Taste-Test: Kirby's Air Ride

Rated: RP for Rating Pending Developer: HAL Publisher: Nintendo Players: 1-4 Saving: Unknown Taste-test by Carl DeNovio

At E3 this year, Nintendo had two big-name franchise racing games in F-Zero GX/AX and Mario Kart: Double Dash!! Tucked away in the deep corners of the Nintendo booth, though, was another racing game: Kirby's Air Ride. This game was radically different from the other racing genre titles Nintendo has been pimping for years. While F-Zero and Mario Kart (along with pretty much every other racing game ever made) rely on acceleration and mastery of speed, Kirby took this seemingly unbreakable rule of racing and threw a rather unexpected curveball.

You ready for this? Kirby's Air Ride, rather than focusing on building up acceleration and speed to overcome your opponents, focuses on the exact opposite. You have to master the brakes in order to succeed in this game. Weird, I know, but oddly it works. Your vehicle (whether it be a warp star or one of several other racing devices to choose from) will automatically accelerate to max speed on its own, but the course is so riddled with obstacles and baddies that you'll need to be able to ignore your instincts to blaze through the race and brake around turns, avoid obstacles, and counter enemy attacks.

Control for this game is just as unexpected as the concept driving it. One looks at the GameCube controller and sees all sorts of buttony do-dads. There's an A button, B, Y, and X buttons, L and R buttons, a Z button, and a big yellow stick thing, along with the control stick and D-pad. All these buttons, and so many uses for them. Except that B, Y, X, L, R, Z, the C-stick, and the D-pad aren't used. At all. Absolutely everything is done with the control stick and the A button. Again, it sounds weird, but again, it works. The control stick obviously steers the racer, while the A button does everything else. You'll use it to brake, inhale enemies, use weapons, and go around tight curves. I asked the guy at the booth if that would change before release and he told me he wasn't sure, but probably not as the game is really gearing towards simplicity, and you can't get much more simple than a one-button game (except Pac-Man GCN, which didn't use any buttons).

The graphics were about as good as you'd expect. Nothing overly flashy for a game that's based on simplicity. The game was pretty, and I wouldn't call the graphics "bad," but there just wasn't a lot of detail in a lot of things. The characters and baddies were nicely constructed, as were the backgrounds; it just didn't stand up to the incredibly beautiful F-Zero or the meticulously detailed Mario Kart: Double Dash!! For what it was it stood on its own, but compared to other games it wasn't graphically stunning.

There's not much more to the game than that. A very different racing game than its predecessors in the genre, but not wholly unenjoyable. Destined to be overlooked simply because of other huge games coming out in its genre in the forms of F-Zero and Mario Kart, this is a game that both racing and Kirby fans should at least give a shot, and could become an cult classic, if not a sleeper-hit.

Carl DeNovio