NEVER play these Mario Kart clones

Mario Kart is one of the most influential Series in all of gaming it has a huge lineup in its own right but it did something even more spawned a whole genre of copycats I've already talked about a bunch of these before but that's the thing about this type of game seemingly more than any other genre there is an infinite supply of Mario Kart clones Super Mario Kart started the whole series off but really Mario Kart 64 is where the formula truly began to shine the super Nintendo's suit 3D capability was a pretty cool novelty but the Nintendo 64's true 3D made this genre boom so let's start with a game that was also released on the Nintendo 64 developed by the standout developer rare and utilized an incredibly popular IP Mickey Speedway USA yes Diddy Kong Racing isn't the only racing game created by Rare for the N64 they were no stranger to license games like this in fact prior to Donkey Kong Country they essentially created games like Sesame Street 123 and Spider-Man in order to bankroll their fully original titles this isn't even the first Disney racing game they [Music] made but it is the first one that doesn't look like sin because it's rare the game is unironically fun to play it controls really well and has a decent speed which is usually the biggest weakness that a Mario Kart clone can suffer from we can probably thank Diddy Kong for this Mickey Speedway was released 3 years after Diddy Kong Racing so the engine controls and just past experience making a racing game probably really helped out thank you Diddy Kong the theme for the game is also pretty interesting in the opening we learn that Pluto has been kidnapped by weasles Professor Ludwig von Drake gives us cars so that we can search all across America faster but for some reason we get easily distracted by races instead of searching for Pluto all throughout this the weasel sends you pictures of them basically torturing Pluto and bragging about it but sorry we got to finish lap three of Los Angeles first all of the tracks are based on different cities throughout the United States but they are more or less just the types of tracks that you'd expect in a cart racer desert city snow they've just been recontextualized into different cities in America so I'm really looking forward to the Philadelphia stage in Smash today's video is sponsored by cook Unity the first ever Chef to you delivery service bringing restaurant quality right to your door cook Unity connects a diverse community of talented chefs that cook their food in Regional micro kitchens not warehouses they offer a wide range of dietary options including vegan paleo and gluten-free and it's super flexible so if you're out of town or you don't need meals for a week you can easily pause or cancel at any time I got some awesome meals in my first box because I'm a gamer I had to try Chef Ruben's spicy chicken tendies and they were delicious I also had Chef VI's vegan Ratatouille and I cleaned the plate I love that cook unity's meals come straight from a chef with them right on the box so it doesn't feel like I'm eating frozen processed meals so go ahead and give cookunity a try head over to cook unity.com ar50 or click the link in my description to get 50% off your first order a big thanks to cook Unity for sponsoring today's video and let's get back to Mario Kart clones as far as the gameplay goes there's nothing too terrible here like I said the game's controls are really tight so it's genuinely enjoyable you have item blocks with items you'd expect projectiles boost invincibility hazards and even coins that will increase your top speed during the match the Red Shell equivalent kind of sucks though because it doesn't follow the actual track it tries to get to the targeted player in the shortest path possible which means it runs into walls and breaks a majority of the time so it's genuinely only helpful in huge open areas or when your opponent is straight in front of you there's also a baseball item which is neat sort of a combination between the green shell and banana you throw it out like normal and it can bounce around but eventually its speed slows down and it stops rolling staying on the track as a hazard the AI is also infuriating not even playing on the hardest difficulty it is genuinely so impossible to get in the lead and keep the lead it's like their cars legitimately just go faster than yours and there is nothing you can do about it but that is kind of just typical of cart Racers from this era so it's not like I can personally blame Mickey Mouse for that rare also developed a Game Boy Color version of the game so let's check that out too yeah so while this shares the name with the N64 version of the game it's very clear that this is just a retooling of Mickey's racing adventure the first Disney racing game that rare made this was just back in the day when you had to make a handheld version that shared the same name as the Home console version even when literally everything else is different there was some neat functionality between the two versions though if you connected your Game Boy game to the N64 version using the transfer pack you could unlock huy as a playable racer dwey and ly as well as the professor are also secret Racers but they can be unlocked with just the N64 version it's kind of cool seeing games have this kind of feature since it feels like the transfer pack barely had any support another racing game around Mario Kart 64's Heyday is found on the PlayStation chocoo racing Final Fantasy really found its footing during the 9s it always did well in Japan and it had varied success in the west but it wasn't until Final Fantasy 7 that things exploded and the Final Fantasy name actually carried some weight and that of course leads to spin-offs chocoo racing released for the PlayStation in 1999 with the name coming from the chocoo racing miname found in the Final Fantasy series overall chocoo racing pulls characters from the generic enemies and species found in the wider Final Fantasy Universe Chocobo Mughal Mages character like that but they also include some actual characters as well Cloud's in