Been playing a bit of Kirby Air Ride Deluxe. It's pretty fun. (Games Playing Right Now #17)

08/21-23/2025

Sakurai wasn't kidding with how simple the game was using only one button. I'm so glad we are getting a new game as the original is starting to seem more and more unappreciated even after only playing the Air Ride mode in Free Run and CPU matches. 

It ain't easy either if you play with the spicy settings Damage and Speed help set to "On" and "None" respectively. I have won two stages so far with the CPU stepping up one notch each stage. Even at CPU difficulties three and four, you have to be careful with front running as riders behind you can damage your machine and take you out of the race. I have already lost twice to making that mistake and once to having too low of HP to stay ahead and accidentally let the last living CPU hold the lead. I'm pretty sure I won't run that setting if I decide to play with others as the rounds would be deathmatchs for the most part, especially once I unlock more machines like Shadow Star.

Currently a lot of stuff is locked behind the checklists, but if that wasn't the case then I would have been in Free Ride the whole time and probably not like the game as much. I might try to get through the checklists as I miss unlocking stuff in Ring Racers which has a evolved version of the same system. No guarantee though.

It's defiantly worth a shot to play the original Air Ride for yourself regardless of if you are getting Air Riders/Switch 2. I don't have much to say in terms of interesting revelations, but that's how it be with some games for one reason or other. There are some things even I can't see while playing a game at the same time. Game just good. Go play it. Nuf said.

If anyone is playing the Deluxe mod like me and wants to match my DX gameplay settings, I personally set all the settings to the original toggles as I am trying to play as close to possible to the original unmodified game. Considering that Air Riders seems to not be implementing anything similar to the DX features, I am just gonna play Air Ride as it was originally designed for the most part. There is still the cool stuff like the extra Kirby colors that I am still using as there isn't any settings for them and they minimally effect gameplay. 

Don't forget to set the City Trial time limit to 5 minutes. The Deluxe mod has it set to 7 minutes by default instead of the original's default of 5 minutes.

When using KARphin, make sure to use the patched ROMs for netplay instead of Riivolution. It was a bit suspicious that the default way was patch instead of the easier Riivolution modding so I dug around and found messages that say Riivolution mods crash on netplay. 

I also personally disabled all the Gecko Codes besides widescreen and crash reports as well. Same idea with my Deluxe mod settings. Just be aware that anyone you play netplay with needs to have the same code set to prevent desyncs. I am looking into figuring out more about the codes so I can figure out which ones are for online and which ones change the game. For now, just disable them all till you want to try KARphin netplay.

08/24/2025

Nothing much has changed besides having unlocked a bunch of stuff and discovering how the CPUs behave in races. Even just trying to do the checklist with LV1 CPUs can be tough when one of them picks the swerve star and leaves you in the dust when speed help turned off. I had to turn down the handy cap to guarantee I have enough time to find and hit all the boost panels with one of the challenges.

The main addition here is actually discovering the camera. I was reading the game's manual when I discovered it. I then realized that the zoomed out view I see in comp games is actually similar to the fully zoomed out view in races. Sure enough, changing the setting in deluxe for default camera zoom moves the camera as far away like if you moved it yourself. I presume it's a quality of life feature so the players don't have to hold L/R and use the C stick to move the camera at the start of every race. It probably help keep the competitive integrity and saves on controller wear. I'll probably keep playing with the original zoom, but I might zoom out as I feel or even change the camera setting at a later time.