14th June
Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing. I bet you didn’t even notice it’s a couple of hours late this week. Shh, don’t say if you did. This time, Bertie learns a lesson or two about communication while Tom O tackles Mario Kart World’s Free Roam missions.
What have you been playing?
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We’ve Been Playing archive.
Split-Fiction, PS5
There’s a level towards the end that elicited more “wows” from me than I can remember or count.Watch on YouTube
I’m nearly there with Split-Fiction – just the last boss to go (there’ve been some interruptions) – and one thing that keeps coming to mind when I play it is communication. This is hardly a revelation for a game built around co-op and playing together but it’s something I don’t think about a lot, probably because I play games mostly on my own. Lonerrr! That’s an insult I haven’t heard since school. So I’m not very good at it, communicating, because I just assume other people know what I’m thinking.
But you can’t really get through Split-Fiction without communicating, not unless you have a telepathic link with someone, which I don’t think is possible outside of Dungeons & Dragons yet. There are moments where you have to speak up. Still, it doesn’t come naturally to either my partner or me, so we have these weird and amusing stand-offs where both of us are offended that the other person didn’t magically know what to do.
I’m taking a long time to say that I’m learning something of a new skill here. I’m learning to push the thoughts outside of my head and to make sure I’m keeping another person in the know, and that feels profound to me, like a lesson much bigger than overcoming the final Split-Fiction boss.
-Bertie
Mario Kart World, Switch 2
Magnetic! Watch on YouTube
I’ve played a lot of Mario Kart World but I’ve still got things to do in the Free Roam mode’s open world, and I expect I’ll be chipping away at it for some time yet. On Thursday night I sat down for a few minutes to see how many more P-switch missions I could mop up, only to be stumped by one that I simply couldn’t figure out.
This mission was simple. Race down a straight section of track while holding a golden boost mushroom, then leap off a ramp into the finish. The only thing stopping me from doing this was some explosive bombs that were also racing towards the goal, so I had to get there before they did.
Easy. I had DK, a character with a high top speed, and a kart with a high top speed. I’d just boost along and complete the mission. But I simply couldn’t do it. Unknown to me, my son had mistakenly started playing Mario Kart World on my Switch 2 instead of his after school, and I hadn’t noticed he’d popped DK into the Ribbit Revster – a mid-tier kart for speed. It was only after I took to social media to ask for help that my misery could be explained.
-Tom O
Mario Kart World, Switch 2
I really hope DF agrees with my frame-rate analysis.Watch on YouTube
Tom copied me, but like, he wrote his entry first so I don’t know how that works. Anyway this week I played my first proper bout of multiplayer Mario Kart World – using one Pro Controller and two halved Joy-Con – so I got my first dose of the real magic of the game.
Thoughts: the performance dips a bit, doesn’t it? I know that’s a dry thing to notice but I sat near Digital Foundry’s Tom Morgan for so long in our Gamer Network office that his digital scrutiny rubbed off on me. In screen-quartered multiplayer the frame-rate appears to drop. It’s not horrendous but it feels different to the silky-smooth performance of solo mode.
Nevertheless, the magic of Mario Kart was stronger in multiplayer. I see a lot of talk about unfairness and rubber-banding in Mario Kart, by which I think people mean how the game can batter you out of position with its arsenal of shells and other weaponry, then favour those who drop behind with various speed boosts to get them back in contention. And, yeah, I know this can be annoying. But it’s also the source of the game’s trash-talking magic – there’s a lot of trash-talking in Mario Kart, I find – and that beautiful belief that no one is ever out of reach, even if they raced smugly ahead at the beginning. Remove this and what do you have?
I don’t think you have Mario Kart.
-Bertie
