#Kirby air ride city trial trial#

City Trial was where all the action happened. The other modes didn’t really do much for us: we spent enough time with the main racing mode to unlock all the vehicles and courses, and spent maybe five or ten minutes wrestling with the top-down mode’s fiddly controls. My brother and I spent hours playing City Trial together. Kirby offered the promise of a unique experience in every round. We’d long since unlocked all of Mario Kart’s characters, karts, and courses it had reached the limits of our interest. There were only a few unlockable characters, and for the most part they weren’t meaningfully different from the default options.Ĭity Trial mode, though, had a level of replayability that Mario Kart could only dream of. There were no item boxes to pop, no speed boosters or weapons to sabotage other players (other than Kirby’s powers, which you had to obtain by sucking up enemies on the course. Many of the vehicles had weird control schemes, leaving only a few truly viable for racing. The game’s main racing mode was pretty mediocre, especially when compared to its contemporary on the Gamecube, Mario Kart: Double Dash.

Image from Kirby Air Ride’s City Trial Mode, showing the players contesting for power-ups. Sometimes you get unlucky – and sometimes you pick the best vehicle for the job, feed it all the right power ups, and dominate the competition. The game sometimes hints which minigame to prepare for, but it’s not always accurate. If you picked a vehicle that’s great at flying, you might be at a disadvantage in a drag race. If you spent the whole time collecting battle power ups like Attack and Defense, you probably won’t do well in a flying contest. Often, the power ups you collect or the vehicle you pick makes or breaks a victory in the minigame portion. At the end of a set amount of time, your power ups and vehicle are locked in place, and the four players play a random minigame to determine the winner. You can seek out stronger vehicles, collect power ups, and even sabotage other players. In City Trial, your little Kirby starts out riding a basic vehicle, and you have a sprawling city map to explore. Kirby Air Ride has three game modes, but when people talk about “Kirby Air Ride,” they’re most likely referring to the City Trial mode. Right around the time multiplayer games stopped being “fun” for me, we somehow ended up with a copy of Kirby Air Ride.

Suffice to say, playing Smash with my bro can be a little intimidating.) I even stopped playing Smash with my brother altogether (he now plays competitively, and has won money at tournaments and held state titles. I was twelve, and as the older sister, this felt criminally unfair. Whether it was Mario Kart, or Smash, or even our handheld Pokémon games, I never stood a chance against my brother. When we first got the Gamecube, we had a lot of fun doing multiplayer – but my brother got very, very good at the games, very quickly, and after several months I was still playing at around an average level. To our parents’ delight, we often played Gamecube together.

We had a Gamecube (a Hanukkah present that we were supposed to share… supposedly) and a couple of multiplayer staples, such as Mario Kart: Double Dash!! and Super Smash Bros. Growing up, there was really only one person I could play video games with.

Kirby air ride city trial