections in the levels where you just spin the analogue stick to get more air. It's so unbalanced they had to awkwardly automate the levels because they knew the average player would run out of air. I mean I do understand the appeal of Riders because I played a lot of it myself when it came out. I do like how the different character types can use their abilities to refill air. It is interesting and challenging to check your air gauge while you play the game. The wave dashing is fun, it's just far too punishing in my opinion. Even when you do know what you are doing. Secondly, and this is very much an idiosyncratic point, but I don't really think that having extremely complicated racing mechanics and a gigantic skill gap potential works well for mascot racing multiplayer. I mean it does in competitive online, but not in casual online or local multiplayer (which is still a staple of mascot racers to this day). Even CTR, which is a game I love, is in my opinion terrible in multiplayer. I would absolutely wipe the floor with someone if I booted the game up casually and they would just not want to play it anymore. I'm not some godly CTR player but I'm good and know how to play and I would win the race while they were still on Lap 2. I always thought CTR was at its best in single player and especially time trial. Really high skill gap mascot racers either need to have incredibly well designed competitive multiplayer or very strong single player components.
Sonic Riders is incredibly punishing, yes, but only if you're desperate for that one perfect run. I figure Mission mode teaches you most of the basics, and World Grand Prix is just for fun. You don’t have to win every race to get 1st place at the end. That's how chaotic the AI is. The only thing I needed to look up was how to make higher and further jumps.
See, I went in expecting it to be the other way around; that the story mode would ease you into the gameplay and the mission mode would be there after you've learned the basics. I didn't realize that wasn't the case. And that in itself is why I had to just barely scrape by with my limited knowledge to finish in 2nd or 1st. Last I played I was stuck on Green Cave I think? The learning curve just isn't executed well for a kids game. I think that's one reason I enjoy Sonic games: there may be some weird jank or tough moments, but I can more or less just enjoy them and learn as I go if the game doesn't outright tell you something. Riders doesn't do that, other than the crap tutorial movies that tell you the most basic info that you'll learn just by playing. Anything more than that, hell if I know.
…is it just me? Or is that font, for lack of a better word, “tacky?” If you told me that video was not something from the game but something some rando on YouTube made, I’d believe you.
