Mario Kart 7 - Official Topic

@Marzy: If you watch the second video Squidboy posted at 13:10, you can see him getting a blue shell and right after he shoots it, it smashes through the guy in front of him. You'll only see it flying when it's getting ready to explode on the guy in first.

You can switch views at any moment by pressing the D-Pad, but looks like you can't use the circle pad for steering when in first person view.

Won't get my paycheck till next week, so won't be able to play this this Friday :/.

Spiny Shell runs along the ground then jumps in the air when it hits the person in 1st place, so still mostly like the MK64 Spiny.

Nintendo has posted the first volume of Mario Kart 7's Iwata Asks: http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/3ds/mario-kart-7/0/0

- this was the first international development in the Mario Kart series
- Mario Kart 7 originally had 8 people working on it
- the extension of development on Skyward Sword took team members away from Mario Kart 7
- Retro was nervous to work with Nintendo on Mario Kart
- the dev teams went out to dinner and Nintendo gave Retro a toast that made them at ease
- Iwata describes Nintendo's feeling on the collaboration...

...we had Konno-san, who knew we didn't have enough people and thought we should borrow help from overseas and do our best that way. We had Morimoto-san and Ishikawa-san, who were worried about their first project with people from overseas. Then Ichijo-san, who was psyched up about the project, joined us. A little over a year ago, these people came together into a team and got down to work.

- Retro first went to Nintendo for a visit, then Nintendo visited Retro's offices
- Iwata discusses the balance that Mario Kart must have...

...you have to design courses that will make for an interesting racing game, you have to create visuals that will satisfy today's gamers, and you have to express a feeling of lots of variety within 60 frames per second.

- Nintendo produced half the courses and Retro produced the other half
- Retro first worked on the classic courses
- Retro looked back and forth between Mario Kart 7 and Luigi's Mansion to get the Luigi's Mansion course right
- Retro put one dev on each course, and had weekly contact with Nintendo
- Retro worked on character animations that wouldn't clash with new kart elements like the glider
- working on the jump action made it even tougher when trying not to have the characters' heads bump through the gliders
- Retro discusses the importance of having Nintendo work alongside them on the project...

I don't know how we would have done it without Ichijo-san, to be honest. He was sending us screenshots of tools that were still in Japanese, with notes saying what the buttons did, and helping us not only translate text but also translate feeling and the goals we were trying to get. I left the project towards the end to work on other projects, and Bill Vandervoort who came in during the process was working with Ichijo-san very closely, and he had the same feeling.

- Retro's work on previous Nintendo titles have helped them to nail down what the feeling of a Nintendo game should be
- Retro was nervous the first time they tested the game online, since they wanted to make sure they looked like they knew how to play well
- Retro was honored to have some of their staff ghost times included in the final game
- one night during a video conference, the teams had to resort to hand gestures to convey ideas due to a poor connection
- Nintendo shared some Retro concept art for the game...

- Nintendo feels the Mario Kart series is 'for everyone to get excited playing together'
- Nintendo says Mario Kart is about finding the balance between the player realizing their skilled driving and the items that pop up
- the sound composer often discusses the overall image or atmosphere of the courses with the designers and planners while making the music
- the teams didn't bring over all old elements due to the amount of new features that were added
- retaining all old Mario Kart aspects with all the new would have lead to too much data
- Konno played the game thousands of times before release
- Mario Kart Wii was tweaked to have floating/flying karts as a way to sell the idea of adding gliders to Mario Kart 7
- the idea of including coins again came up during previous Mario Kart titles, but the idea was always discussed and dropped during the end of the project
- this time coins were mentioned from the start
- some kart customizations are faster on land, but worse underwater
- for real players, if you want your opponent's parts, you just have to race and beat them
- Nintendo details the process of including all the communication features

...early on we were making the Community, where you can easily gather with like-minded players online. But we didn't think of the Mario Kart Channel for StreetPass and SpotPass until quite a bit later.

- you can race people on the Internet over and over even if you haven't exchanged Friend Codes
- Nintendo originally wanted to include a feature where friends could gather like this directly on Nintendo 3DS, but time constraints pushed the feature out
- Nintendogs + Cats' Journal for checking your StreetPass content was the inspiration for Mario Kart Channel
- you can race 7 ghosts at once
- on the dev team, Konno say, "Shiraiwa-san, you're always Banana Master"
- Shiraiwa and Konno play online games together in their personal time, and this lead to some of the ideas included in the online features for Mario Kart 7
- the dev team wasn't sure they could achieve their goal of having the game run at 60FPS at all time
- it took a lot of hard work to achieve this, especially when including the goals of other dev team members
- Konno suggested the inclusion of Wuhu Island, which ended up being one of the toughest tracks to get running at 60 FPS
- Mario Kart 7 composer Nagata shares his goals for the project...

I pay attention to the sound of the engines every time. I also try to make sure the background music doesn't simply sound like racing-game music. It's like Mario's blood runs through Mario Kart. Luckily, a lot of fans enjoy the music from past Mario Kart games, so this time as well I tried to make memorable music.

