John Rabbit
Banned
So, this game has apparently received it's fair share of LTTP threads since release. I bought it for $5 on the Steam sale in anticipation of a game night I hosted, but we never got around to playing it. I'm not bumping one of those old threads for a specific reason, because in the 8 or so hours I've spent with the game since Saturday, it's proven to be an incredible local co-op game with my wife.
I wouldn't call my wife a particularly...skilled...gamer. We enjoy playing games cooperatively, but with the sole exception of top-down games (Diablo 3, twin-stick shooters, etc) and titles like Earth Defense Force, she often struggles with controls and usually I do a lot of the heavy-lifting. One of our favorite games is Mario Kart 8, which is a game she struggles with a great deal largely because of her inability to get the drifting mechanic down, and because the A.I. isn't particularly forgiving; even on 50cc, which for her (and me) is too slow. Despite frequently placing within the bottom 4, she enjoys the game, but not for particularly long (we played this for almost 5 hours straight on Sunday).
Enter Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, which is, seemingly by total accident, a fantastic split-screen experience for both skilled and unskilled players. Here's why:
You can play the career mode together.
This isn't particularly novel, but when playing the career mode with more than just one player, only one of you has to meet the event requirements to move on. This means that my wife can race to her heart's content, place 4th, and as long as I win, we pass the event. This is nice because it still feels like a victory even if she didn't win the race/event. The coins we pick up are shared, so she can use the slot machine to get power-ups that I don't really need. It's nice that the career mode is laid out into different groups of events, each with it's own world map of events; so as you play you really see your progress together.
On the lowest difficulty, C class, the game is still fast.
Unlike say, Mario Kart, selecting a difficulty has no bearing on the general speed of the race (it does in a way, but it's not broken into discrete speed classes). On the easiest difficulty, this allows my wife to occasionally miss boost pads or flub stunts, almost completely ignore the drifting mechanic, and still finish at 5th place or better almost every time. She really enjoys the weapon combat so her victories are usually because of her mercilessly wailing on the other racers. Although I finish waaay out in 1st almost every race, it's still fun for me because the game itself is fun to play and I get to mess around doing stupid drifts and risky stunts. It also helps me better prepare for playing on the harder classes since I get familiar with the tracks.
You can share weapons.
When racing in splitscreen mode (this may be true online but I have no idea), you each share a banked weapon slot. This means that when I'm cruising in first place, and my wife is battling for position, I can pick up weapons ahead of her, bank them, and then she can use them on who ever is in front of her. Conversely, she can bank more defensive weapons like the glove and the blowfish for me to use. This is a REALLY awesome touch that turns an otherwise purely competitive game into a partially cooperative one. We both really like this mechanic.
The game is easy to play and understand, but rewards greater attention to smaller mechanical details.
This isn't a knock against Mario Kart at all, but I think a lot of people underestimate how intimidating that game can be to newcomers or casual players; it can be pretty relentless to you at any class level, and not really understanding "how" to play is a barrier. For whatever reason, S&ART sort of simplifies the formula a little bit, specifically when picking a racer. Instead of swapping parts and looking at how it affects your stats, you can really just say to yourself, "Well, I want someone who's really fast, or turns sharply," and just pick whomever has the highest of that stat and basically do well (before y'all lose it on me and say how every kart racer does this, bear in mind I'm speaking specifically about playing with my wife, who doesn't usually get on well with kart racers). There's also a complexity to the mechanics (risk boosts, stunt combos, etc) that isn't made obvious that I enjoy and I'm able to engage with, that doesn't affect or hinder her experience at all.
The 2-player splitscreen isn't claustrophobic.
Just look at this wide angle:
The game is awesome.
It's a fantastic homage/shrine/whatever to SEGA's gaming heritage. The character selection is a little weird (Danica Patrick? Wreck-It-Ralph?) and a lot of the references are lost on my wife (Ristar, Burning Rangers, the giant select screen skeleton on the Golden Axe course), but overall the game's presentation and look is outstanding and contains enough analogs to Mario Kart's weapons and concepts that she was familiar with everything after a race or two.