the game because of course he is that's cloud squal from Final Fantasy 8 is also a racer other Square series make appearances as well ya from Parasite Eve and Jack from the 3D Battles of world Runner so it's a fun little square history lesson as well as a cart racer the game also executes a bit differently from Mario Kart the core gameplay is obviously the same but they deviate in ways to make it feel more unique and Final Fantasy the first major change is that you can hold up to three items at a time with them dragging behind you automatically however if you pick up multiples of the same item they instead become stronger variants when finally used emulating the magic upgrading system from Final Fantasy outside of items you can also select a special ability for your racer each character has one that is their signature but you can mix and match to your liking these gradually charge throughout a race and you can activate them once the meter fills these abilities range from a simple boost or flying over hazards for a short period to stealing items like the boo item in Mario Kart attacking all Racers or protecting yourself from attacks I really like this it adds an additional layer of strategy to your Loadout and you can kind of tweak to your own play style Mario Kart got close to this with the character specific special items in Double Dash but it's never really been explored more since then which I think is a shame I usually opt for the abilities that protect you from incoming damage because a big issue with this game is never knowing when something is coming your way there's no incoming item indicator or sound effect that really gives you a heads up though to be fair this wasn't exactly standard practice in the 9s so I guess I can give it a pass the track selection is a bit lacking as well with only 10 total tracks in the game I feel like the bare minimum should be 16 four tracks and four cups but again that may be the Mario Kart mindset speaking 10 just feels like such a small number though I guess to make up for that there's actually a story mode in the game it isn't long and you can clear it in a couple hours but it's genuinely entertaining it's told in a storybook style so I'm waiting on a lawsuit to be announced any day now you travel from place to place completing races and adding Racers to your little party ultimately racing against Bahamut and completing some silly Final Fantasy nonsense there's plenty of fourth wall breaking and little joke sprinkled throughout it's genuinely a pretty funny story mode Chocobo racing is often mentioned when the conversation of good Mario Kart clones comes up and it comes from one of the few franchises with enough popularity to pull it off so it's odd that for years this sole PlayStation 1 game was Final fantasy's only cart racer at E320 squareenix announced a whole lineup of games and one of these ended up as a teaser for a brand new racing game chocoo racing 3d which was then cancelled all we've got are a few screenshots and some crunchy footage of that potential game but then they gave it another try 2022 saw the release of Chocobo GP a switch exclusive title made to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the final fantasy series honestly I think this is a great little way to celebrate the series bringing back a beloved cart racer from the 9s that celebrates all things from the franchise it's really good the game perfectly recaptures the spirit of the original while bringing it into the modern era of cart racing the chocoo sub series of games has also greatly evolved since the first game so the racers in the game aren't just generic species this time but actual characters from various chocoo games which is a great type and of course you also have iconic Final Fantasy characters again like Cloud Strife Gilgamesh and Ben it includes a story mode that totally captures the spirit of the first one and for some reason it's fully voice acted like of all things they put maximum effort into this one was super surprising but Square tried to have their cake and eat it too with this game because they tried to make it a live service Game season passes with new characters and tracks in-game currency microtrans actions these were all over the place nearly everything in the game needed to be bought using real life money there was no way to Simply earn these through playing now ordinarily this isn't a bad thing by default particularly if it's just Cosmetics plenty of games use this model but those games are all also pretty much free to play Chocobo GP was a game you still had to pay a full price for just to get into the game and have to spend more money in the item shops and they don't even have Creator code Aaron nmar this just did not sit right with the fans and rightfully so if you're selling a full price game that has paid DLC I feel that content should be purchasable at any point free to play games with timed events and season passes I'm still not a crazy fan of that concept but I can kind of offer a little more leeway for that they offered a full version of the game that you would pay for and that graciously allowed you to purchase the new content but there was also a light version of the game which offered only the bare minimum roster and only let you play the prologue of the story mode but strangely you could also play in the online mode man this is a weird game like I said players did not like this payto pay model and after five seasons squareenix turned heel and changed the whole system the light version was done away with leaving just the full price version of the game but now everything can be unlocked simply by playing the game earning tickets and coins and then you can head over to the item shop to redeem stuff this is truly how it should have been from the beginning in my my opinion but it does also suck that they immediately kind of screwed over anyone who was Allin on the season pass stuff like imagine having spent hundreds of dollars on this game to get everything in the game and now anyone can purchase it and get all the stuff you did for like 40 bucks why did Square Enix just do that but another big