How I play Ring Racers after unlocking everything. (Games Playing Right Now #13)

First of all, if you haven't played Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racer yet, at least give it a try. It's tough, but it's well worth the time, especially because the game is free.

You back? Good. I have decided to play some more Ring Racers partly because of Mario Kart World coming out very soon. I will be able to better compare the games by having Ring Racers fresh in mind. While I wait for the release of MKWorld in 6 days and hope my console doesn't get raided by mail pirates, here is how I actually played Ring Racers and how I will probably continue playing it.

Vibe Racing.

I open Stereo Mode and put it on the shuffle, then I host a private online lobby with random items off as well as no CPUs. This is to have the vote level progression that Match race doesn't support. Then I try not to forget to set the gear to 3 because I don't have enough wins for Auto Gear to select Gear 3.

That's about it really. I do enjoy the GP mode, but I not someone to choose playing the hard way without some kind of reward. Vibe Racing is a really good way to have very little mental commitment while also being enough to engage me. Sealed Sounds: HVT as well as the track collection for the base game have been really great to vibe to as it has various different kinds of music from Sonic to other media I have never seen. Give vibe racing a try once you are done unlocking everything like I have.

Building A Map Pack.

I am personally content with the base game's maps simply due to the massive volume of base game alone. Somehow, they made over 4 games worth of cups with maps of almost perfect quality which ends up being more tracks than MK8DX with the booster course pass included. I almost wasn't gonna bother with adding mods just because I had everything I wanted already and more.

That eventually changed though as you can see. I kept seeing modded tracks in montages and I eventually saw Coconut Mall and decided to change my opinion. I started to miss some of my favorite tracks more than ever. This is when I started to develop the map pack. I picked the maps based on the top downloaded maps, featured maps, and other maps I found in other ways. There were some complications, but it's pretty big now. The pack probably doubles the race map count and adds a fair amount of battle maps. Shame many of the packs don't care to make full cups leading to the weird race only cups. My goal is to work towards adding every pack that features a returning favorite or is being published by someone who made a favorite map and then continue vibe racing with the new pack.

Unlocking Tracks.

Some mod developers want their tracks to be actually played in Grand Prix or unlocked by finding secrets. Grand Prix is quite fun considering that the cups that tend to lock their tracks also are complete and even include a special stage so I had a blast doing that. The Caldera Cup is really hard though, especially the special stage which I might rank higher than the later stages believe it or not.

What's actually annoying though are the secrets that unlock certain maps. They can be fun to find, but even with hints the CTR pack takes a while to unlock everything in. Plus you might forget to actually complete a run to unlock the respective track which means you either do the secret again or use a command and then complete the track. This isn't the worst of it though. There was this one secret map that I had no idea what it was. I knew it was there seeing a static screen in the Lost & Found maps, but I didn't recall any other packs having secret maps. First, I had to load each mod one by one going back to match race to see which pack did it. I got lucky as it was early in the list. The next problem was finding the secret. Both the message board page and the Kart Krew discord haven't reported on where the secret was so I was on my own with the only info being the actual map that needed to be unlocked. To cut it short, I had to use the map maker and ask for help on Discord to find it. To anyone who wants to add secret maps, at least report that your pack has secrets and give hints so we can get through them to finish our map pack. I am too suborn to use cheat codes, but most people aren't and will never care to actually look for your secret even half legit like I did.

Edit: ^ Has no idea on what the next secret he'll be working to find is.

That's about it.

That's how I enjoy Ring Racers. I never really went online at all because I only really play Ring Racers multiplayer as a social experience where I get to talk to people or hear people talk in a stream or something. There is also the problem of gameplay mods for Ring Racers which aren't a fun experience for an already complicated and complete game mechanically if I remember correctly. The only times I get to play Kart online are those who invite me to play SRB2Kart. 

Ultimately, Ring Racers for me has become a more single player vibe game and a development toy with some of the stuff that this blog or past bulletins may have featured. 

I do personally hope to play the game with more people, but that will happen once more peer groups I know open themselves up to learning a tough game like this.

A teaser to what I hope to write about in my MKWorld blog post.

I won't tease what I will write. Although, you can try to make some connections in your mind and might be able to ask interesting questions that I plan to answer.