Pro Tip: Mines can be used to attack people behind you
This Weekly Kusoge received a request from Destructoid’s favorite child, Wes Tacos. I bring this up to draw out the fact that he is a troublemaker. Once kusoge had turned me into the bitter shell of a human, the intervention would have been really awkward. I would point at him and scream, “This is what you want, right!?” before diving out the nearest window and escaping back into the wilderness.
Anyway, I don’t know who Jimmie Johnson is. I thought he could make hot dogs, but then I realized I was just mixing up the Jimmy Dean and Johnsonville brands. Try getting that association out of your head.
Turns out, he’s a NASCAR driver. I’m both Canadian and female, so my only intersection with NASCAR was to make the interesting observation that they were just driving around. Fortunately, Jimmie Johnson’s Anything with an Engine is a racer and doesn’t have many NAS-type cars. Unfortunately, new music because the Mario Kart 8 just dropped recently and i want to play it more.
I’ve never really been away from Mario Kart Game. I think Wacky Wheel was the only other racer I’ve played, and I didn’t expect I could cut that deep. I’m pretty sure I own a lot Sonic the Hedgehog every racing game about six times, but I’ve never played them. And yes, Team racing Guys, this is when your monofocals pop out and fall into your wine glasses because I never touched them.
So the closest I came to a bad racing game playing Mario Kart Wii when motion control is on. It seems like a small neighborhood of kusoge city. I can discover M&M’s Kart Racing or… Ew, there’s a Woody Woodpecker Racing. That sounds like the embodiment of everything I’m up against.
James Stephanie Sterling, in their Destruction days, dealt with evaluate it. Their final argument was “Few video games can claim to be ‘good in a bad way’, but Anything with a motive definitely come close”. While I respect my senpai, I have to disagree. I found very little in Anything with a Motive which I really consider worthwhile.
Let me take a step back and say I don’t think Anything with a Motive It’s a bad game, it’s just underperforming in every way. There are times during a standard race when I think, “this isn’t also bad,” and then a test of time or an endurance race happens and I think, “this is the hell that holds my dead soul. ”
The songs are good. Some of them are pretty bad, and because they’re all built as if they’re tracking in a stadium, they feel flat, but they’re not the worst. I’ve never really enjoyed any of the drivers. It’s all just stupid concepts. There’s a guy driving a bathtub in an old fashioned wetsuit, but he’s a lunatic. There was one sumo wrestler who couldn’t contain himself, and I’m not sure if I was offended because I’m not a fan of toilet humor or because it was a disdain for sumo wrestlers. I played the vampire because she has big tires.
Weapons are similar. They are mapped to four face buttons, and each driver has essentially the same buttons. They look different, and I think they have different effects. However, if you choose a new driver, you’re not exactly redefining everything. You gradually build up your weapon by getting crowd approval, it’s a neat system. However, it did not create the most chaos in the races.
Where the game starts to get intolerable is with the rubber band AI. I found it amusing when Mr Johnsonville told me that “every lap counts” in a standard race when you can just go all the way to the last lap. The opponent is always glued to you, and if you fall behind, you will noticeably return to the group. A few rockets and a well placed nitro at the end is all you need.
The worst is when you’re racing Jimmie in the final event of each trophy. Anything with a Motive determined to keep the two of you together. I won’t even use the turbo for the first two laps, because I will automatically accelerate as I get further away from the sausage man. I would save my rocket, then just make his life miserable in the final round. Work all the time.
It’s not the most severe rubber band I’ve seen in a racing game, but it’s a lot more brazen than it should be. It may be necessary because the drivers aren’t so aggressive, but I don’t think it needs to be so blatant and so easily manipulated.
I mostly hate the test of time, which gives you an ideal path and a chevron instead of a proper ghost. Then there are endurance races where you accumulate as many points as possible in each round. It’s monotonous. There are matrix races where half of your opponents run in reverse, but this mostly just makes it hard to see how close you’ve come to qualifying.
Then there was the dubbing, which I turned off. They have broadcasters commenting on your race, and they’re not silent. Just imagine Mario Kart where Toad’s hoarse, cigarette smoker voice speaks to tell you that mushrooms can help you get ahead. It’s like that. The only one is very insistent tell me what the mine is for at least twice a round. I get it, buddy. They are great for cleaning people’s tail feathers. They prevent people from following the sea route. I already know this well that twelve races are over, maybe cooling it off with unwanted reminders.
Oh, that’s hilarious, there’s a mock 3D mode. I think there’s also a standard 3D TV mode, but my Playstation TV is in storage, so it’s time to spruce up my branded blockbuster video in red and blue. Well, that’s bad. I mean, it doesn’t. It worked as it should, but I found myself unable to spot small details like rockets with weird colors that blinded my eyes when trying to reconcile the two colors they were seeing. It’s a bit funny, though. Take me back to mine Rad Racer day.
As I said, Anything with a Motive not too bad, I just don’t know why anyone would play it unless Wes asked them to. Who is it for? NASCAR fan? Jimmie Johnson is the only NASCAR driver in there (I think). Is there much crossover between NASCAR fans and kart racing fans? I do not know.
It’s rare that I feel like I’ve wasted my time playing a game, but this is one of those moments. I couldn’t do anything. All I know is that Jimmie Johnson doesn’t make hot dogs. This is the time I’ve spent that could have been better used Mario Kart 8’s new music. Anything with a Motive got to this point in a confusing way, so bad I didn’t know it existed. I’ll put this back on my shelf and from now on just ignore it.
For the previous weekly Kusoge, check out this link!
Zoey Handley
Zoey is a gamer. She has played video games her whole life and is a lover of both new and classic games. She loves digging in the dirt and picking out games that are perfectly fine if you clean them up a bit.
