[Open Assets] Super Mario Kart Pack V1.4

Yep. SMK ports. Though they are adjusted to RR's gameplay style very well.

I just have one critique, and that's for Koopa Beach 2; the big lake area with all the deep water is problematic due to the respawn plane being too high and the fact that you can't really see it at all. Lowering the respawn Plane could make comebacks easier, and making the Deep Water's palette a darker shade of blue could alleviate the second issue entirely.

Other than that, an excellent Map Pack.

You have colored me impressed with the work you did to recreate all of the courses Super Mario Kart had to offer.
The new battle maps for the Star and Special Cup were also very welcoming, and I'm glad you used the themes that didn't get a chance to shine.

The changes made to some of the courses feel right at home with Ring Racers' physics and controls and were also a necessity in some cases like the Feather shortcut in Bowser Castle 2.

However, I do have a fair amount of critiques, and no it isn't about the track layouts given Super Mario Kart's tracks were made to be that simple; it's the applied gimmick to some of the courses. Vanilla Lake 2 in this is much more manageable than it was in SRB2K, but the sloped toilet bowl-like structure, combined with the jagged parts of the course, led to me either launching into the air, or somehow hit a wall where there was none. Some of the new battle maps, like the Bowser Castle and Rainbow Road-themed ones, are a bit too small and could lead to some...VERY unhappy times, especially in multiplayer.

The Sealed Stars are also a bit painful, specifically the ones for Star and Special, and was a major jump in difficulty from the ones in Mushroom and Flower, mostly from being corner heavy, having the UFO's path be sporadic, or just having a blind jump into the pit. It also exacerbates the issues with the UFO in Gear 3/Vicious speed being too fast to catch up with on your first run (though that isn't your fault).

I've been using these recreated courses to test out my new character pack; the pack in question is also related to Super Mario Kart and you were part of the inspiration as to why it was made, so I thank you for making this level pack for the game that started the kart racer genre.

Impressed with the effort put into this mod, great for nostalgia with music and everything well implemented with Ring Racers mechanics. Only thing is you can tell these maps don't merge well with the game XD

Okey, let's write a more professional review on this.

Why do I think that this pack "actively makes modded servers worse"?

Ring Racers has a total of 151 race maps, this pack has 24 race maps.

This means when this pack is added, it makes up 14% of available maps to race on, which makes it extremely likely that at least one of these maps will come up on vote screens or through random picks if a server lacks voting.

And when you look at the maps on offer here, with the way each of them is designed... they all play the same.

They were made too wide and too big, they all end up revolving around tethering and scummy power item play and nothing else, their extremely flat nature makes most trap items practically worthless.

All the maps play the exact same way, 24 maps that are needlessly wide and extremely flat and Boring as hell to play on, 24 maps that make it that much harder for actually original and well made custom/vanilla maps to come up and be played because they drown out the map pool to such a horrific extent.

The maps here actively make playing the game a worse experience because it becomes so much more difficult to pick and play other maps that were actually built for the game's mechanics and took a good amount of effort to perfect instead of an extremely low effort array of port maps from a game whose design contradicts Ring Racer's every step of the way.

That is why I think this map pack actively makes the game worse and wish every person who hosts a modded server would get rid of it.

OOOHHH MY PEEEAAAK. jokes aside, Its perfect in every way. Now that Super mario kart is crossed off the list, now i need 64, super circit, double dash, DS, wii, 3ds, and wii u. I see super ciurcit could be next. Besides that, keep up the PEAK work.

So, generally I'm enjoying what I've played so far (playing in Grand Prix on Master, still haven't gotten emerald on Star and Special), and I do think you've done a pretty good job on these overall, but oh *man* Rainbow Road needs rings added to it badly. I put myself into ring debt pretty quickly and I just never had an opportunity to get out of debt, much less use rings to catch up or anything of the sort. The layout is fine, the size feels fine, but having no good way to get rings feels super bad in this game and means you're likely to end Rainbow Road at the complete mercy of ring sting. (I'm also not fond of Vanilla Lake 2 being a constant slope towards the death pit in the middle - it's not *impossible* to play around but it's just kinda a constant frustration that I don't find very fun to deal with. Koopa Beach 2's water pits also feel like they kill you a bit too quickly - was hard to boost over them with anything but the spinning top.) CPU difficulty seems to increase with each cup - some tracks are *really* rough about the CPUs on Master, getting into Master Sneaker Cup-tier on several tracks. Not sure how to address that, however, and I'll have to digest the cups a bit more before I feel confident saying how rough they really are after getting familiar with the courses.

I do, however, enjoy the special stages I've played so far - Star's special stage feels difficult, but so far I haven't felt like it's *unfair* so much as it was just unfamiliar. Will have to digest them a bit more to give thoughts on their difficulty.

Sealed Stars could be better (and also fully work properly), the lack of plentiful rings on Special Cup is also less than to be desired

This is a good set of ports visually, but the gameplay is significantly harmed by one major flaw: everything is way too big. There's not really any challenge to cornering or evasion because of the sheer size of the road. This should be pretty easy to fix by upping the mobjscale by a lot. Maybe thin out the ring count a bit too.

Also, I found two bugs in the Sealed Star I played: picking up the emerald doesn't brighten the area or change the music, and the clear sequence where the lock falls down is missing.