ExciteBots: Trick Racing — School Cup: Canada
Ah, the crisp and unspoiled natural wonders of Canada. Whoa, Canada sounds a bit…thrashier…than I would have imagined. There are a couple of new features introduced on this course that will show up time and again in future races. The first and most important feature is the one that is brought up in the pre-race quick tip, the Leg Run mode. If you run across a wrench token on the racetrack, grab it! Your bot will fold out its legs and hoof it…wait, how is that faster than the wheels that it normally races on? Well, it is faster…for whatever reason, and it also brings a number of other bonus perks. As you may have noticed in the title screen demo, a bot in Leg Run mode will make short work of other bots, performing a powerful Leg Smash upon your unsuspecting foes. There are also a couple of different things you can do in Leg Run mode, the one in particular on display here is the Song Rail…which is honestly as extremely random as it sounds. You hop on a ramp connected to a grind rail and shake the remote to jump at the quarterpipe to try to hit all five notes suspended above it, each one being worth a star. The other notable feature to be introduced on the School Canada track is the Elevator Bar, which is functionally identical to the Yellow Bar, except it is vertical and helps you to reach places you otherwise couldn’t where there isn’t a jump to give you a little boost in altitude. On the second lap, I decided to take the scenic route around the bend without …
Looks like Sonic Riders.
They look similar, but they don’t play similar.
That aside, it would be pretty funny to see a Segway race.
Whereas in the original Sonic Riders, if you were hoofing it, you were likely doing something seriously wrong…your ride had run out of air and you were forced to find some more fuel.
I haven’t really taken a whole lot of time to get a better feel for Zero Gravity yet…it’s all so foreign to me, which is odd since the original Riders probably seemed equally foreign when I first started to play it.
It’s probably a combination of the laziness and desire to completely finish the original first.
Ah, we had this same logic in Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity, except a bit worse: When running, you were about twice as fast as when you’re on the board…which makes me wonder, “Why do they even need these boards in the first place? They’re like Segways of the Sonic world.”