| kupomogli said: Not just blue shells. First place has 0% chance of getting anything in Mario Kart 64 and beyond other than green shells, banana peels, and bombs. You have the chance to get any item while in second place and the chance only increases the further back in rank you are. Sandbagging so you can continue getting good items and holding onto them and then pulling into first place at the end and using the good item you've got to guarantee your victory isn't very fun. Yes it's a family friendly game, but what's the point in having competitive multiplayer if you have to purposefully play worse to guarantee a win? The only other game I've played that does this same thing is Split/Second, where first place is at a disadvantage on tracks with two or more shortcuts since it takes a full bar to activate a shortcut, so after first place activates a shortcut, players following first place get to use the shortcut or activate the second shortcut while first place is already within the shortcut. The difference between Split/Second and Mario Kart is that it's something they overlooked with Split/Second while with Mario Kart the game is designed to penalize the winning player. |
Kart 64 had its share of problems, to be sure (rose tinted glasses help a LOT. Objectively it's the second-worst Mario Kart i own, but it always places top in that franchise on my VGC Top 50 list), but the problem with sandbagging is that you have to worry about defensive pressure from first place and offensive pressure from 3rd (as well as the "hurt everyone" items), and in other Kart games second place only barely gets anything better than first, which is not worth the strategic tradeoff.
What could be a fun strategic mechanic to add to the game would be if the Blue Shell had dynamic targeting, meaning 1st place could just hit the brakes as soon as they heard the pinging, and hope that second place is greedy enough to try to pull ahead and have the targeting switch.
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.
