ModNation Racers
Think Mario Kart meets LittleBigPlanet. Pretty cool, right? Whenever I’ve had to describe ModNation Racers to any of my friends I typically use that description, and to be honest, it couldn’t be more accurate. ModNation Racers is the latest game in Sony’s line of “Play Create Share” games, or in MNR‘s case, “Race Create Share”.
Developed by Vancouver’s own United Front Games, MNR is a brilliant showcase that demonstrates just how a user generated content game should be done, but that’s also not to say that the game is without its faults. ModNation Racers gives you the option to create your own characters (or ‘Mods’), karts and tracks and then put them use either online or via the game’s career mode.
Overall, the play mechanics are good – you accelerate using R2, steer with the Left Stick, drift with X, boost with L1 and dispatch items with Square. However, sometimes it feels as if the steering won’t stay straight unless you are really forcing the left analog stick forward. The drifting mechanic works well most of the time, but does go in the wrong direction from time to time. It would have been better if you could control the direction of drifting through a button press (a la Mario Kart Double Dash), instead of the game trying to guess what direction you’re trying to drift. While not a huge issue, it can lead to frustration from every now and then.
With that said, the biggest source of frustration from MNR comes from the game’s exceptionally long loading times. When I originally tried the game’s public beta I felt that the loading times were also long but played it down due to the fact that it wasn’t a finished product. It’s not like the loading times affect the game or it’s playability in any significant way, but to have to wait 1 minute plus for a race track to load seems a little excessive.
My qualm with MNR is the sometimes brutal enemy AI and career mode difficulty. Unlike other kart racing games, you cannot select your difficulty on the racing circuit, while the initial few races might seem easy enough, the AI quickly learns its lesson and is hell bent on beating you. One of the things I also found surprising was how close the AI is behind you at all times. Basically it takes one slip up or fall of the course to go from 1st place to last.
However, with all this said, ModNation Racers is still a superb game. All of the flaws I’ve outlined are relatively minor, in fact the AI issues go away as soon as you race online against other players. The online play is very smooth and offers plenty of options to customize the difficulty, track type (game made or user generated) and more. Within seconds you’ll be racing against other players and hopefully exploring new tracks created by the MNR community.
The best part of ModNation Racers is the ability to create your own tracks, karts and Mods, but it’s not just being able to create them, it’s being able to create them with such ease that makes it great. When creating a track the game sets you up with a steam roller, you control it as if you were driving a kart and begin to lay down your track. When that is all said and done you can than choose to have the game auto-populate your track with prop items such as houses, signs and more, or simply lay it all out yourself.
If diving right in is too complicated or you are a creator looking to explore more advanced options, the game offers many different tutorial videos all of which walk you through step by step on how to create a killer user-generated track. One thing I found interesting was that there weren’t really any terrible courses that can be made with the tool set, just some annoying ones – such as a course designed to allow unlimited drifting so that players can unlock a trophy. It’s fine when there’s just one or two, but when the keep popping up in online races in can become frustrating.
Overall, ModNation Racers is a game I would highly recommend, if only so you can experience how amazing the level creator is. Like my earlier description stated, MNR is like Mario Kart meets LittleBigPlanet, and while there might be some areas for improvement you’d be a fool to miss out on such a fun experience.
Likes:
- Ease of all creation tools
- Ability to play split screen and race online at the same time
- Ability to download other’s creations and remix them your own way
Dislikes:
- Loading times
- Mild drifting issues
- Racer AI always seemed way to perfect
Review Score
/ 
The review scale at LevelFortyTwo is between 1 and 5. A score of 5 is considered an amazing game, 4 is a well-done game with only minor issues, 3 is in the middle; not great, but not bad, 2 is a very problematic game, and 1 is absolutely terrible.
What’s In A Mascot?
It’s interesting, when you look at the three big companies, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony, only one of them has a definitive mascot. Mario is arguably the most recognizable name in video gaming, along side Link/The Legend of Zelda, yet another Nintendo franchise. The brand loyalty and instant recognition of these names is what really drives home Nintendo’s sales. People feel comfortable going out and buying a Mario game. It’s what they know, and in most cases, it’s what they grew up with. Mario has been at the forefront of gamer’s minds since the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System in the 80s. Is the power of Nintendo’s mascot a true driving force in their success? And would Microsoft or Sony benefit from having a mascot as recognizable as the plumber himself?
