i guess i get that weird feeling when i read about Transformed and the effusive praise people have for it. it is such a widely-praised modern kart game, and i’m all about those kart games. so, i guess i speak up because i basically kept playing it way longer than i should have, looking for the elevating factors that caused everyone to love it, 'cause like
on the surface, it’s exactly the type of game that i both should like and are becoming vanishingly rare, but my distaste for it is massive. the first game is just so much more fun to play! it isn’t the big carnival of loving sega fanservice that transformed is, but the driving is pretty great. everything about the actual gameplay of transformed seems like a step back from the first game.
then hotshot racing comes through and basically is exactly the kind of game i wanted, so. idk. i think transformed is a neat package, but
I just played the one at the time (which was heavily discounted in steam sales etc.) and wasn’t playing it at the limits, so your enumerated flaws didn’t occur to me or weren’t strained
the gimmick is fun but I wasn’t looking for shaving seconds I guess
I never played the other Sonic karts but Transformed has a strangle hold in my mind purely on its driving and drifting mechanics. I will admit that the transform parts is mostly a gimmick but I do enjoy how you have to manage your angles on some tracks when you hit a transform point. You can totally get some bad wave RNG during boat sections. The biggest sin is that the item powers are barely sega themed though I heard the blowfish was a junk puyo in japan. It definitely lost something in its character when Akira could tetsuzanko your car for a turbo boost. Part of me wants to play the version that had a bar you could build up for the all star mode just to add another layer of build up during laps.
I agree in pure design terms - the Diddy Kong Racing multi-vehicle concept ends the same way turret and vehicle sections go in shooters, without enough time to develop depth or play to really test the player on execution. On the other hand, the track design and energy level they hit in Transformed really makes those first two weeks a lot more fun, and that’s all the time I was ever going to give it.
A lot like the tradeoffs between Pac-Man: CE and Pac-Man: CE DX. A sugar rush channel that willingly burns out quicker.
even so, I didn’t really like CE DX compared with CE, because it was immediately too sugary, whereas the level of care in the presentation of Transformed – the boats in the gd panzer dragoon level immediately felt like playing hydro thunder at a dreamcast launch kiosk to me, it’s a more thorough cover act than anything I can think to compare it to – has kept my affection for it basically sky high since release.
I don’t ever play like, time trial modes on kart racers, I mostly just queue up big GP races on hard. that probably has something to do with it. but I do find the tricks and the course design all significantly more fun on a moment-to-moment basis than in Mario Kart at its best, which I’d only rate as comparatively fine. I never liked diddy kong racing as a kid either, the different plane and boat segments all felt distinctly undercooked to me then! not so in this. the flow might be weird and discontinuous (I don’t believe this in practice, I adore the way the tracks shift while maintaining some continuity, but pretend for the sake of argument I do) but it has just enough physics to be incredibly fun for me anyway.
so I reject the sugar rush argument. it’s like we’re setting up a dichotomy between a krispy kreme donut and a bagel. what about a really good donut.
Mario Kart 8 to Sonic [something] Transformed feels like an age-old Sega / Nintendo pacing difference (most impressive for how well Sumo could speak in it). There’s a specific cadence of stacking crazy moment on crazy moment and then maybe a third crazy moment topper! that Transformed can pull off that really feels great, where Mario Kart is careful to build each setpiece to start and finish on its own right and never lose clarity of its own idea by borrowing energy from another. I think that’s a fine route for a racer; it’s more solid at low- and high-skill play but the Sega approach doesn’t irk me like the similar style difference between Star Fox and Afterburner or Galaxy Force II, which I find much much harder to play. (Yes, Panzer Dragoon which is similarly forced to be slow by the nature of 3D, is probably a fairer comparison, but)
By the end of my time with Transformed I was getting fatigued with the duration of the boat and plane transformations, which felt like dead time, and felt like their sections were nearly solved next to the kart racing. The Afterburner stage with the aircraft carrier segment in particular stood out as a stage that felt like I was watching for half the duration.
For all the content mario kart 8 has I just can’t feel engaged with it. What’s the point when I can’t adjust my drift angle or chain drifts and hold a boost charge on squirrely tracks? It also kills me that I can’t pepper the gas during drifts in MK8. Give me control or give me a tedium that is just trying to perfectly execute a track and dodge outside influence.