- Nagata changed the music for when you're in the air and underwater
- the music also gets another layer if you're in first place
- this change to first place music slowly fades away as your second place opponent closes in
- if you get hit with a shell, this layer to the music ends abruptly
- one of the devs that handled the gyro-controls is a big fan of cars, which lent to his development of this aspect
- the dev team wasn't ready for players to go into first-person, so the karts weren't made with that kind of detail in mind originally
- if driving in first person, the camera will pull back a bit when you're hit to let you know what happened
- the screen would originally spin when you got hit, but the dev team felt this made the player too dizzy when it first person
- Super Mario 3D Land's dev team even used Mario Kart 7 as a reference during development when it came to 3D
- each item was adjusted individually for 3D impact
- Konno says he's received a ton of emails from people around the world, all encouraging Mario Kart 7's development

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=453218

- The music also gets another layer if you're in first place
- This change to first place music slowly fades away as your second place opponent closes in

I love this idea!

IGN gave it a 9.

I've took this off for now, IGN embedding breaks threads for some reason. One of the other staff can sort it out, maybe they can get it working.

Link to the video review

( Edited 29.11.2011 14:35 by Marzy )

Looks good but I can't believe Waluigi isn't in the game, he's like one of the main characters. Online mode looks awesome.

Destructoid gave it a 5/10 while all other reviews are between 80-100%.

Meh, it's Mario Kart. What do they expect? It'll be as fun as the other games in the series and it has improvements and new features.

I'm not as excited about it as Skyward Sword or anything, but it's just Mario Kart. Everyone buys it, we all play online and then have we a bunch of fun. It's Mario Kart! how could you not like it?!

Okay, I think everyone knows it's Mario Kart now.

( Edited 29.11.2011 18:10 by Marzy )

Yea, it's a Nintendo fan staple, this time with great online.

Ha, Jim Stirling review, why doesn't that surprise me...

GT Review

I just found out about the communities in MK7, which is a fantastic idea. Who's making the C3 community?

Probably the first member to get the game and Mush told me earlier today that he actually got his copy this morning, so I guess that's going to be him.

( Edited 30.11.2011 13:43 by SirLink )

If whoever makes it pops over a news tip or tells one of the staff, we can put a news article about our swanky new community

Anyone know how exactly this will work?

Example - Mush makes the C3 community and sets the rules, let's say no blue shells. Then one night Mush isn't online but a bunch of us from C3 want to play together but want blue shells in. If Mush isn't there, can we edit the rules?

Hopefully this won't be too big of a deal, but just curious about who can edit things when the creator isn't around.

I guess maybe for GP tournaments, if we had a sign up group of 8 people, we could create a separate community for that one tournament.

What's everyone's thoughts on the League idea I brought up not long ago? I know the 8 player GP tournies and knockout (1 vs 1, lose and you're out; win and go to next round) tournies will be more popular though.

Cubed3 community is created! Code for the community is: 46-9525-8248-4504. The community rules are 100cc and all items, you can't change this so if someone isn't happy with the settings, we'll have to create another one.

I'm not happy with it XD

150cc please?

Okay, so I guess it looks like we'll have to create new communities for each tournament depending on who runs one.

That makes no sense. It would be just way easier if they'd let you edit anything you want apart from the code of the community. But yeah, like Az said...how could anyone not want 150cc? All items are fine, I survived with them in MKW too so whatever.

I guess Marzy will have to create a specific Marzy community where all items are disabled then.

Yeah it dawned on me afterwards - you can't edit the items in the room after making it? This just makes more problems when wanting to mix the rules up a bit - you'd need to create more rooms and get in touch with everyone to tell them the new codes. Don't see how this is a massive online improvement at all... I mean communities are great, but not being able to edit rules after making one? wtf

Azuardo said:
I'm not happy with it XD

150cc please?

Okay, so I guess it looks like we'll have to create new communities for each tournament depending on who runs one.

Nobody plays Mario Kart competively on 100cc Mush. XD It's way too slow for my liking as well. =3 It's pretty stupid that the rules are set in stone once the community is made, I swear sometimes it seems like Nintendo are cavemen when it comes to the internet.

L said:
Nobody plays Mario Kart competively on 100cc Mush. XD It's way too slow for my liking as well. =3 It's pretty stupid that the rules are set in stone once the community is made, I swear sometimes it seems like Nintendo are cavemen when it comes to the internet.

Huh, it would be pretty annoying if you could edit them, It's a good thing they're set in stone once created, I don't want groups I join changing constantly, I want them static.

edit:

I'll set up a 150cc group will all the trimmings, and all the best tracks first if possible (Special Cup and a choice few others).

Mod Edit: Your video affected the thread, stopping people from replying, Squidboy. Sorry, but I had to remove it. Where possible, try to search for a YouTube version instead. I tried myself but couldn't find one, so if you could just link to the URL page for the vid itself, that would be great, thanks. - Azuardo

( Edited 01.12.2011 17:27 by Azuardo )

I'm sure there'll be preferences people will want the more we play though. Eventually we might not want blue shells in our games so we'd need a new group. Making new rooms for different tournaments isn't much of a problem though, since people will sign up for the tourney in a thread and will get the room code right away.

To begin with, I think I'd just want 150cc with all items and all tracks. I guess I'll find out later tonight how it all works.