So maybe it's not just me then. I have only finished one race online. The rest I'm leading (I have two first place finishes) or am in the hunt for first place and I get bumped.

I've only had trouble when I tried to join you schmoes.

SO. First-person view: Do you LOVE it?

I was pretty excited for this option, since it seems well-suited to 3D. But you know what ISN'T well-suited to 3D? Gyroscopic controls. Luckily, you can disable those (in a wholly unintuitive fashion). It's definitely more difficult to drive from that perspective, because of items and drifting, and such, but it's very cool. Most of the necessary information is still given to you, but there's no rear-view mirror. And there probably should be.

Still, a cool option. Maybe I'll get good enough to hit coins while drifting. We shall see...

@Anand

Never tried first-person racing, I just stumbled on it by accident and quickly switched back to regular mode. Though somehow, when racing regular, I made Luigi look over his back shoulder and the camera actually shifted that was ever so slightly...maybe I hit the d-pad by accident?

So I have no idea if Nintendo's servers are just really overloaded or if our internet is just that bad...but I've only finished two races in the twenty that I've tried to race online. I'm thinking it's the new servers just got hammered over the launch and I need to chill...but I'm tired of the "There's a Connection Error" message popping up.

But why would they specifically hit a load right NOW? I'd think launch day would be the biggest. I haven't had any troubles yet, just one disconnection over like 4 or 5 hours of online play.

On a side note, I'm a bit disappointed in battle mode. It's fun but like... there isn't a single battle stage with any real verticality. Block Fort was so much fun precisely because there were 3 levels of play! All of the battle courses in this game are flat. And, to be honest, mostly uninteresting. I get the feeling that battle mode was mostly an oversight here. As it has been since the N64, which is weird, because that mode was huge on N64 so you would think they would ride that a bit. It'd almost be like making a new Goldeneye but not spending any real time on the battle mode.

Verticality does make for more strategy in battle mode, but I can't say I particularly miss it here. I think I've always enjoyed the head-on battles on flat courses better, anyways.

Zero, the recent GoldenEye for Wii had a somewhat disappointing local multiplayer component.

@ludist210

I've been racing way too much online this past week, and haven't experienced any connection errors.

Aside from when we tried playing with Guillaume....

Played quite a bit today, I'm up over 2000 rating. Competition is getting fierce!

I played for a bit tonight with Fabien (VofEscaflowne) and Seth (Het_Nkik) and had a lot of fun. Had a connection error when first trying to join up, but that's it. I was connected for a good two hours or so with no problems.

@kgtennispro

Yeah, I ended up assigning my 3DS a static IP. Dead or Alive Dimensions was a little shaky (but it usually is when I play with people worldwide), but Mario Kart 7 was solid. I'll try again tonight...I played with Mikey and we split two races.

@ludist210

I was having connection errors as well so I too gave my 3DS a static IP address and put that IP in the DMZ. Hopefully that fixes things.

Anyone still playing? I could maybe get a few races in before bed. Was out a little late tonight.

Let's give it a shot.

edit - Wanna join international races instead? I don't think we'll have enough people to fill it up.

Kept trying to join but I keep getting a communication error for some reason.

@anon_mastermind

Yeah, I passed 3000 VR last night, and raced with some people in the 5000 range.

It seems like most of us stayed clustered together to the point where almost every victory came down to who got lucky with an item at the end, heh.

@PogueSquadron

Aw. Sorry, maybe it was my fault.

I was with a bunch of Japanese people for some reason.

So let me tell you guys a story. There was a young boy who was full of potential. He worked hard, he generally excelled. He did well in school and expected to graduate college and get out there into the "real world" and continue being successful. And for awhile he did. He was full of optimism and had this notion that the harder you work and the better you do, the more you will be rewarded.

But then life started beating him down. Because life doesn't really work that way. You make plans, you prepare to execute plans based on this idea that if you work hard at your plans you will succeed, and then tons of things that are somewhat to completely out of your control can fuck you over bad. One second you are moving along with tons of momentum, the next second a completely unavoidable tragedy strikes and you are stopped dead in your tracks, and find it difficult to get moving again. Nonetheless you get back up and... well let me tell you something, no one is going to help you when you are down, they're will see that you are lagging and push you right the fuck out of the way, more likely than not knocking you right back on your ass in the process.

So this happened to this boy, and for years now he has been moving through life somewhat confused, wondering what happened to all of his unbridaled potential. But he had to learn the hard way that life will beat you down and fuck you up, and where you end up only has a marginal connection to where you would ideally be based on your raw talent and abilities and the hard work you put into things.

AND NOW I UNDERSTAND WHY MARIO KART INFURIATES ME SO MUCH. IT'S BASICALLY THE MOST PERFECT LIFE SIMULATOR THAT EXISTS. FUCK YOU BLUE SHELLS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

@Zero



On a brighter note: yay, I got all the gold cups in 50, 100, and 150 cc! Of course now I have to tackle Mirror Mode, should be fun!

Really, the best strategy is to drop down to 2nd once you see someone get a blue shell on the bottom screen.

@anon_mastermind

That seems to be the case. At any rate, it's a good idea to glance at the other racers' items on the bottom screen periodically, as it allows you to make better decisions on how to use your current item. Be more offensive? Or play defense because someone got a red shell...

Of course, the downside to that is momentarily losing sight of the action right in front of you. I've had some baaaad things happen to me due to looking at the bottom screen.