The “Fair” Mario Kart
So we got some new information about Mario Kart 8 and the biggest news of them all is the item customization. With this new development players can customize which items will appear on the map. So for those who hate blue shells you can breathe a sigh of relief because you can get rid of them, but from the sounds of things that is only the beginning as the game’s producer Hideki Konno had this to say.
“Game balance is also another really important element of Mario Kart that we look very closely at and place a lot of value on. From the time we start working on development, thousands of times, maybe even tens of thousands of times, we adjust that balance when we’re playing. At the end we come up with what we hope and feel is a really good balance. It’s our strong hope that folks would want to play with the items as we have balanced them.
We do hear, and a lot of people out there say it, that Mario Kart is all about luck. That if you’re at the front then you’ll get hit with a blue shell, so it’s all about luck. That feature is not random — it doesn’t just happen. There is a lot of adjustment and there is a lot of thought and effort put into that system, and developing it in a way that actually promotes game balance. I would hope people understand that as well.”
So it looks like the Mario Kart series will get a major change to the gameplay to make it more adaptable to the skill set of the players. That could be a good and a bad thing. It’s good because it sounds like it really makes it more about gameplay, but also bad because it means it could eliminate elements that give all players an equal chance of winning so it’s hard to say if this will be overall a plus or a minus to the fans as a whole.
Jacob Carpenter is the writer for TSCN.TV and also a blogger under the name JSnakeC on IGN
