I'm going to tell you LBP's biggest problem right off the bat. It's a problem that Mario Kart doesn't have, Crash Team Racing didn't have, and most other Kart games didn't have, either--the characters had personality. Until my Sackboy has a different personality than your sack boy, until there is a memorable foe, and until somebody says a friggin' word (besides the narrator), all we have is a bunch of characters you can't relate to racing against other characters you can't relate to. This even extends to the platform games.

Mario doesn't have much of a personality but you care about the world he's in because it's kinda fleshed out. It has rules. It has something for you to latch on to. Little Big Planet, in every form, is still looking for its identity. Take this test (and for fuck's sake, be honest.): Think of a screen shot of any little big planet game that you've ever seen in your entire life. Can you accurately remember what the character looked like? I can't even remember the ones shown in this thread that I looked at just before I typed this post!

I own LBP, LBP2, and LBP PSP and I don't even know what the fuck my character looks like. I can't remember the color, the clothes, or anything. In my mind, until I play the game again, it's just some generic Sackboy.

As fun as a game that LBP2 is, the one thing I don't like about it is that for 3D graphics, there's pretty much nothing realistic looking. It's all blocks and card board cut outs, etc. As childish looking as it can be.

One thing I'm hoping is that the development tools allow you to make LBP style racing stages as well as Modnation Racers style stages. When I say Modnation Racers style, I'm talking about believable backgrounds and not just the cardboard cut outs LBP is known for.

Noticed a sales dropoff between LBP 1 and 2. Spinoffs by nature dont perform as well as direct sequels. But we shall see.

On topic, no way Sony can recapture what Nintendo did with Mario Kart

Would you consider Jak X as number 2 then? It had platformer characters! 

Oh, you.  You just came to this thread to make a fool out of me, didn't you!

The game developers just need to know that couch multiplayer games like Mario Kart, Smash Bros, etc... cannot be improved by adding whiz-bang features at the cost of loading.

Minimal loading must be the most important feature in the specifications list... not anything else.

Yeah thats what pretty much turned off many players was the horrible loading times. If they make the same mistake for LBPK it's not going to be good.

CTR is still my faverite kart racer, and the only way the devs can f**k this game up is the load times, MNR load times were a joke. If reviews mention anything bad about the load times then they might as well be sending the game out to fail.

It could very well happen, and at the same time it might not. 

In my opinion and many others, Crash Team Racing is better than the Mario Kart franchise.  Then with Chocobo Racing, and I may be alone here, but another game I think is better than the Mario Kart franchise.  Chocobo Racing had a lot of very good tracks and the Materia system placed a far greater emphasis on skill over the mostly luck based, sandbag to win, system the Mario Kart games have(except MKDS where snaking gets rid of any advantage sandbagging would give you.)

So there's always the possibility of a game being better than another.  Sadly, one thing Mario Kart has going for it is Mario.  It's kind of hard to top a franchise that everyone loves so passionately that it blinds their judgement on a superior game actually coming out.

@bold And who doesn't have a pimp's moustache...unless you want it to have one.

@underline "Sackperson"...li'l sack can be whatever sex you want it to be, or none.