problem persists with this game the track design it sucks now I don't mean the Aesthetics or the design and theme of a track I mean the literal thing you race on the pool of tracks are split into four different categories long short Hyper Speed and Technical so it seems like you get about 25% of each right so many of the tracks in this game fall into just the short or hypers speed categories and very few are the long or technical tracks I find myself beginning a race blinking and then the entire thing is over you just end up zooming through almost every race you're barely playing the game it would have been cool if they gave these tracks more laps to compensate or you know actually design more of the long and Technical tracks I'm not opposed to Shorter tracks I mean Mario Kart's baby Park is one of my favorites but the reason that track works is because it's a super short one among a roster of medium to long tracks so it makes that experience far more memorable and this isn't even a problem that was solved by each season's new cups they all continued to be short or hypers speed with the occasional long or technical track thrown in there it's definitely a fun little game it keeps all of the cool stuff that kept it unique while also improving upon little things that two decades of cart Racers sort of figured out along the way it's just it's only really fun in short bursts honestly to help advertise for chocoo GP during its leadup and launch a mobile game was also released Chocobo GP Dash and my God this is awful it's nothing more than a really thrown together Happy Wheels clone where you play as a chocobo and Mughal trying not to tip over as a standalone mobile game this would just be bad but as a mobile game being used to Market another Home console game I mean what were they thinking like can you imagine somebody downloading this game and playing it and then thinking dude I got to have this on my switch speaking of Bad Games Atari carts the Atari Jaguar was released in 1993 heralded as the first 64-bit console ever made to which the general public responded with the hell's a bit this thing was a commercial failure doing so poorly that it finally convinced Atari to exit the Home console Market forever it only had 50 games in its library but we were lucky enough that one of those was Atari carts obviously inspired by Super Mario Kart the developers actually managed to recreate the mode 7 style of rendering that allowed for this fake 3d effect Atari was impressed with their ability to copypaste that style and they wanted them to make a cart racer using popular Atari proper yeah I don't really know what they were expecting here because it's not like Atari can really pack in some iconic characters for this game to really make it shine even at its worst Mario Kart still has Mario who does Atari cards have Scully I mean the Wikipedia article literally only mentions one single character Bentley bear and his most notable appearance is a cameo in the background of Wreck-It Ralph okay so it may not have some notable characters but maybe it has good gameplay it doesn't have good gameplay these controls are just awful a normal turn is far too wide for any of the tracks they've designed but you totally spin out after like 1 second of using the sharp turn button sometimes you'll activate Zen mode and you'll find this perfect Middle Ground where you have the most perfect lines but then you'll lose it and the race is trash sometimes you clip on stuff that you don't even know is part of the terrain or isn't part of the track because everything is 2D and flat you just can't tell the items in this game are basically designed to fix this problem giving you better speed or traction but that just begs the question why even do that just make your game fun to control the whole time don't make it a cute little power up to tease me and then take it away the only offensive items the game has either slow down your opponents or reverse their controls which means nothing to cheater CPU characters and every item panel is single use once you've run it over it's xed out and it can't be used at all for the rest of the race which is just so lame by the time you get to the last lap you are just racing there are no items to be used just a reminder that this game came out for the Atari Jaguar which means that anyone who had the misfortune of owning this game when it was new had to play it on this monstrosity but I was lucky enough to play this on the Atari 50 collection on Steam so I could play using an Xbox controller yeah that's right I'm belittling Atari Jaguar car owners I'm a badass another big game company that took a stab at the cart racer was Sony with Mod Nation Racers for the Playstation 3 and PSP while everything about it is pretty typical of a Mario Kart clone the game's big selling point was the ability to create your own tracks while incredibly easy to use it also allows the tracks to be as complex as the player wants the basics allow you to paint the track out as you like essentially creating the path you would drive during a race you can select where the item boxes go Place decorative elements deform the track to make it uneven or add ramps really you can do almost anything players could then share their custom tracks and download other users Creations to race on the short and sweet pitch of the game was that it was Little Big Planet but for the racing genre which is an accurate description so accurate that then they just made that game Little Big Planet carding created by the exact same developers as Mod Nation Racers this game boiled down to Mod Nation Racers with the Little Big Planet skin the game has a Nar you customize your own Sack Boy and collect little items and stickers in the same way that Mario Kart captures the spirit of the Mario Series Little Big Planet carding really captures the spirit of that series just in the cart racing genre the core elements of Mod Nation Racers and Little Big Planet carding are incredibly similar which makes sense given they are made by the same guys Little Big Planet probably feels a tad more fine-tuned in both the racing and track creation