So yeah, amazing game. Here's some random images:
I wouldn't call my wife a particularly...skilled...gamer. We enjoy playing games cooperatively, but with the sole exception of top-down games (Diablo 3, twin-stick shooters, etc) and titles like Earth Defense Force, she often struggles with controls and usually I do a lot of the heavy-lifting. One of our favorite games is Mario Kart 8, which is a game she struggles with a great deal largely because of her inability to get the drifting mechanic down, and because the A.I. isn't particularly forgiving; even on 50cc, which for her (and me) is too slow. Despite frequently placing within the bottom 4, she enjoys the game, but not for particularly long (we played this for almost 5 hours straight on Sunday).
Enter Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, which is, seemingly by total accident, a fantastic split-screen experience for both skilled and unskilled players. Here's why:
You can play the career mode together.
This isn't particularly novel, but when playing the career mode with more than just one player, only one of you has to meet the event requirements to move on. This means that my wife can race to her heart's content, place 4th, and as long as I win, we pass the event. This is nice because it still feels like a victory even if she didn't win the race/event. The coins we pick up are shared, so she can use the slot machine to get power-ups that I don't really need. It's nice that the career mode is laid out into different groups of events, each with it's own world map of events; so as you play you really see your progress together.
On the lowest difficulty, C class, the game is still fast.
Unlike say, Mario Kart, selecting a difficulty has no bearing on the general speed of the race (it does in a way, but it's not broken into discrete speed classes). On the easiest difficulty, this allows my wife to occasionally miss boost pads or flub stunts, almost completely ignore the drifting mechanic, and still finish at 5th place or better almost every time. She really enjoys the weapon combat so her victories are usually because of her mercilessly wailing on the other racers. Although I finish waaay out in 1st almost every race, it's still fun for me because the game itself is fun to play and I get to mess around doing stupid drifts and risky stunts. It also helps me better prepare for playing on the harder classes since I get familiar with the tracks.
You can share weapons.
When racing in splitscreen mode (this may be true online but I have no idea), you each share a banked weapon slot. This means that when I'm cruising in first place, and my wife is battling for position, I can pick up weapons ahead of her, bank them, and then she can use them on who ever is in front of her. Conversely, she can bank more defensive weapons like the glove and the blowfish for me to use. This is a REALLY awesome touch that turns an otherwise purely competitive game into a partially cooperative one. We both really like this mechanic.
The game is easy to play and understand, but rewards greater attention to smaller mechanical details.
This isn't a knock against Mario Kart at all, but I think a lot of people underestimate how intimidating that game can be to newcomers or casual players; it can be pretty relentless to you at any class level, and not really understanding "how" to play is a barrier. For whatever reason, S&ART sort of simplifies the formula a little bit, specifically when picking a racer. Instead of swapping parts and looking at how it affects your stats, you can really just say to yourself, "Well, I want someone who's really fast, or turns sharply," and just pick whomever has the highest of that stat and basically do well (before y'all lose it on me and say how every kart racer does this, bear in mind I'm speaking specifically about playing with my wife, who doesn't usually get on well with kart racers). There's also a complexity to the mechanics (risk boosts, stunt combos, etc) that isn't made obvious that I enjoy and I'm able to engage with, that doesn't affect or hinder her experience at all.
The 2-player splitscreen isn't claustrophobic.
Just look at this wide angle:
You can almost always see the entire width of the track (which are also very wide, with a few exceptions) in splitscreen. This isn't even true when playing solo, as the camera is a little more zoomed in on your racer. This is a HUGE deal to someone who isn't intimately familiar with playing kart racers or their mechanics, being able to see everything at once helps tremendously.
The game is awesome.
It's a fantastic homage/shrine/whatever to SEGA's gaming heritage. The character selection is a little weird (Danica Patrick? Wreck-It-Ralph?) and a lot of the references are lost on my wife (Ristar, Burning Rangers, the giant select screen skeleton on the Golden Axe course), but overall the game's presentation and look is outstanding and contains enough analogs to Mario Kart's weapons and concepts that she was familiar with everything after a race or two.
So yeah, amazing game. Here's some random images:
