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MMORPGs in disguise
Dec. 17th, 2007 10:14 pmIt had to happen eventually. I had avoided them for so long, but as of last week, thanks to so many people on the Clickteam chatroom playing this, I have finally been bitten by the MMORPG ferret. This caught me by surprise because this is an RPG disguised as something else - it's Nexon Kartrider, which is what I'd politely describe as being "inspired" by Mario Kart (but it's still not quite as much of a ripoff as the blatantly plagiarized Crash Team Racing). So as it's just a racing game, everything's OK.
I should warn you in advance that it's impossibly cutesy and manages to be even more bubbly than Windows XP, but if you can get past that without being sick, it's easy to see that it's clearly an RPG underneath. It starts off in the tutorial mode, where you're shown the basic controls (left turns you left, right turns you right, hooray) along with the difficult-to-master "drifting" technique that you'll waste hours of time on before realizing it's mostly faster to just hold Up. Then you're left to run riot, either going straight into the multiplayer mode or trying to complete certain scenarios first.
The scenarios are well worth doing because they give you a decent amount of cash and "RP" (experience points, or "Race Points", possibly). I say "scenarios", but the game's still in the beta stage and there's only one of them at the moment - it tells, in rather broken English, the story of somebody with a rugby ball for a head called Dao who one day wants to become a championship kart driver by using his weird disembodied eyebrows and habit of ending most sentences with a tilde for some reason. It's played out in a visual style that's frankly worryingly similar to Strong Bad's Japanese cartoon, though the game is actually Korean - it's strange how as a country (or rather two countries) they got into online games so much.
Sooner or later you're nudged in the direction of multiplayer, either through your own choice or through scenario missions that tell you to practice your driving against other players. This is where things start to get interesting. The disadvantage with the game, as with all MMORPGs, is that you're forced to compete with semi-literate American skateboarder types. The advantage, as with all MMORPGs, is that you can beat them. After a while, anyway - you're only allowed on the lower skill level "channels" at first, and have to get a sense of where to be cautious and where to zoom ahead holding both middle fingers up behind you before you start to get significant amounts of experience from finishing in a respectable place. More experience gives you access to the higher-level channels, more driving tutorials for advanced techniques, more scenario missions which reward you with experience, and the whole unstoppable cycle continues until you realize you've been playing it for eight hours and everyone else has gone to bed.
There are several different game modes. You can opt to play individually or in teams - the team mode gives you slightly fewer points overall, but might be more lucrative if you get into a good team even though you're rubbish. More importantly, you can either play Speed mode or Item mode. Speed is a pure race - there's nothing but you and other drivers, and your position in the race is determined by your ability to pick the right spots to slide round corners and use your limited boosts wisely (or, failing that, your ability to swerve in front of other faster players and get them to crash into your cheating backside). Item Mode, just like Mario Kart, gives you the standard array of banana skins, water bombs and various other items of warfare with which to irritate the other players. Most of them have the effect of slowing them down to a halt several different ways so that you can cruise past them while they wave their fists at you Dick Dastardly-style, but there are a couple of more interesting ones like the Magnet which can be used to give you a great advantage if you fire it just at the nanosecond where you can see the race leader ahead of you on a long straight.
You'd think that the monotony of it would be a problem after a while (there are, at a guess, about fifteen tracks, five of which are decent) but it isn't - it's the promise of the ever-closer Level Up and, after a few of those, the next "Glove Colour" to show off to people that come with them that make it addictive. Not to mention that with just a couple more first places you might have enough money to buy the new kart that you've had your eye on. MMORPGs represent a world in which what our parents taught us to ignore now matters the most - material gain and being measured by no more than a number. I'd recommend that you create an account and download it yourself, but obviously you're above that level. Aren't you?
I should warn you in advance that it's impossibly cutesy and manages to be even more bubbly than Windows XP, but if you can get past that without being sick, it's easy to see that it's clearly an RPG underneath. It starts off in the tutorial mode, where you're shown the basic controls (left turns you left, right turns you right, hooray) along with the difficult-to-master "drifting" technique that you'll waste hours of time on before realizing it's mostly faster to just hold Up. Then you're left to run riot, either going straight into the multiplayer mode or trying to complete certain scenarios first.
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Sooner or later you're nudged in the direction of multiplayer, either through your own choice or through scenario missions that tell you to practice your driving against other players. This is where things start to get interesting. The disadvantage with the game, as with all MMORPGs, is that you're forced to compete with semi-literate American skateboarder types. The advantage, as with all MMORPGs, is that you can beat them. After a while, anyway - you're only allowed on the lower skill level "channels" at first, and have to get a sense of where to be cautious and where to zoom ahead holding both middle fingers up behind you before you start to get significant amounts of experience from finishing in a respectable place. More experience gives you access to the higher-level channels, more driving tutorials for advanced techniques, more scenario missions which reward you with experience, and the whole unstoppable cycle continues until you realize you've been playing it for eight hours and everyone else has gone to bed.
There are several different game modes. You can opt to play individually or in teams - the team mode gives you slightly fewer points overall, but might be more lucrative if you get into a good team even though you're rubbish. More importantly, you can either play Speed mode or Item mode. Speed is a pure race - there's nothing but you and other drivers, and your position in the race is determined by your ability to pick the right spots to slide round corners and use your limited boosts wisely (or, failing that, your ability to swerve in front of other faster players and get them to crash into your cheating backside). Item Mode, just like Mario Kart, gives you the standard array of banana skins, water bombs and various other items of warfare with which to irritate the other players. Most of them have the effect of slowing them down to a halt several different ways so that you can cruise past them while they wave their fists at you Dick Dastardly-style, but there are a couple of more interesting ones like the Magnet which can be used to give you a great advantage if you fire it just at the nanosecond where you can see the race leader ahead of you on a long straight.
You'd think that the monotony of it would be a problem after a while (there are, at a guess, about fifteen tracks, five of which are decent) but it isn't - it's the promise of the ever-closer Level Up and, after a few of those, the next "Glove Colour" to show off to people that come with them that make it addictive. Not to mention that with just a couple more first places you might have enough money to buy the new kart that you've had your eye on. MMORPGs represent a world in which what our parents taught us to ignore now matters the most - material gain and being measured by no more than a number. I'd recommend that you create an account and download it yourself, but obviously you're above that level. Aren't you?