aspects simply because the developers had two extra years of experience of course everything else is little big plan toied so items track themes carts and some mechanics are introduced that better fit that theme and of course you could also upload and download user tracks to both games unfortunately had their server shut down which means you can't download custom tracks anymore you can still make them all you want they just can't ever leave your console it's really a shame when this happens to games and look I get it servers are expensive to keep up for a game that has a small user base but that doesn't make it suck any less for a core function of the game to just be permanently disabled the games do have fairly sizable story modes which is more than you can generally expect from a cart racer and there's also a dedicated Community who are looking to create custom servers as an alternative but as of this video there haven't been any major releases or announcements a recent cart racing release comes from our favorite game Mill DreamWorks All-Star cart racing if this is giving you War flashbacks are you surprised you can race as so many of your favorite DreamWorks characters like Shrek po Megamind and the Escape zoo animals for some reason this game is so slow even on the fastest speed setting I feel like I'm rolling around in Elmer's Glue combine that with the staple cheating CPUs and you really just have a super mid cart racer there are some aspects that really do interest me I just can't be bothered when the game is so boring one of my biggest complaints about cart Racers is figuring out the Boost mechanic at the beginning of the race every cart racer has them but they are all different sometimes you press a on go sometimes you begin accelerating on two or on one or at some other random point and the game never tells you that this is a mechanic so you're just left guessing when you pick up a new cart racer but DreamWorks cart doesn't do that instead you get to play Friday night funkin and if you time your inputs correctly that gives you the Boost start I I love this not only does it illustrate this to you in a fun way it actually illustrates it to you at all I feel like no cart racer actually tells you that you can get a rocket start at the beginning you just kind of learned that in one of them and it applies to the rest of them trolls are also found throughout the levels sometimes they're the context for opening up an alternate path by driving through their magical harp thing you can also collect music notes during a race these are used to purchase different items in the shop but these also fill up a meter in the corner during the race when you max out this meter the trolls will grant you an extra little item and while this item aspect is cool when you're on the receiving end it can just be so frustrating because once again this game does not have any kind of an incoming item indicator that gives you a heads up and this game released in 2023 like I can excuse the 9s but we've learned by now show me what is about to hit me and why does this game have gorgeous lighting for no reason the character models are ass the stages are acceptable but the lighting it's like Ultra 4K hyper Ray Trac lighting inside of overall it's basically Nickelodeon cart Racers with a different coat of paint and that's not a compliment but actually I can play as boss baby so never mind I take it back I take it all back please forgive me Konami didn't want to be left out of the fun either so they made their own cart racer too Konami crazy Racers for Game Boy Advance with a roster of plenty of Konami characters you can race through a variety of tracks in this cool fake 3D engine and wait is is that this is just Mario Kart crazy Racers takes advantage of the mode 7 capabilities of the Game Boy Advance just like many other games and as a result this just kind of looks and feels like super Circuit but the crazy part is that this game came out months before super Circuit though I guess to be fair both games are just using the same Tech that was already used in Super Mario Kart it was just capable of being done on a hand held now the game tries to deviate a little bit but the changes are so minor the item boxes are categorized differently you can grab blue item boxes to exclusively get a speed boost item or a red item box that can give you any possible item it mostly just looks and plays like Mario Kart but I actually mean that in a good way in the same way that you might have fun playing Mario Kart super Circuit you would have fun playing this game at the very least it's a Fresh coat of paint and you play on different tracks using different characters and different items but it's also not that different at the same time it's also still held back a little bit by the hardware it was on but if you were to pick this one up I think you'd have a pretty good time with it it even inspired a sequel for IOS and Android crazy cart racing and that game is not available anymore please just let me play your games stop taking them off of digital app stores after like 8 minutes I just want to play funny little games Mario Kart clones as a whole aren't going anywhere even though some of them get taken down off of of digital storefronts it's a beautiful formula that Nintendo came up with and even if you make a really bad one the mere existence of popular IP plus cart racer is enough to generate some sales and for those of you who are thinking right now this second he didn't talk about any of the Sonic racing games I know [Music]

Channel: Aaronitmar

Views: 23,192

Keywords: mario kart, mario kart 8 deluxe, booster course pass, mario kart 8, nintendo, scott the woz, antdude, caddicarus, mario, aaronitmar, arcade, nintendo switch, meme, shrek, boss baby, megamind, final fantasy, konami krazy racers, chocobo racing, chocobo gp, mario kart wii, diddy kong racing, disney, mickey mouse, mickeys speedway usa, disney speedstorm, family guy, warped kart racers, atari, atari karts, coconut mall, mario kart clones, copycats

Id: 48MmtsHz3gQ

Length: 23min 30sec (1410 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2024