Time and time again Nintendo has proven that most of their flagship products are long-term sellers. This means that instead of most sales happening in the first two weeks of a game's release, they expect to see constant numbers over the course of a year or two. However, most of Nintendo’s games that see sales patterns like this tend to be Mario titles. As previously mentioned, the words Nintendo and Mario almost feel like one and the same.
If you buy a new Nintendo system, whether it be the Wii or DS, your first instinct is to pick up the latest Mario title, banking on the fact that older games in the franchise were good. Even Reggie Fils-Aime, President and Chief Operating Officer of Nintendo of America, is so confident in Nintendo’s mascot that he believes that their latest release, New Super Mario Bros. Wii will outsell Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on the Xbox 360 by the end of the holiday season (January’s NPD numbers). This is a fairly bold statement when you look at the fact that Modern Warfare 2 sold 4.2 million copies on the 360 alone in November. Fils-Aime makes his statement “unequivocally”, showing that he truly must believe in the power of their mascot.
When looking at Microsoft and Sony, while neither have as definitive a mascot, most people frequently think of Master Chief while thinking of the 360 and its predecessor. However, Sony has no real mascot that instantly comes to mind when thinking about the Playstation brand. They have incredibly memorable characters from their first party games, such as Kratos from God of War or Nathan Drake from Uncharted, but these are both mascots created within the past 4 years. Old charmers like Spyro and Crash are still around today, but unfortunately their glory days seem to be behind them. The symbol most firmly associated with Playstation is its logo.
In 2008, Sony made a big push to make LittleBigPlanet and its cute and cuddly character, Sackboy, their mascot as a way of reaching out to the general public with a character who wasn’t soaked in blood. Before the launch of LittleBigPlanet, the game was being regarded as revolutionary and the project that would finally bridge the gap between casual and hardcore gamers on the PS3. Essentially, it was the product that gamers thought the rest of their family would like. After all, it had a cute and cuddly character, and it was a platformer, just like the original Super Mario Bros. Unfortunately, once the game launched, casual gamers found themselves overwhelmed by all of the creative abilities housed on the disc, and thus turned away from it. By the beginning of 2009, Sony was back onto Kratos and Nathan Drake.
It’s too bad that Sony gave up on Sackboy after only one release. Like almost everything, it takes time to establish a brand or mascot. Not only was LittleBigPlanet a brand new intellectual property, but Sony was also trying to launch its “protagonist” as their mascot. Nintendo didn’t originally set out to make Mario their mascot, it was the result of the public’s response. Back when the NES first launched the amount of games available was much smaller, and the fact that Super Mario Bros. was first-party developed helped to create the association of Mario and Nintendo as one entity.
One of our users, 1mpulse, had this to say: “Think about it this way, if Mario was invented now, he probably wouldn’t have the same impact. So much of it is nostalgia, and what we, as gamers, are used to.” Mario didn’t become Nintendo’s flagship product overnight, in fact Super Mario Bros. 2 didn’t originally come to North America, it was only after years of sequels and marketing campaigns that people really started to associate Mario as Nintendo’s mascot.
It’s interesting to look at each of the three console developers, and their different successes and failures. How much more popular would Sony be with the kind of brand loyalty Nintendo has? Where would Microsoft be with the amount of first-party games developed games that the PS3 gets? And the biggest question of all: where would Nintendo be without Mario? It’s scary to think, I imagine most people including myself have a hard time thinking of Nintendo without the existence of Mario. This just goes to show how important a mascot can be to building up brand loyalty and association.
It's easy to tell from the dominance of Xbox Live, the beauty of the PS3 and the phenomenon that is the Wii how each company does things differently. At the end of the day it’s what allows us to have such diversity in the games that we play. Even though Microsoft and Sony don’t have a definitive mascot, maybe that’s what creates the balance between all three companies and the games that they release.
